PRIME MINISTER AND THE POETS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLII, Issue 20509, 29 August 1936, Page 12

PRIME MINISTER AND THE POETS

CHALLENGE TO UNIVERSITY IMPORTANCE OF FREEDOM OF OPINION The Prime Minister, Mr Stanley Baldwin, addressing the Congress oi the Universities of the British Empire at Cambridge recently, urged the universities to produce more poets—to inspire the World with a sense of unity and a sense of freedom, says ‘The Telegraph.” He emphasis’d the importance of preserving freedom of opinion in the academic world; and said that research workers should be relieved of financial anxiety. “Great Poets are Scarce As Chancellor of Cambrige University, the Prime Minister was welcoming the 200 delegates to the congress. “Great poets are scarce—scarcer, perhaps, than scientific men,” he said. “I always feel that one of the tragedies of the world is the way in which the devil is using the discoveries of the chemist, and of those men who invented the Internal combustion engine, for the destruction of mankind. No poet has done that. “I do not think many o f them did much harm in their lives, but they left us incalculable benefits for this world, and if the universities can conspire to produce more poets, more power to their elbow! “It has seemed to me during these recent years,” he added, “that the one plain and obvious duty of a statesman who keeps himself true to what he believes to be the genius of his race is to try to keep in the balance a due proportion of discipline and of freedom — with an Inclination, if ever in doubt, towards freedom—and to teach his people accordingly. And so, I think, it is with the universities. “Political freedom, freedom of thought, is essential to the maintenance and progress of democracy. We see to-day attempts in some countries to coerce academic opinion. At all costs we will preserve our opinion; but that very freedom carries with it responsibility to which I know that everyone in the Empire will rise. The world after all, looks to the British Empire for maintaining those traditions which built it up.

“When I regard the problems that lie before you, I am impressed by the burden and the responsibility of those tasks no less than I am by my own; for what have you to do? You have to keep abreast with learning in this modern age—in itself no easy task—and you have, above all, to train the young, an immense responsibility and a position, in my view, of the greatest privilege. “In my view, the men who are doing research and who have a special talent for that work, should be free, as far as possible, from teaching. But, at the same time, I always remember that your work in one way is like mine. You and I are both doing our work in the world for its own sake and without any object of probability or possibility of getting rich.” Ideals of University Mr Baldwin said that the university ideal throughout the Empire had flowered and flourished diversely. The last thing that any of them would want in their universities was standardisation, and its concomitant, mass-production. He continued: “If the advance of knowledge, as it may well be in some places, is to an extent hampered by inadequate financial resources, the universities, it seems to me, must consider among themselves how best they can develop certain subjects, how they can be able, possibly, to exchange students in the event of it being impossible for them to provide fo rcomplete instruction in every subject in every university.”