Paying for Talent

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 449, 30 January 1948, Page 5

Paying for Talent

T is good that there should be a growing revolt in New Zealand against our national reluctance to pay for exceptional talent; though we are in that respect in the same position as most countries as young as we are, and as thinly populated. It is of course time that we had a different story to tell, but we must not begin talking as if older countries invariably honour their gifted sons | and shower rewards on them. Ond’ New Zealand exile at present in Wellington suggested the other day ‘that if our ‘scientific workers. banded themselves together in a union they would get better treatment. Perhaps they would; but no one who has attended recent meetings of university professors and lecturers will think of them as academic innocents who don't know how to look after Le raats selves. It is quite right that they should look after themselves, but not exactly desirable that looking after themselves should ever be, or ever be supposed to be, more

important tO them than sooking after knowledge and truth. There is a point beyond which we should not go in considering the financial rewards appropriate for scholarship and scientific research. If a scholar is liberally enough paid to. be able to pursue his work without financial anxiety there is not much need to worry about him: he has joys that the rest of us can never have. If he is kept below that level of mental freedom the situation is bad wherever it exists, and no one should attempt to justify it; but it is not in itself worse that a scientific worker should have financial worries than that a farmer should, or a nurse, or the mother of a family. In any case we have some interesting: scientific results to show in spite of our treatment of our scientific workers. We have not made an atomic bomb, but we have shown the world how to keep babies alive, produced a new sheep and a new strain of wheat, and are now hot on the trail of auto-sexing fowls. If tears must still be shed over our gifted sons, they need not be big or bitter tears, or kept flowing too freely.