Public Confessions

A shockingly small number of students heard a series of extremely interesting talks in the lunch-hour of the week of September 9-13. The so-called Inter-faculty talks are an annual scries of half-hour periods in which a prominent young exponent of most of the College's disciplines attempts to apologise for his kink in that direction, and give his hearers a clearer idea of what students in other faculties do when they are studying, or else is given an opportunity to ride his own special hobbyhorse for the mystification and benefit of the audience. And the way in which this was done last week deserved a far better response than it got.

On the Monday. Mr. Jim Ritchie gave a rapid analysis of the current rapid developments in psychology, in which theraw material, "behaviour." is recorded and explained in terms either of General Systems (statistical analysis, and so on), or of motives (the Freudian, Jungian hunting ground), or from a sociological point of view. He then went on to mention some work in this latter field that he himself had done among manual labourers, where he made some significant discoveries about the similarities and otherwise of the makeup of Maoris and pakehas.

The second speaker. Mr. Keith Walker, an honours English student, discussed the "useful" functions of English scholarship in maintaining a serviceable and attractive language suitable for both technicians and poets, in providing accurate texts of worthwhile works of literature that would otherwise be corrupt or lost, and in giving readers precise and clear understandings of the meaning of words and phrases in the writings of preceding centudies. He claimed further that the discrimination a good critic brings to bear can help as to get hold of what our worthwhile but obscure litterateurs are (or were), getting at.

Listeners on Tuesday heard an explanation from Mr. O'Neill, a new lecturer in Classics, of the decay in the study of classics and in the esteem in which a classical scholar is held. If, said Mr. O'Neill, classics students read the works of Antiquity for their intrinsic merits as books worth reading, and not as material for minute textual quibbling, or as examples of the melodious cadences obtainable in obscure and extinct languages, and further if these students attempted to lead their lives in emulation of the great men of whom the Classical writers tell, then perhaps what is now an ossified, ivory-power survival discipline may revive and be again a valuable influence in the education of men for employments other than university teachers.

Mr. O'Neill was followed by Mr. Bede Rundel, who gave a taste of what philosophers do by [unclear: divssing] the relationship between certainty of the mathematical or logical kind, everyday empirical certainty, and contingency, the area outside that of logical certainty. To his chagrin, the philosopher finds that he's got to put up with the possibility of error (however remote, it's still there), unless he's prepared to pay the price of saying nothing worth saving.

For Wednesday's single address, by Mr. R. A. Bell, on Chemicals from Natural Sources, the Salient reporter was unable to be present, and he has been unable to find anyone who was there: we trust Mr. Bell didn't address an empty room.

Mr. Humphrey, who is doing a doctorate in physics, took as his subject for the first of Thursday's pair of talks the "Difficulties of Research in New Zealand." The main troubles were availability of radioactive materials, for his experiment on neon in excitation states of between 4 and 10 million electreon volts, in the exact form required, and the lack of much valuable "experimenting technique." know-how derived from familiarity with simliar pieces of apparatus, which is built up in laboratories where there are many people doing research, but which is sadly lacking in New Zealand. Local research vs as also hampered to some extent by a limited budget, which ruled out experiment in many fields where the cost of equipment is high, and by the experimenting tradition in the colleges, where a bias for nuclear research affects the direction of much research undertaken for degrees.

Mr. Ramsey does systematics. He is a Ph.D. student in the Zoology department and is engaged on the identification of mites found in the soil of Brother's Island. This systematic research, the labelling of different animals, was the most basic branch of zoology, and although in Europe and elsewhere this was far enough advanced to permit researchers to branch out into experiments in physiology, genetics, and so on. New Zealand was still too far behind with the systematic classification of her many unique species to be able to give much time to anything else.

On Friday. Dr. Stone of the French Department described the University City of Paris, an international student living quarter, where he spent some years while a student at the Sorbonne. Built in the twenties and thirties (with more expansion still going on), this self-contained block of hostels (26 already built), restaurants, and theatres is an idealistic experiment in race relations. There are hostels especially for many overseas countries, and students from virtually everywhere live together in the University City, along with about an equal number of French students. It has worked well, but not as well as might be partly because of the fantastically high pass standard at the Sorbonne, which makes everyone work too hard, and partly because French students tend to be very individualistic and don't appreciate much the demands on their individual freedom that genuinely corporate life must make.

Mr.——of the Geology Department, mildly surprised his audience by giving an exposition of how we see, which would have seemed more appropriate for a physiologist, a psychologist, or a philosopher.

It was nonetheless, worthwhile and illuminating to hear. Its burden was that by habitual automatic processes the mind imposes an intelligible order and pattern on the raw material of blocks of colour.

Perhaps symptomatic of the failure of students to take advantage of this chance of getting some understanding of fields outside their own was the way French students left straight after Dr. Stone's talk and were immediately replaced by scientists who hadn't bothered to come until a geologist was speaking, thus effectively demolishing the contact for which the talks were designed.