One Endowed Chair at the University

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 194, 5 November 1927, Page 12

One Endowed Chair at the University

AUCKLAND’S LACK OF FUNDS MESSAGE TO THE PUBLIC Endowed chairs, of which most universities and colleges boast, a number are lacking at Auckland University College. Certainly the college has one, the Sir John Logan Campbell Chair of Agriculture, but this is likely to be transferred to the recently constituted New Zealand College of Agriculture at Palmerston North, leaving Auckland once again disconsolate. The luckiest sister of the New Zealand family is Otago University, which has chairs of English, mental, physics, history, founded by gifts amounting to £90,000 from the Presbyterian Church Board, chairs of mathematical, mechanical and physical sciences, founded by a gift of £15,400 from Arthur Beverley, chairs of the medical school and of economics, and a gift of £2,100 toward a chair in ethnology. “The endowing of a chair is an excellent way of assisting any one aspect of university education in which the donor may be particularly interested and at the same time of perpetuating an individual name in an eminently acceptable manner, as the name of the donor is linked with that of the chair in perpetuity,” says a “message to the public of Auckland,” which has just been issued by the Auckland College authorities. TEACHING MAY DETERIORATE A serious statement about the finances of the college is made by the president of the council, the Hon. George Fowlds. He says: “The present state of affairs means merely that the greater the expansion of the college (and in a city and province such as Auck-. land this expansion is inevitable) the greater the tendency, through lack of funds, for the quality of teaching to deteriorate.” “If the public of the Auckland Province has the interests of university education at heart (and from evidences of the last few years it appears to have) this state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue. The college is getting closer to the public and the general community every day; its scientific and technological departments and schools are finding their services availed of more and more for reports and tests, and the other side of the college is filling the needs of the public. “If the Auckland University College is to mean to the City and Province of Auckland what universities throughout the world mean to their communities, it must be supplied with the means of carrying on in an efficient manner. Research discoveries of pure science today are “rule-of-thumb” to-morrow, and it is the firm conviction cf the college authorities that this fact is recognised by our local community. Increased annual funds are urgently needed for library, lecture requisites, material and apparatus and for necessary increases in the teaching staff.”

Mr. Fowlds states that the college has over 30 per cent, more students in 1927 than in 1921, and £9OO less annual Government grant. The schools of architecture and music obtained no grant, and the school of engineering received £350. The estimates for 1927 showed an estimated deficit of £1,400.

The ideal method of allowing the university to expand concurrently \\ith the community would be to put the finances on a provincial basis. Another method would be to split the Dominion grant for university education on a provincial population basis.