I think it is not an inappropriate preamble to the discussion of this Vote to point out that the extra amount now given, £24,570—I am specially interested in the college here in Dublin—represents 12 times the sum we voted yesterday to a man adjudged guilty by a tribunal, in order to defray the cost he was put to to defend himself. His offence led to his disappearance from the ranks of the Government, but he has been safeguarded by a particular pension. One could make other interesting comparisons between the sum that gentleman got away with in connection with his position as Parliamentary Secretary and his profits as a bacon curer, in which he was completely inexperienced, as well as the undisclosed profits for which he will be one day brought to book.
On the university matter proper, we are being given an extra £45,000 as between the three colleges. I have not the advantage of knowing the situation in Cork and Galway as well as I happen to know it in connection with Dublin. My information in connection with Dublin is derived from one of the finest reports on the whole situation with regard to university education that has been produced in this country. That report has been produced by a group of professors and some of the lecturers of the University College, Dublin, on a reference given to them by the governing body of the college through the President of the University College, Dublin, in May, 1944. They prepared a report which they signed in January, 1946. Right through the year 1946 there were discussions going on with the Government on foot of that report. The report was presented in full to the Government.
One of the reasons I am mentioning these dates is because I find it hard to understand the reference by the Taoiseach in connection with the Cosmic Physics Vote that he had been seeking from the universities information as to what they require to put them into a position that would seem to be adequate to the duties they were carrying out, and he appeared to be complaining that he had not got this information. Nobody who had the benefit of reading this report could complain that he was without information on the matter. I understand the report was in the hands of the Government quite soon after it was signed and presented to the college. I presume some time was occupied by having it considered by the statutory bodies connected with the college. There is quite a considerable review of the whole process of university education in Ireland which is not all relevant to this Vote but very little of it can be considered completely irrelevant.
As far as the Dublin College situation is concerned—and I will take it as my example this evening—I am pretty certain that what I say in connection with the University College, Dublin, can be paralleled by similar remarks in connection with the two other colleges, because they are suffering from the impact of the new currency that we have here. I think I should fit this matter into the general framework of life in this country. What we are now suffering from is the result of possibly the best intentioned efforts of the Government during the war, efforts that, no matter how well intentioned, produced the most deplorable results. It is only in recent months it has become recognised how much we have suffered from what has been done. We used to have our rewards in life measured by what we knew as the pound sterling. We know there are pounds of other types; there is, for instance, the pound Egypt, the pound Turkish, and certainly the pound Australian.
Here I come to the chief author of our present discomforts, the Minister for Industry and Commerce. We have, so to speak, the Lemass pound here and we measure our standards in Lemass pounds. We measure them in ten shillingses of the old rate. That is the value that, under the policy adopted here for five years, is now associated with what is still the monetary unit for measuring incomes and rewards in this country. This country, within the past two or three days, has been held up to public odium in the report issued by the International Labour Commission as being one of four countries which, during the war, succeeded in lowering its wage rates beyond what its wage rates were at the start of the war. It is pointed out in the International Labour Office Report that in nearly all countries monetary rewards were increased, but the purchasing power did not increase in relation to the moneys paid. This country is picked out as being in the group of four countries in which purchasing power lapsed below what it was at the start of the war.
When one considers the company we are in, it certainly cannot be alleged to be a very creditable performance on our part. We are grouped with France, Japan and Czechoslovakia, and when one thinks of devastated France, of overrun and destroyed Czechoslovakia, we get a definite idea of how little good, and, in fact, how positively bad, were the efforts made in this country to try to preserve people against the impact of war conditions. We are the only neutral country put into this group, and if Japan was not over-run during the greater part of the war, she certainly suffered at the end, and, as a matter of fact, her currency, I should imagine, shows even a greater depreciation than our own.
In any event, we start on that basis in considering any Vote which we have to consider here, that the moneys paid to all sections of the community would have to be doubled before we could arrive at a situation in which people would be getting the same reward in purchasing power as they got pre-war. I open on this new Vote for University College, Dublin, by saying that, with this addition, the staff of University College, Dublin, will not be put in the same position in relation to the purchasing power of the rewards they get for their services to the community as that in which they were in pre-war years, 1937-38 and 1938-39. There is nothing in the Vote in respect of capital endowment and the trouble from which University College, Dublin, suffers is that, from these annual grants, it has to take something to put against the debt which has been accumulated because of the deficiencies in capital endowment.
