RESEARCH PLAN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 January 1940, Page 6

RESEARCH PLAN

" INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS VICTORIA COLLEGE FELLOWSHIP MR H. VALDER’S MUNIFICENT GIFT. ACCEPTED BY UNIVERSITY SENATE. (By Telegraph—Press Association.) ■ WELLINGTON, This Day. j The University Senate, which met today, adopted the industrial research fellowship plan. The plan is one under which Mr Henry Valder, of Hamilton, recently offered to provide £l5OO per annum for five years to enable the Council of Victoria University College to appoint a Research Fellow in Social Relations in Industry. The College Council accepted the trust, subject to the approval of the University Senate, and thanked Mr Valder for his munificent gift. In the course of a letter to the Victoria College Council, Mr Valder said, in part:—“l have been associated for the greater part of my life with commerce and industry, and it has long been my opinion that the great assistance which industry receives from science and scientific method on the purely material side has no counterpart on the side of human relations. I became convinced, as the result of many years of observation and experience, that some agency was required to grapple with the subject of social relations in industry, and some machinery to make it 'effective. Every year makes me more convinced that the need is urgent.” Mr Valder added that a committee of professors and others had advised him that a fellowship would be better than a chair, because a chair is very closely associated in the public mind with lectures, and the fundamental idea in this foundation is research. It was recognised that the ultimate value of a fellowship would lie in the quality of the Fellow, and his freedom, status and emoluments, therefore, had been safeguarded as securely as possible. Victoria College had been chosen because it is located at the seat of Government and consequently is more closely in contact with officials and official information, with the headquarters of industrial bodies, and moreover Victoria University College has a Department of Political Science and Public Administration from which valuable co-operation may be expected. A statement by the Victoria College authorities observes that Mr Valder is an industrialist of wide experience. “His efforts to promote the cause of peace in industry by means of the partnership idea (it is added) are internationally recognised (See ‘‘The Way to Social Peace” and “The Real Stanley Baldwin” .by Wickham Stead in England and “Industrial Democracy’ by Robert Brookings in the United States of America). It is a significant fact that the present approach to the University and to science should come from the industrialist and from business itself. Business in the past has endeavoured to solve its problems by practical adaptions to immediate difficulties. There has been too little scientific research in the direction of examining and re-orientating the organisation of industry. On the other hand the University has been concerned far too much with preparing candidates for professions and too little concerned with one of its ultimate functions, that of research. The approach of industry to the University and of the University to the fundamental problems of the people are all to the good. The field of research in this case is at the present moment particularly interesting and apposite because the research will be in the most neglected of all fields —that of human relations. Democracy is supremely interested in the relations of man with man both in national and international affairs, and these are very closely in-ter-related.”