41

1.—13 a

The University of New Zealand is equally defective as regards organization, of which indeed it has but little. In practice it consists during the greater part of the year of Chancellor, Registrar, and undergraduates: there exists the utterly strange and anomalous position that the teachers of the undergraduates (qua teachers) are not even members of the University, neither have they any official status within the University, nor have they as teachers of New Zealand I , ni versify students any organization whatever. It is true that the teachers are represented on the Senate to a very limited extent, but it is in a most inadequate, ineffective, and unorganized manner. There is no< the slightest official mi' recognized co-ordination between the various colleges or between teachers of cognate subjects, lieu- is the principle of representation of subjects admitted or provided for in election to the Senate. It therefore happens that importani subjects or whole schools .11 faculties may not be. and in fact are not. represented mi the Senate at all. With its preseni constitution the Senate may and does refer questions of detail in any subject to the teachers of that subject, but the Senate itself deals with all the broader issues without consulting the teaching staff as a whole. Obviously, however, the teaching staff, since its members are responsible for the different subjects concerned, are better able to appreciate the bearing of the subjects upon one another, and it should therefore be consulted on all the broader issues, such as the general nature of the statutes for degrees. It is often stated that the large number of professors on the Senate gives the staff a sufficient voice in academic matters. bill al the present time, though nearly half the members of Senate are professors, only four of them hold office as representatives of the Professorial Hoards. It is possible, therefore, for the oilier professorial members to outvote the Hoard's representatives. Then, again, the interests of each Professorial Hoard are so wide that one man cannot adequately represent them all. The various subjects are at present not rationally represented, the members may all be professors of languages without any representative of science, or arts and science might be represented to the exclusion of medicine and mining. The University of New Zealand possesses, in fact, no organized machinery for dealing with the complex courses of study provided by a modern university. Matters relating to policy, government, finance, examinations, and curricula are referred indiscriminately to the office of the Senate by graduates, undergraduates, individual professors, Professorial Hoards, faculties, and individual members of the community; there they accumulate for ninny months; the Senate meets, and a long list of these heterogeneous accumulated matters is submitted to it by the Chancellor, and they are referred to different committees to report on within a week or ten days. The acquaintance of the members of these committees with the subjects referred to them may be and often is of the remotest, .yet the subjects frequently require the most intimate knowledge both in their technical aspects ami in their relation to the community as a whole. In short, the Senate is a body which in its composition corresponds exactly to a College Council, but which presumes to cany nut the duties ami functions of a Professorial Hoard and of all the faculties, which allows business to accumulate for months, and then hurriedly disposes of it in ten days. This organization may hi , simple, but no one could suppose it to be effective or to give satisfactory results. Probably the method was adequate in the early days of the University—twenty-five or thirty years ago —but with the present growth and development of University courses and methods of teaching it is obviously quite inadequate. As regards organization, then, we conclude that there exists no truce of any automatically operating organization which any body or corporation must possess to be vital and to be capable of living, surviving, and developing. The need of reform in the constitution of the New Zealand University was admitted by the Education Committee of the House in 1910. It was at that time Imped that certain changes which had been proposed in the Senate, such as the institution of a professorial conference which was to meet annually, would lead to lasting improvement. Hut the Senate in 1913 rejected all the recommendations that had been sent up by the conference, and abolished the conference itself, which had only met once. Nevertheless the Senate admitted that there was need for some change in its constitution, and set up a committee to consider the subject ami submit its proposals to the graduates of the University, to the College Councils, and to the Professorial Hoards. Most of the graduates have had no experience of the conditions in other universities, ami not having paid particular attention to university organization are not competent to decide whether the present system is satisfactory or whethei , it can be improved by following more closely the system used in other universities. Nevertheless the method now being followed by the Senate gives such men a greater voice than is given to those who by their experience are really better qualified to express an opinion. For whereas each graduate has received a copy of the schemes proposed by the committee of the Senate and a voting-paper, the professors individually have received neither. (3.) /;/ ii/mi manner are Modern Universities elsewhere organized- so ox hi fulfil their proper Functions? In the first place it is necessary, both from the point of view of organization and in order that the University may concern itself much more than it has done in the past with teaching and training, that all those who are engaged in instructing its undergraduates should be members of the University. Secondly, it is necessary that such teachers should be organized and their work co-ordinated and then correlated. This can best be attained, as in other universities, by grouping together the teachers of cog .ate subjects into various faculties. Thus the University would establish faculties of arts, science, law. medicine, and so on. Each faculty would be Composed of all those professors and lecturers in each of the four affiliated colleges who were concerned in teaching subjects in that faculty.

(s—l. 13a.