When the universities were founded, the original grant given to University College, Dublin, was £32,000. The building grant was £110,000. It was recognised that that would not be sufficient for the buildings which were plotted, and it was decided that the best thing to do was to put up as respectable a facade in the way of buildings as could be put up, along the Earlsfort Terrace frontage and to leave the wing around by Hatch Street uncompleted, to spend the money available to us in getting as much building done as possible and leaving the rest to be completed from the later grants which we hoped for. Unfortunately, before the buildings which were to be put up out of the grant of £110,000 had been completed, the 1914-18 war broke out.
The contractor found that he could not carry out his contract, and in any event the value of money went down to a particular point, with the result that even the amount of building originally intended for that sum of £110,000 had to be reduced. Some buildings were, however, completed, but the college was left with a debt of £39,000, part of that debt having to be financed out of the annual grants, these having been intended originally for the maintenance of the staff, for the provision of the amenities necessary to a college and for payments to the administrative staff who also had to be accommodated there.
In 1920-21, a sum of £20,000 was given to the college and eventually, in 1926, a special grant was given, and, in addition, the building known as the College of Science, which, when put up, cost £200,000, was given to University College, Dublin, as one way of easing the tremendous difficulties under which the college laboured because of the fact that the student body had grown out of all proportion to the original buildings—the class rooms were overcrowded and every room used for staff or students was completely and entirely inadequate to the ordinary needs of these people and the services they were supposed to give. Since then, debt has still accumulated and eventually a non-recurring grant of £70,000 was given in 1943, but the result of all that is that University College, Dublin, still finds itself paying out of its annual grants, or else running into debt with a bank, for the deficiencies in the amounts given towards its proper equipment by way of buildings.
The total sums which have been calculated as expended by way of capital outlay on buildings, alterations in buildings and on the playing fields at Belfield, come to about £250,000, and, in capital grants, the college has got £155,000, plus one non-recurring grant of £70,000, part of which was not for building. Suppose they are all taken as being building funds—they left the college in debt by over £30,000 and the interest in respect of that debt has to be found out of the annual grants.
At this point, the comparison may be made which is contained in this report. The number of students in the college at present is 3,200. The original number with which the college started was 500 and, in 1926, when the College of Science was handed over, the number of students was in the neighbourhood of 1,200. It had grown from the original group of 530 to 1,200, and it is now 3,200. When looking for comparisons, we do not take the older well-endowed English universities, but two of the more modern universities, Birmingham and Manchester, give a basis of comparison. Birmingham University has something less than 1,500 students. Its capital grants, between the university proper, the student union and halls of residence, amount to £1,300,000. Manchester University student body is about 1,700 and the capital grants given to that university to date amount to £1,100,000.
As I said, the repercussion of the capital endowment deficiency on our annual grants has only to be mentioned to be realised. The college has to devote some part of the grants it gets to maintain its staff and provide all the equipment of a modern nature which is of an annual type, to meeting the debt which has accumulated over the years, a debt which is paid off from time to time and then starts to grow afresh. The original grant for the university was £32,000. That was increased because it was found to be hopelessly inadequate, even in the early years, and, up to 1925-26, the college had got an additional £20,000. University College, Dublin, therefore, was maintaining itself, or was supposed to maintain itself, on an annual grant of £52,000.
In 1926, the scheme worked out— although it did not work out with absolute accuracy—was that the original grant was to be doubled. University College, Dublin, was to be given an additional sum of £32,000 which did not raise the total grant to the full £84,000 but did raise it to £82,000. In 1926, an additional grant of what was almost the equivalent of the old grant was given and the college was then told to carry on on the basis of an £82,000 grant. Again, I want that regarded in relation to the number of students. In 1926, the number of students was about 1,200, and, in 1944-45, it was 3,037, and, in the present year, it is just short of 3,200. The number has more than doubled, and yet no moneys by way of annual grant have been given until now, when we are giving an additional £24,000.
In the meantime, on account of the growth in the number of the student body, the new faculties which have been founded and the additions made to existing faculties, considerable extra work has fallen on the staff. In recent years, in addition to the fact that the emoluments they got were reduced by the heavy income-tax which had to be paid, the pounds they got, which used to buy 20/- worth of goods, had slumped to the point at which each £ was worth 10/-. It is quite clear in these circumstances that the university required additional sums to be paid to it and, as I say, it is now being given this sum of £24,000. With that sum of £24,000, it would be possible to make some improvement in respect of, I think, all the staff.
