THE FORESTRY SCHOOL

Rotorua Morning Post, Issue 5279, 16 December 1946, Page 4

THE FORESTRY SCHOOL

^ • ^JHE scheme for a forestry training centre at Rotorua, which was first fully set out in an appendix of the annual report of the State Forest Serviee, and to which the Prime Minister referred here on November 25, has . been severely criticised by The Press, of Christchurch, which points out that the plan cannot operate without the approval and cooperation of the University of New Zealand, and that the Senate will have the first opportunity of making a decision on the subject next month. It should be observed, says our contemporary, that the Serviee, as a State Department, has proceeded in this business very clumsily. When the University was to be involved as a partner in the scheme and when the scheme must either be adapted to the University's constitution or the University's constitution, be bent to the scheme, the department did not seek the University's collaboration and ran full tilt against the facts and the principles of the University's build. It is for the University to say how easily it tolerates the mode of approach adopted by the State Forest Serviee ; but a' community which has many reasons to distrust bureaucrats in heavy boots will be ready to applaud if the University objects. It is for the University, also, to say how far it is prepared to go out of its way to help in operating the State Forest Serviee scheme. For example-, the University is called on to recognise the proposed. training centre a(S an institution teaching courses for its degree (post-graduate) in forestry science; but the centre is not to be an incorporated college of the University, or incorporated in one of the constituent colleges, as the University's constitution requir.es — it is to be a departmental institution. Again, the board of management, on which the University is to be represented and which is supposed to be responsible to the University for the^ academic conduct and standards of the centre, is not to appoint stafi: •members but only to "approve" their appointment, which will be to the employment and conditions and discipline, not of the University, but of the State Forest Serviee. The University can, it seems safe to say, take only one view of a proposal to staff an -institution, not its own, with teachers not of its appointing, not directly responsible to it, and not subject to its discipline, and to let this institution graduate students to a degree of the University: The State Forest Serviee scheme has one clear merit; it proposes to make the forestry degree post-graduate ; i.e., the degree of .B.Se. or its °equivalent, should he taken first, as the University may well agree.' For the rest, before the State Forest Serviee and the Prime Minister eompeted in setting the date for the operation of the scheme, they might have considered how; it can operate at all, on the aeademic level, if th£ University does not, consent. They might have con.sidered the possibility that # the University will stand up for, and hold out for, the full and normal re-establishment of the School of Forestry within the University, in close working liaison with the departmental training and >experimental centre that would stfil be necessary.