Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 15, No. 1. March 5, 1952

[Introduction]

This book is an immensely readable and enjoyable, but profound, history of your college—Victoria University. Its style is midway between "Time" and Trevelyan. It has been so brilliantly and effectively written that it has been called "The New Zealand history." It is so, because it is human. In the words of Professor Beaglehole: "The college seems to have existed of human beings, men and women, whose relations to their fellows have been so interesting that in the end I seem to have said more about students than about anything else."

This book, then, is about students. Students "who also stood in the hall and read notices, debated, played football or hockey, worked in the library, took notes, swotted, turned pale in November, or flushed with triumph, before a printed page of questions." The students who made the Victoria University of today.

In 1874 the University of New Zealand—" an institution on which men have recorded their sentiments from time to time with fury, loathing and despair; but never with the passion of love"—was set up as an examining body. "It had a Chancellor and a Senate but it had no students, no teachers, no library and no habitation." Canterbury College and Otago University affiliated. Then an 1882 Bill founded Auckland University. The Government was clear that it had done enough for higher education.