Here, again, I should like to make a comparison. The average salary of a senior professor in University College, Dublin—I am speaking of a man of many years standing in the college— was, pre-war, between £800 and £900. It will be possible with this grant to put some of these people up to £1,400. That means that they will have a purchasing power of £725 as against the £800 or £900 they used enjoy. It will be possible to put only five members of the staff on that basis. Three more will be put on a basis of £1,300, now equivalent to £650. The bulk of the full-time professors will be allowed £1,200, with a present purchasing power of £600. Although this addition is very gladly welcomed, it must be viewed in proper perspective. The proper perspective is that it does not even put the staff of the college back, so far as real purchasing power is concerned, in the position in which they were in 1938-39.
We have been asked, I understand, to increase students' fees. The situation at the moment, with regard to the revenue of the college, on which it has to maintain its whole staff, is that £82,000 comes from these grants and £72,000 or thereabouts from students' fees. The entire expenditure is not exactly on a 50-50 basis but it is somewhere approaching that—£82,000 from the State and £72,000 from students. Our fees have been lower than those of the great majority of university institutions in Great Britain but they amount roughly to about £23 per head of the student body. We are now asked, I understand, to raise the fees by 50 per cent. That will make the average cost of university education to the student £34 per annum. It must seem iniquitous to have to raise students' fees at a time when every item which has to be counted in the cost of getting a student educated in the university has gone up. Lodgings in the city, when it is possible to get them at all, are not affording the same standard of life as even students were accustomed to have. At certain times of the year, students are being compulsorily evacuated from their lodgings to make room for tourists. Everything in the way of equipment which a student has to buy—scientific equipment, books and other things—has increased in price, while the cost of clothing to the parent has increased. In these circumstances, I understand that we are asked, as a condition of getting this grant, to raise the student fee from about £23 per head to £34 per head. I suppose it will have to be done but there will be repercussions, possibly in the way of reduced numbers, which will again seriously disturb whatever equilibrium was ever achieved in connection with the finances of the college.
Many comparisons can be made with the university situation elsewhere. The booklet in front of me gives a comparison with a group of universities in England and Wales and with the solitary university institution in Belfast. It is an amazing thing that, since 1926-27, the State grant in every case except that of University College, Dublin, had increased. Even since 1937-38, there has been an odd increase here and there. If you take the whole university grants for Great Britain and Northern Ireland, they used to amount to about £2,500,000. The present Chancellor of the Exchequer in England, being a university man, has some appreciation of university difficulties and some appreciation of university development, and he has promised the universities already that the State grants will be increased from £2,500,000 to £7,000,000. Since he made that statement about the £7,000,000 a year ago, he has told in the most generous way those who made representations to him that whatever the universities require he will give to them. He agrees that the system they are inaugurating on the other side for raising the school age in respect of the primary schools, the re-equipment they are doing with regard to their secondary schools, the invitations they are giving to boys to remain longer at secondary schools and the way in which they are making the path easier for the secondary school pupil to go on to the university will mean better university education—or, at least, the equipment of universities in a better way and the provision of more staff and, probably, better staff. Even since he mentioned £7,000,000, he has told university groups that they need not consider £7,000,000 the ceiling, that he will expand the amount so long as a case can be made to him that the moneys are required. That means that he is increasing by £4,500,000 the old-time grant of £2,500,000. Again, may I stop to make this comparison. The staff in England are not suffering from one of the matters of which I have spoken in connection with the staff here. Money has not lost its value in England. Rates of wages have increased since the 1939 period by about 65 per cent.
The cost of living has not gone up by more than 25 points. The actual value of their money has increased. They are not allowed to spend it as freely as before but, if not, they are certainly not running into debt, as people here are. They can have a bit of a nest-egg and a definite promise was given in Parliament that these moneys, placed to the credit of small people, will be released to them. A beginning was made last year in that regard. Taking into account the increase in cost of living, which would decrease the value of their money, and the increase of wage rates over there, the value of money has improved. The International Labour Office calculation, to which I referred a moment ago, measured that improvement at about 45 per cent. Our currency has depreciated to the point that, as I said before, the Lemass £ is worth only 10/-. We are endeavouring to pile up more of those ten shillings in an endeavour, for instance, to make the money being given to the professors represent the old purchasing power which they got as their reward. In addition, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in England has pointed out that, in the first five years after the war, £10,000,000 is to be provided for the universities, to enable them to enlarge and equip their buildings. What they have promised is—in the first five years, £10,000,000 and actual grants, in so far as the State contributes to them, to be raised from £2,500,000 to £7,000,000, that sum to be increased further if a case can be made for it.
