A COLLEGE JUBILEE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 516, 13 May 1949, Page 6

A COLLEGE JUBILEE

| Written for "The Listener" |

by DR.

J. C.

BEAGLEHOLE

AN, said Sir Thomas Browne in his magnificent fashion, "man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave, solemnising nativities and deaths with equal lustre"; solemnising too, shall we add, jubilees, that sort of nativity that confers an extra lustre on men and institutions. The universities of the old world celebrate their five hundredth and eight hundredth anniversaries; even in the new world Harvard has had its tercentennial, and Princeton lately an orgy over its double centenary; we in New Zealand must be content with a fiftyyear span when we rejoice. -It was fifty years ago, on April 17, 1899, that Professor John Brown, fresh from Glasgow, but now for qa fortnight an inhabitant of Wellington, that rather crude colonial capital, gave his inaugural lecture on the classics in education, end Victoria College was really launched on its peculiar and not uneventful career. Cautious Brown and his colleagues — expansive, laughter loving Mackenzie, high-spirited Easterfield, brilliant and debonair Maclaurin-could not foresee the future, so they hoped for the best, buckled down to their Latin and Greek and English and Chemistry and Mathematics with a will, and be- lieved in the college they had founded as intensely, probably, as most of the rather old (but none the less romantic) students who saw their dream of higher education come true. What days they were! What enthusiasm, in the borrowed rooms of Girls’ High School and old Technical School buildings; what highfalutin’ ideals and limitless gas about fellowship and learning, what intellectual insobriety! For this was a sort of spring after a long, long winter of discontent. Wellington, lagging well sbehind the other

colonial centres, and through no selfmade sacrifice, had at last got a university ' college-without a _ habitation, without even a site, it is true, but a university college of its own; and a university, the youth remembered, is not buildings, not endowments, not fellows’ gardens and ivy on immemorial walls, but men and women. They went ahead. And now, at the end of fifty. years, what have we got to look back on? What has Victoria College meant to the community, to its students, to the world? T has been a singular place. It was not rooted in any belief in the virtues of education maintained by the citizens of Wellington, those tough commercial men. The province was not founded by scholars and gentlemen-and of course there were "advantages as well as disadvantages in this. But the great advocate of university education in the capital, the virtual founder of the college, was Robert Stout, a Shetlander and Otago man, who came to the capital primarily as a politician. His own bills were thwarted in the legislature, and, curiously enough, it was Seddon who passed the Victoria College Act of 1897-Sed-don, back from his Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, with a Cambridge LL.D.; Seddon, seconded by Jock McKenzie, the Minister of Agriculture who believed that what this country needed was not more education but more control of land and more hard work. Seddon had been suddenly smitten with his idea-he would found a college, a Victoria College, to commemorate the occasion on which he had so recently assisted, and he would found, a poor man’s college,

a democratic as well as a loyal manifesto, with low fees and_ scholarships from the primary schools, that would make the older colleges, the haunts of riches and snobbery (so he implied) sit up and take notice. College endowments, adequate finance, adequate housing, were the last things that Seddon thought of-‘"it would all come right in the end," he told his despairing suppliants, from time to time; and marching with magnificent indignation over Stout and his other critics, he passed his bill and pressed down this queer diadem on the brow of his Queen. \ HAT would the Queen think of it if after fifty years she could study its history? One trembles. For Victoria College has never’ been, precisely, a Victorian institution. One would not say that it has been constantly and heavily improper,, but certainly it has hardly fought, as a general rule, for the Proprieties. The Queen would often have been puzzled, and she would have rarely derived amusement from these creatures of her ghostly majesty. When students have written odes and sonnets to their mistress, it has been to a different Victoria, a starry-eyed, star-crowned maid on the heights, a Pallas, a Minerva, a Clio, a Melpomene all in one, whose empire has n@ ranged over continent and sea, but over the spirit and the mind. She is a Queen whose regality would not have fitted into Buckingham Palace. But, she has never had a palace of any sort in which to expand herself, in which (to quote one of her early worshippers) to "trail her robe of unimagined dyes" (she was Science as well as Arts); the buildings, as they spread up Salamanca Road, on the heights, on their bed of clay, were never palatial, and any robe trailed therein would certainly have been trodden on, not without curses. Indeed the college, this anomalous tribute to the virtues of the QueenEmpress, has remained a Poor Relation. For most of its life it has been a poor relation among the 6ther university institutions of New Zealand; and while it has been catching up over the last 10 years, it is still, as universities go eleswhere, a very poor relation. It has commemorated not so much Queen Victoria as her subject Mr. Wilkins Micawber; and while it has never displayed quite the exuberant vitality, the noble fortitude, of that great many yet its head has never been long bowed by misfortune, or by disappointed expectations, or by failure to hear, as the fancy robe of unimagined dyes has swept past, the chink of ha’pence. There has been desperately canny financing from the start, munificent gestures have been ruled out; but the college has continued to exist. [Tt has continued to exist; and it has . had one capacity beyond all richesthe capacity to call forth affection from a continuous stream of students. Behind the lectures, behind the japes and jeux d’esprit that has so often affronted Respectable People, there has been this sort of personal feeling, this odd but not fantastic warmth, this sense of life lived in common in a particular way, which

