University and Educational Intelligence

Abstract

THE University Bulletin issued by the Association of University Teachers has hitherto been confined mainly to a record of the activities of the Association, which have been concerned largely with questions of remuneration and other conditions of tenure of university posts. In the November issue an effort is made to widen its circle of readers. Lord Gorell contributes an article dealing with three subjects: (i) expected developments of the functions of the Teachers' Registration Council with the view of the establishment of teaching as one of the unified learned professions; (2) the financial needs of universities; and (3) the projected Imperial Education Bureau. Prof. Arthur Thomson's thoughtful and arresting essay on the essentials of education deserves a wider circulation than the Bulletin can hope to give it. Here is a biologist dealing with the ignorance of young Scotland as faithfully as Prof. Burnet in his Romanes lecture dealt with the same subject from the point of view of the humanist. Over the familiar initials M. E. S. appears a plea for large capital grants to universities as recommended by the Royal Commission of 1870 on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science. Prof. Sandbach tells of a committee having been appointed by the A.U.T. to consider and report on the subject of co-operation between libraries, possibly on the lines of the German central information bureau and general card catalogue, for the benefit of research workers in Great Britain and Ireland. There is also a contribution from Melbourne on the perils of inbreeding and localism in universities in the Overseas Dominions.