UNIVERSITY LIFE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20784, 20 July 1937, Page 4

UNIVERSITY LIFE

AUTONOMY ESSENTIAL By Telegraph Press Association WELLINGTON, July 19 Freedom above all things was the most prized privilege of the European university student, said Dr. Paul L. Dengler, director of the AustroAmerlcan Institute of Education, Vienna, in a New Education Fellowship seminar address at Victoria University College, to-day. In the Vienna university there was freedom from State interference, freedom of learning and freedom of teaching.

Dr. Dengler emphasised the fact that autonomy was an essential feature of good university life, and he deplored the wave of Fascism which was destroying the traditional freedom of the country’s universities. There must be freedom from State interference, complete freedom for the university professor to choose his method of teaching, the matter he taught and his way of presenting it, and there must be freedom for the student to choose his course, to attend lectures as wished, to select his teachers and travel from university to university as his search for knowledge dictated. This outstanding characteristic of the Austrian university represented complete freedom of speech for all. Dr. Dengler said he thought that the universities must arrive at a balance between the individual and the community as warring trends in society and guarantee the complete freedom of the universities to assist in taking the world out of its present Impasse. Internationalism could only be a valuable feature of education if grounded upon a true understanding of one’s own national life.