Subsidy Removed

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 569, 23 January 1929, Page 8

Subsidy Removed

N.Z. UNIVERSITY COUNCI! PROTESTS ECONOMY PENALISED Press Association DUNEDIN, To-day. “Some of us who have for from a generation to half a century backed up our successive Treasurers in their policy of laying past our annual surplus from our fees and subsidy to accumulate as a fund for scholarships have had the shock of our lives in seeing the Ministry remove our fixed annual subsidy instead of increasing it.” This statement was made by the Chancellor. Professor J. Macmillan Brown, in his address at the opening of the meeting of the New Zealand University Council in the Allen Hall University of Otago, Dunedin, this morning. “Finding £ 32,000 in our balance sheet as our bank credit, they assumed we were rolling in wealth.” he continued. “They have Socialised I will not use a more truthful and plainspoken word—that slowly accumulated scholarship fund at the very moment we were beginning to need it most.” The Government failed to see that such an action was tantamount to asserting that thrift was a fault and not a virtue in public bodies. “Public bodies should now* spend all their revenue every year lest some Government that has need to economise should cast its eye upon the accumulations for future needs and ‘convey* it.” he said. “This will develop in local bodies a habit of lavish extravagance without the foresight as to whence the money is to come—a habit that no Government professes to encourage.” INOPPORTUNE MOMENT The curtailment had come at a most inopportune moment, when students attending University Colleges had increased from hundreds to thousands and the need of more scholarships was becoming more clamant. The need was not so much for entrance scholarships, but post-graduate scholarships and fellowships, for the purpose of research work to further the development of the resources of the Dominion. The State had made a false step In removing the fixed annual subsidy. “And still worse this mutilation of our finances introduces w*hat all advanced educationists deplore as one of the greatest disasters to the education of a country. State interference with the liberty of a university. We shall before long be on the verge of bankruptcy and have to go hat in hand to the Government to plead for help and especially for scholarship funds, and it will be able to impose whatsoever conditions it pleases in response,” continued the speaker. A FUTURE EVIL “There is another tendency on the part of the Government that*has to be protested against as full of evil for the future; it is in calculating subsidies to educational institutions, to lessen them by as much as the proceeds coming or about to come from legacies left to them. This is a reversal of the attitude that distinguished the pioneers of New Zealand in endowing education and ultimately in encouraging educational gifts by granting pound for pound subsidy on them. Even this it was proposed in the new University Act to do away with and leave the subsidy to the tender mercies or financial necessities of the Ministry in power; happily the authorities were persuaded to abandon this proposal and to substitute a limit to the amount of subsidy to be granted. This policy is the surest way not merely to discourage public generositv but to extinguish it. * % TIME FOR A HALT “All the measures are of a piece: and it is time to call a halt on this downward path. The only position that could justify this not merely niggardly but destructive spirit would be the bankruptcy of the State. To penalise thrift in public bodies, to annif hilate the spirit of generosity to educational institutions, and to curtail their liberty is the surest way to make the nation decay. If this council has due regard for the welfare not merelv of university institutions but of the country it will call the attention of the new Ministry to the disastrous results hat are certain to come from measures uke these, concluded Professor Macmillan Brown.