In Great Britain and Northern Ireland there is this amazing situation further to be considered. As far as University College, Dublin, is concerned it has only two sources of revenue. The State gave it, before this Vote was introduced, £82,000, and it receives about £72,000 from fees. So far as those other universities in Great Britain and Northern Ireland are concerned, their fees were about 30 per cent. of their annual income. The State grant was only 36 per cent. of their income so that about two-thirds of the income was contributed by the two sources from which University College, Dublin, draws all its income.
The other one-third in England was made up from a variety of sources. In England there are many local authorities which give grants—not payments for students, but actual grants—to the universities. They have donations, very valuable donations, amounting on the average to 15 per cent. of their entire revenue. The non-State endowment is about 15 per cent., and further donations bring that 15 per cent. up to 17 per cent. In England, between the local authority endowment, private endowment and bequests, they get one-third of their incomes. The £2,500,000, which is to be raised to £7,000,000, only counts or only did count as one-third of the moneys which these colleges get. Their fees give them about one-third and they get another third from the sources which I have described.
There are many comparisons in this booklet that could be made with the university system here, and they are all put in a most conservative way because they do not pay any great attention in any detail to the depreciation in the value of money. They do not weigh to any great extent the fact that most of these universities which are brought into comparison have a body of students, I should say on the average, not more than half the number of students attending University College, Dublin. The average would not be more than 1,600 in any of these places, while University College has to accommodate 3,200 students.
When this money is paid the university will find it possible to make certain increases in remuneration in regard to their staff. These increases will not in relation to the present day value of money put these people in the position, poor and all as it was, in which they were before the war. As far as the junior staff are concerned their position will be relatively bettered by the fact that they will get a greater percentage of an increase, but on the whole when this money is divided up in the way suggested, and when one takes into consideration the extra work which is borne by the limited number of people who will benefit, although they have gladly, welcomed the increase now given to them, it must be pointed out that it does not meet the requirements. I understand that some consultations are going on with regard to the allocation of some additional sums. I do not know how far they have gone, but I do know that the college is lingering on in almost exactly the same position in which it found itself in 1918 after the previous war. Some additions have been made.
An anatomy department was built and other buildings were renovated and repaired but, in the main, whatever buildings there are at Earlsfort Terrace are very nearly in the position in which they were in 1918. The university has been granted the use of the College of Science but whether it is proposed to continue to give them the use of that building I do not know. They have got the use of about 90 per cent. of it at the moment and its original cost was supposed to be a couple of hundred pounds. It should be remembered that with added buildings go added costs of maintenance which have to be supplied out of the ordinary grants. Unless there is a completely new view taken of university education the college will not be in a position to give to the students the help the students are entitled to expect.
There is one other matter to which I would like to refer—the matter of pensions. The pension fund with regard to the staff of University College, Dublin, is, I understand, in quite a bad way. Not all the staff have rights on the pension fund. I should imagine that it is confined almost in its entirety to those who achieve the rank of professor as a full-time office. I am not sure if even the investments that have been made out of the moneys granted for this purpose would meet the calls that might fall upon it. Again, I am given to understand that some statement has been made or some hope has been held out that the pension matter will be looked into in the near future, but now that the preliminary matter of an immediate grant is being dealt with, I should like to put this to the House and to the country in connection with the professorial staff of University College, Dublin. The persons who attain to that rank do so generally in their middle years, if not in their late middle years. There is an age at which they are compulsorily retired. If you take the average age at which a person enters the college staff and take the age at which retirement is made compulsory it will be seen that a man cannot have many years' service. As the pension is related to the number of years that a man serves, the amount that can be earned by the ordinary holder of an office there is very small.
