“QUO VADIS?”

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1042, 5 August 1930, Page 14

“QUO VADIS?”

STUDENT’S VIEWS ON VARSITY AIMS “GOOSE-STEP” PROGRESSION “We cannot hope to emulate the ideal of a great residential university like Oxford, but we have before us the non-residential universities of England —Leeds, London, Bristol, and a host of others, with a tone and a tradition and a high standard of scholarship. It is on these that our eyes should be fixed (we, who have been referred to in the South as a ‘glorified night school’); it is toward this ideal that we should be slowly moving.”

Thus writes “Bona Fide” in a recent edition of “Craccum,” the Auckland University College's “unofficial fortnightly.” He draws an amusing contrast between the alms and method.; of American and English university education. Whatever the faults of the American system, he continues, it has succeeded in making university education general, In making truly democratic the higher learning of this world. But it has done so only by a deplorable lowering of the standard, and it is an extremely debatable point whether free education to such an advanced degree is an unmixed blessing. The moving pictures of American univer sity life are condemned by the writer as distorting to an incredible extent the original, but he finds in them a terrible similarity between their coeducational system and onr own, and our whole educational system bears the same damning “goose-step” method of progress from grade to grade, he writes. FREE-PLACE SYSTEM Those who are more advanced in years ascribe the different tone prevalent in the college today to the influx of students under the free-place system. In a university of this size, there should be more distinction between full-time students and those who treat the place merely as a “glorified night-school,” or as a playground for their social activities. The full-time students should be in a position to control the college as far as present regulations would permit. Again, the college should have a hostel—or rather, two hostels —to form a centre for student life, for there Is urgent need for a recognised official hostel. Then again, he concludes, since we have no tutor to advise ns, as is the case in English universities, we would possibly welcome the appointment of a rector, who would fill a position of general authority and be to the college what a headmaster is, or slightly different lines, to a large school. The present staffs have, in most cases, ton much to do in coping with their work, and no slight on their activities is intended by this suggestion.