The University

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 347, 15 February 1946, Page 5

The University

HE article on Page 14 may come to many people as a kind of secondary earth-tremor following the major shock produced recently when the Chancellor declared that New Zealand has only a third-rate University. Arguing that our University is in a very sick state, Professor Gordon says that what is mainly needed to restore the, patient, to health is a quick and substantial injection of money, and that we can have a first-rate University if we are willing to pay for it. The case is clearly so desperate that the community must be prepared to make a financial blood-transfusion, but the question still remains -as to whether the trouble may not be more deepseated than our article suggests. Our University has come to be looked on as just an extension of secondary school, with professors replacing masters but performing much the same functions; a place to which young men and women go in order to acquire, as speedily as possible, the academic labels necessary to "land a good job." The conception of learning as an end in itself scarcely exists here. Or it would perhaps be more correct to say that it exists mostly as a sentimental theory, based on romantic ideas about life at Oxford, Cambridge, or Heidelberg, where students are supposedly’ given almost personal tuition, and knowledge is sought for its own sakea theory which is, of course, denied here in practice by the present mass-production methods. At the same time, while we may have lost something in pure culture by making university education (of a sort) widely available in New Zealand, we may have gained something in democracy, for it must be remembered that the old world conception of university life which we still sentimentally adhere to in theory but reject in practice largely depended, in fact, on the existence of a leisured and wealthy class which had no need to worry about landing good jobs. The problem is to strengthen the cultural influence of our University without weakening its popular basis; but as a first _ approach the community must get clear in its mind what it means by university education and what it expects from it.