Secondly we have no room for all these students. The University buildings were too small before the war. Today the situation is utterly hopeless. We lack everything, teachers, remedies, reading rooms, laboratories, auditories, houses where the students can live and have their meetings a.s.o. To a great extent, this is the consequence of the small grants the university is receiving. And the few teachers are badly paid, they have little or no time left for research, and are missing modern remedies for their instruction.

So far I believe the conditions are rather alike in Norway and New Zealand.

But this is but one side of our problem. Besides we totally lack a university centre with a characteristic student's life. The old university buildings in Oslo, erected a hundred years ago, were once lying outside the town, but unfortunately the authorities did not secure a single site for expansion. The consequence of this has been that the University now lies in the centre of the town in one of our most travelled quarters. There the students of medicine, law, history and language have their resort. But the students of French and German must take their instructions in an old school eight minutes away. If a student will lend a book at the University Library he must go fifteen minutes away along one of the main streets in a western direction. The zoological, botanic and geologic collections belonging to the University lie in museums to the northeastern parts of the town, three quarters of an hour from the centre buildings. The students of mathematics and natural science have their own new buildings outside the town, three quarters of an hour to the northwest of the centre! In addition to this we lack a great house of assembly so the students get very little contact with each other.

Today nearly every student wishes that the whole University must be removed to the north-west of the town, where there are still plenty of sites for new buildings. It is, of course, a question of grants. But the greatest repugnance does not come from the granting authorities, but from many of our own professors! They will not leave the old narrow buildings, only erect some new in the neighbourhood, in our most travelled centre, and thus increase the confusion and schism. Surely you will understand that ideal conditions are far away from the University of Oslo today.