Training the University Graduate

Abstract

In the annual report presented by the ViceChancellor, Sir Charles Grant Robertson, to the court of governors of the University of Birmingham on February 23 comment is made on the increase in the number of students in spite of the general depression. It is pointed out that on the Continent, the universities are greatly congested, the attendances being, paradoxically, greater the greater the depression. The chief increase is in the faculty of medicine. The Vice-Chancellor raises the question whether the universities are doing all that they might or ought to do to meet the requirements of the rapidly changing social conditions. For example: “if the Universities are providing, and will have to provide to an increasing extent, direct training for careers, not contemplated twenty years ago, and those careers require a special technique, the essential problem is as to whether that technique can be taught, or whether the true function of the University lies in preparing for the most rapid acquisition of the technique elsewhere and as a post-graduate business. ‘Technocracy’ is the latest American gift, and we may fear the United States—especially as a giver—but do we not need as a nation, outside the Universities but definitely correlated to them, a series of ‘schools’ which will do for the University graduate, who has not been like the engineer technologically trained, what the Hospital does for the medical graduate who becomes, for a strictly limited period, a House Physician and a House Surgeon ? Do we not also need a much closer connexion between the big Technical Colleges and Schools and the Universities ?” In referring to the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Research, the Vice-Chancellor gives his opinion that “the Committee ought to be in a position to support a plan of research conducted by a Department as a whole on definite lines and for a definite purpose and extending over a defined period”. The only obstacle to such a policy is of course the financial one.