ACADEMIC RUMPUS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 935, 12 July 1957, Page 8

ACADEMIC RUMPUS

By

SARAH

CAMPION

"| HE. present shenanigan in Auckland ‘" over the University site, which has been simmering for years and is now blowing a pretty head of steam, strikes some of us older academic types as very odd indeed. Mainly, I think, because we come from places in which the university and the market place live side by side, forever irritated by one another’s different demands, habits and aims, but still mutually dependent, like a@ married couple approaching, with some weariness and even more wry amusement, \the ecstacies of their diamond jubilee. We are not used to the idea of the market place rejecting even the physical presence of a university, as if it were a boil, or the H bug. The traders’ booths, obedient to tradition, lie ‘wide open to trade: the colleges obedient to theirs (which is monastic), are built in enclosed form. They turn their backs, for the most part, to the streets; and conduct their life, generally of a most un-conventual hilarity, noise and liveliness, in and about a series of courts. This architectural form seems to have been vetoed in Auckland, which puzzles me. Surely there would be room for it, in the present heart-of-the-city, top-of-the-hill site? And surely it would suit our climate admirably? Secondly, the question of rateable value in’ property, of whether an academic foundation could, so to speak, be worth its space to the local tradesmen, did not, as far as I know, come into the question seriously in Great Britain,

even in the building of those later Recbrick establishments. There’s a tradition, in one part of London, that if you covered the grass of Westminster School playing field with golden sovereigns, you still couldn’t pay for it: and London University, also, must occupy one of the most valuable sites in the city. Probably it boils down to this, that the conception of what a university is for has changed inevitably, and some would think disastrously, in the last 50 years. In the Cambridge of my youth, and more still nearly a 100 years ago in the Cambridge of my father’s youth, the aim of the place was to extend, as athletically as possible, the minds of the dedicated young and old, whatever subject they studied. Nowadays, everywhere in New Zealand except in Scots Dunedin, "University" seems to be the place you go to directly after school because your buddies and cobbers are going, and because there, by stretching your mind no more than is comfortably convenient, you can qualify for a fairly good job. However, one cheering thing about the present affair has been the return of the broadsheet, or, more exactly, printed broadside. This assault on the public flank is a real spearhead of freedom, for, with one honourable but sometimes faltering exception, the Press

in democratic New Zealand is far more conservative than in bad old England. Now, as in Bradlaugh’s day, it is still possible for a man of fiery conviction to bypass the entrenched newspapers with a pamphlet. Auckland's air is filled with the foul gases which blacken ratepayers’ paint: but it may not be freshened by controversy of intense local interest, And future interest, too; since, if things go on like this, many of our children won’t be able to go to university at all, no room having yet been built for thaak.

% x * ()THER traditions have equally queer ways of growing. Here’s a domestic snippet to show what I mean. "Mum, I betcha don’t know the story of Waltzing Matilda." "Of course’ I do! There was an Australian’ called Banjo Paterson, and he was driving along an _ outback road in his buggy one day, and he met a swaggie who was singing .. ." "That’s not what everybody in Stanley Bay says! They say, there was a lady singing in a night-club in the last war and she was singing ‘Waltzing Matilda,’ and a man came up-he was a spy you, see, though he’d got an Aussie uniform

on and everything-and he said, ‘That’s a nice song; that’s new, isn’t it?? and she said, ‘Yes, isn’t’ it nice,’ and then she sent straight away and fetched the police, and he was arrested and done to death somehow. Good story, eh?" "Very," says Mum dryly, much preferring Banjo Paterson, but having by now just enough sense not to say so. Or, for that matter, to mention poor Thomas Wood, who would be equally wounded by the above, were he to overhear it.