has meant not merely mechanical existence, not merely teaching to a programme and learning by rote, but something that has affected the heart as well as the mind. It is a thing more noticeable at some times than at others, but it has never quite gone even at the worst of times, under the impact of war or depression, and it is a thing that has touched staff as well as students and given them some corporate being. Nothing could exceed the unhappiness, the underlying as well as explicit dissension, of some university ‘institutions; it has been the happiness of Victoria to have escaped that. There have been fierce and mighty arguments, terrific onslaughts, colossal defiances, battles that baffle description; yet above it all, behind it all, pervading it all, the rag-clad alma mater who has also been, somehow, a~pure and snowy-breasted maid (see early college poets) has stood for wisdom and understanding and a measure of disinterested love. OW rich the college has been in personality! It has not, one must admit, numbered very many scholars of real renown among its teachers, but it has had first-rate teachers and some good scholars. It has had, anyhow for brief periods, the brilliant Maclaurin, the profound Salmond; it had Laby, who made Australian science what it is to-day, it had Picken and Sommerville. What would it have been without Kirk and von Zedlitz, so diverse in their origins, so alike in their breadth of mind and their sense of honour and their comprehension, so alike and yet so different in their wit, so tolerant and so independent; both great teachers of men and women. They were among the great personalities, but so also were the four foundation professors; and what a study of a quite different sort there is in Maurice, Richmond, the consciencedriven teacher of law! One takes their names almost at random, yet with a sort of logic, because they stand out; but there are others, still teaching, to whose minds and ways one could devote long and rewarding examination. There have been the lecturers, there have been the students; rich, rich has been the harvest of their personality too; though if one began to mentiom students’ names, from 1899 on, one would be sunk within an (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) avalanche. There has not been a year without its contribution; they gave to the college, and the college, one thinks, | gave to them. They are scattered over New Zealand, and over the world; the bodies of hundreds of them are scattered over the battlefields of the world. They have given much to New Zealand too; given this wealth of personality, given standards of scholarship, given research- from the days when Easterfield first preached the gospel of experiment. Their research has been as diverse as the chemistry of Robertson and the geomorphology of Cotton, the ethnology of Diamond Jenness, the entomology of Myers, the Roman history of Syme. And as researchers they have gone far and wide. The college has shared in the nature of every uni-versity-it has learnt, it has taught, it has added to knowledge. Its record over fifty years, one finds when one begins to collect the visible evidences, is quite astonishing. The list of books and papers and memoirs and theses and expert reviews is increasing rapidly. Not as rapidly as the numbers of students, of course. We started out with ninetyeight, we’re going on for two and a-half thousand. : UT what, to go back to an earlier question, has the College meant to the community? It has, of course, "turned out" eminent persons, in con-

siderable quantity. It has turned out judges and K%C.’s and heads of public departments and archdeacons and diplomatists and schoolmasters, and even a few members of Parliament. It has done its technical job well enough. What it has "meant"-for example, within its immediate community of Wellingtonis a rather harder question to answer. The community, perhaps, or some of it, has been inclined to be censorious. Wel-lington-one says this with regret-has never been university-minded. Wellington has never been generous, in terms of cash. This, Wellington has seemed inclined to say, when funds were the topic, is the Government’s_ business. This, Wellington has seemed inclined to say, when students were the topic, is a dreadful business. One sort of reason is obvious enough. From time immemorial universities have been the resort of youth, who have been highspirited, and noisy, and fractious, and sometimes overly-critical of their elders; youth who have indulged in processions of political or of too broadly humorous import; youth who have been filled with a sense of mission to reform the world. (It must be, said, however, that they do not stab their professors as often as they seem to have done in the Middle Ages, or to live quite such bawdy lives.) This sort of thing takes some getting used to, in the best-intentioned ‘societies, with a university on the outskirts, and Victoria has never been on the outskirts. Its very virtues, its independence of outlook, its critical spirit, its pledged allegiance to wisdom rather than to gold, have done it no more good than have its mild youthful vices, with the Rich and the Great, the Respectable and the Proper. And yet those are the things that a university exists to promote. Those are the things which Victoria

College has meant; by which, in the end, it will stand or fall in the judgment of the truly wise. Those things, and, maybe, one other thing which is allied to them. The college has always been the home of what one may call, for want of a better phrase, the "social conscience." The social conscience has made students critical, has made them compassionate, has made them rebellious and non-con-formist. It has led them to nourish all sorts of heresies, just as it has led them into wars and into Christian missions and into all sorts of mad devotions and impossible loyalties. It led the professors, four decades ago, to embark,on the long campaign of University Reform; it led the College Council, on one memorable occasion, to defy the whole Government and people of New Zealand. Would the community, in its best moments, when the temporary noise and gaucherie of the youth has sunk away and been forgotten, really have it otherwise? .Would it have its university subservient? We know what happened to. subservient universities in other coun-| tries, and to their countries. Every col-| lege, Victoria among the rest, has had its mass of the conventional among its children. Should our country not rather think with pride of the obstreperous? . Pride or shame, there sits the college on its hill, its old clay patch. It gazes down on the sea, above it are undoubt~edly the stars, as its poets have so often pointed out. It has had its first fifty years. It is provincial and gawky-true. It does not win mafy Easter Tournaments, But it has achieved something. "It has never served Mammon, whatever else it has served. It is alive. It isstudents are not so sentimental as they were fifty years ago, one blushes at one’s temerity with the language, but one can perhaps say the word quickly, knowing all faults and all shortcomings-it is loved.