Take the position of a professor in the old time. He had £800 a year and he achieved that rank about the age of 45. Most of them would achieve it about that time after being what is called a statutory lecturer or an assistant for many years before. Whatever service is given as a lecturer or as assistant does not count towards pension; no pension is allowed because of earlier years' service as lecturer. A man who goes out at the ordinary retiring age and who had £800 a year would get ordinarily on retirement £200 a year, if he took the gratuity of one years's salary on retirement. If he opted for the other system which is known to be the superannuation fund and took no retiring gratuity, he would get a sum of about £250 or about £5 a week, with a present purchasing power of 50/-. Fifty shillings a week are what a university professor has to look forward to at the end of his days. This Estimate, of course, makes no provision by way of bettering that situation though I understand some provision is to be made in that respect. I would like to get some indication of what is in the Minister's mind in regard to what any member of the staff could look forward to on retirement and how this £250 or £5 a week is likely to be brought by any special arrangement up to the purchasing power of that original £5 a week they used to have. I again point out that the number of people who qualified on these ranks on the full-time scale is very small indeed. I believe that the entire staff of University College, Dublin, is under 100 and of those some 25 would be on the part-time scale and would not be on the pensionable grade at all. That leaves something in the neighbourhood of 75, which can be divided again, as two-thirds of them are professors on senior staff and one-third is junior staff. That is the body which has to be attended to and the particular body on whom, as far as University College, Dublin, is concerned, the highest type of education in this country depends.
A comparison was made with certain salaries paid to people in other walks of life for the purpose of seeing what would be an adequate and reasonable sum to pay to men of the type who become university professors. A comparison was made with the Civil Service, which I think was not an unreasonable comparison. Civil servants are also people who are supposed to be opting for stability in life instead of for the hazards of the commercial world. Civil servants, of course, have been tricked by the bonus arrangement which was promised to them and which has now been taken from them. They were told they should stick fast to it, that it was going to be their sheet-anchor in times of rising prices. Unfortunately, they stuck to it when prices were going down and they suffered, and it was taken from them by Act of the State when it was supposed to be of any benefit to them. The consideration of that bonus matter somewhat complicates the comparisons made in this document. When the comparison was made, it was thought not to be unreasonable to take the retired type of person who might be supposed to be looking for professorial work in comparison with a member of the Civil Service who retired from the buffetings and hazards of commercial life. We discovered, when the comparison was made, that if you went down through the salaries attached to secretaries and assistant secretaries of Departments and came to the grouping known as principal officers, you found that the principal officer rank had attached to it a salary of about £700 rising to £800. The bonus, at the rate in force when this matter was being considered, which was the stabilised rate, showed that he would get £954, rising to £1,100. Only ten people in the whole of University College, Dublin, were getting as much as the initial salary of a principal officer—only ten out of the whole staff were put on the grading of the initial payment of the principal officer grading. The principal officer had at least the promise of a bonus and he had prospects of promotion, of rising possibly to some of the higher ranks, of assistant secretary or secretary. The professor who goes on the salary that we have apportioned to University College, Dublin, starts there and stays there, he gets the maximum at once and gets no improvement in his conditions.
I have only made extracts from this document—which is a most valuable contribution to the seamy side of university life—and any other matters that might be discussed here possibly would be better discussed on the main Vote for Universities later in the year. But the extracts I have given, when shown to anybody interested in university life or anyone who appreciates the work that is being done in the university or anyone who has any conception of the value of the university as an institution in the life of the State, are surely enough to make them realise that the way is not very inviting or alluring for anyone who wants to take up this type of work. One does not need to give very much thought to this matter to understand how many of our good people could be usefully employed at a very small increase of expenditure by the State, but who have to seek their livelihood elsewhere and have to give the benefit of their training and gifts to students in other countries.
The student body, of course, is not mentioned in this document. As far as they are concerned, they will still have to put up with the grimy conditions of life to which they have become accustomed. I have often thought it would be wise to go to some of those societies like the Old Dublin Society or the various philanthropic societies who go around investigating the conditions in Dublin and ask them to call in and investigate the conditions in the university, to look at what one of the professors once called the interior slum conditions in some parts of that building. Some of the buildings which the university took over in 1900 when it was first founded are still there, because it is too expensive to take parts of them down, although they are rotting to decay and there are some parts which are at times very dangerous to those who use the building.
University College, Dublin, as set before us, has a grand facade facing Earlsfort Terrace, but the interior is not so pleasant. Students who go there may have very pleasant memories afterwards of the people they met and their student associations and the type of life allowed to them and the freedom that goes with university education, but they certainly will not be able to tell anyone that any great provision was made to make their lives more pleasant or more coloursome than they themselves made it. The main place for students to congregate is the central hall. There is no special room for them.
