FRENCH CULTURE

Taranaki Daily News, 22 September 1931, Page 12

FRENCH CULTURE

UNIVERSITY OF MONTREAL. STATELY PILE OF BUILDINGS. Vancouver, August 19. Canada is to have a new centre of French culture—the University of Montreal, whose stately pile is now being erected on the slopes of Mount Royal, behind the city. Most Canadian universities, in common with American, have closely followed the English pattern, except McGill, of Montreal, Queen’s of Ontario, and Dalhousie of Nova Scotia, which are .modelled on Edinburgh. The University of Montreal has turned to the. University of Paris for its model. It. is intended for post-graduate work mainly. Undergraduate work will be an adjunct only, delegated to 16 colleges classiques, scattered over the province of Quebec. Their course of study is not elective, their professors hold university appointments; their examinations are set by university officers; their degrees, .or brevets, are conferred, by the university. Plans for the new university call, for one main building, with numerous wings. There are to bo a university hospital, of 480 beds, operating rooms, dispensaries, out-patient clinics, dental clinics, an observatory tower, rising several hundred feet above the St. Lawrence, and a power plant. i The institution is the first lay univer- ! sity in French Canada. It will borrow | professors from French universities ■abroad, and send each year one of its own to deliver a series of lectures on i French Canada at the Sorbonne. All the lectures will be in French; English will be rarely heard. Tho University of Montreal will aim to represent everything which French ' tradition has accomplished while it was arriving at a consciousness of its power as a distinct force in North American fe.