There is some provision made for them in a basement—I believe there is some place where they can hang up their overcoats and there is a system of lockers. It is a cheerless sort of place and none of them go there, so the main place for meeting is the central hall. In the change over between lectures, in the forenoon when lectures are finishing, the hall is as crowded as a small town on a fair day. The students stand about most of the time, as there is no place where they can sit down. They are not served with any amenities in the way of rooms, with furniture, chairs, tables, books and periodicals. Their life is entirely empty of that, though surely they would not object to it. On the whole, they are not given to looking for much in the way of luxuries, as they have been educated by very many years of experience, in hearing from students who have gone before them that they are not to be looked for in the college. I am making no reflection on the staff in speaking in this way, as I think as much has been done for the student body as could be done, but the other element that is supposed to make up university life is entirely lacking in the college.
I referred a moment ago to the universities in Birmingham and Manchester. Birmingham, with a capital expenditure of £1,300,000, has spent about £150,000 on a students' union and halls of residence. Two or three of the ecclesiastical colleges have set up establishments for young students, and there are two or three places where they may congregate and enjoy the opportunities of life in a very limited way, a life that is supposed to be most appropriate and most valuable in the university. The majority of our students are scattered through the city in lodgings—and very indifferent lodgings, in the present circumstances. There are occasions for meeting other students at class times, during lectures or in the five or ten minutes between lectures.
There is no general social life for these people outside the occasion of a meeting of a university organisation. There are no real occasions on which they can meet as an ordinary matter of course, and there are lamentably few occasions upon which the members of the staff get an opportunity of meeting the students or on which the students get the opportunity of meeting them. A professor or a lecturer goes to his class and attends there for a particular period. The only time the majority of the students see any member of the staff is when he is carrying out his official duties, lecturing or demonstrating. The social contacts and the ordinary human contacts that the students might like to have with the staff and which, possibly, would be beneficial to them, are entirely precluded by the particular set-up in the equipment of the university. Anybody who has visited some of the older English universities, as I have, could not but be struck by the association there is between the people who live in the different colleges in which so many of the staff and of the students are housed. Both have their rooms in the same college buildings. The staff and the students have their meals together. They meet in the ordinary recreation rooms, in the lounges and in the smoke rooms. As a matter of course, a member of the staff will turn in and allow the students to enjoy his company while he enjoys their more youthful and more vigorous viewpoints. Anybody who has had that experience could not fail to get a tremendous appreciation of what all that means in university life, what a valuable part it plays in it. There is that association there between students and staff. We have not got that here, and cannot get it, and it is not possible to provide it under the new grant.
There is a sort of antagonism— perhaps I should not use the word "antagonism"—but there is supposed to be an indifference as between the staff and the students here. I think the students think that is the situation. I do not know that there is any member of the staff who would not welcome an opportunity of meeting, not only his own students, but the students in any of the other faculties. The occasions for meetings between the staff and the students are limited. When they do occur they are of a rather ceremonious type, so that free and easy intercourse is not always possible.
These are all matters which, I suppose, lie for amendment in the future. Outside the non-recurrent grant of £70,000 in 1943, this represents the first approach to the university system since the increase in the endowment was given in 1926. That is to say, 20 years after. The way in which the new grant is being given will not bring the moneys which the professors used to enjoy back to their old purchasing power, but, at any rate, this increase is gladly welcomed. Most of the staff have asked that I should definitely state their appreciation of what the Government are doing at this time, even though we may complain of delay and, with some justice, say that it is not what was expected and is certainly not what is required to put the university on a proper footing. Yet, when all that is said, it is an approach in the right direction. One thing it does is this, it shows that the authorities have wakened up to the scandalous and sordid conditions in which the universities have been left. We hope that it will lead to a bettering of the situation, and that when the authorities have now entered along this path, they will go further and pay some attention to what I referred to as the students' needs.
I hope that something will be done to try to arrange, now that a grant is being given to the college, that some provision will be made over and above that to meet the human needs of the staff, and so enable the university to become a real meeting place where the students and staff can come together, enjoy each other's company and have benefit of what is everywhere regarded as a most valuable part of university life—the clash of mind on mind. As far as the big majority of the 3,200 students are concerned, you have among them people with varying points of view. Many think there is value in their points of view, and that every opportunity should be given for the exchange of views between students and staff. I am not using the language of exaggeration when I say that there is none of that to-day. As long as that is so, a most valuable side of university education is being lost.
