OPENING OF KINGSWOOD COLLEGE UNIVERSITY
OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA ON SUNIAY, 17TH
NOVEMBER, 1 363
Speech by the Prime Minister, ' the Rt. Hon. Sir Robert Menzies
Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chancellor, Your Grace and Ladies and
Gentlemen I think I ought to begin by giving you a short but
powerful talk on the warming qualities of wool. ( Laughter)
I went around earlier among my gaily caparisoned colleagues
on the bench here and fingered their robes. I am the only
one who is all wool and a yard wide. ( Laughter) Anyhow, that
will have one great advantage and that is, it will shorten my
speech, because it is a warm day.
Now, Sir, I am over here, of course as everybody
knows, on certain illicit occasions. This is a day off. This
is my one unquestionably respectable day in the period of three
or four weeks, and I was delighted to find that I could still
accept the invitation to open this College, this new extension,
this building, because, as I don't need to tell you, I have a
very profound belief in places like this and it has been my
very great privilege to make some contribution to the development
of university education and of residential colleges over the
last ten years. Coming across yesterday in the plane and bereft of
all books of reference, I was trying to remember something that
had provoked a thought in my mind. I hope I remember it
accurately. Many of you will recall it. Wordsworth in " The
Prelude" has a marvellous description of the statue of
Newton " Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought alone."
Those lines have always stuck in my mind "' voyaging through
strange seas of Thought alone." Well, perhaps some of is may
occasionally be tempted to feel that we are explorers of the
same fashion, but most of us are not. It may very well be that
some man of soaring genius to use the word in its proper
sense like Newton like Einstein, may indeed go through
strange seas, all alone, perhaps without the need of company or
companionship, or fellow workers. I don't know. But no
doubt, every now and then in the history of the world there is
somebody who achieves something tremendous, adds something
tremendous to the sum of human knowledge and who does it as an
individual, exploring a problem, lonely, complete in himself,
just as there may well be in the history of the world great
thinkers who were in effect hermits who shut themselves away
from the world. iAut for most of us, for the overwhelming
majority of people in this world, work cannot be done just
alone. Education cannot be regarded as a purely individual
matter. That's why we have universities. Thatts why we have
residential colleges, because what we are seeking to do is to
extend the boundaries of knowledge in a mass of people, working
together, getting to know each other, learning from each other,
the whole matter being part of the process of producing civilised
people. And, of course, by definition originallyI suppose,
a " 1civilised person' was a person who lived in a city. He was
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by definition, a man who lived among others, who learned from
others, the result being that in the total there was a degree.
of knowledge, a degree of genuine instruction, a degree of
genuine understanding which amounted to what we call civilised
education. Now, Sir, we occasionally forget it, The world
occasionally forgets it, but what we all are looking for is a
civilised life, civilised relations between the nations of the
world, civilised relations between the people who live in our
own country, and a civilised life is a life lived in a human
society. That's the first thing that we must remember. Not
lived in the abstract but lived in a human society. And therefore
if education is devoted to the task, as I believe it is of
equipping us for civilised life, then I venture to say that
education is at all times best considered when achieved in a
social setting, and when I say social setting, I am not referrimg
to that word " social" with a capital ' IS" that you read in the
gossip columns. A social setting, a setting among human beings.
I was just saying to myself, " Suppose a man couldn't
go to a university, suppose he couldn't go and live in a residential
college, suppose he lived out somewhere in the middle of a
desert but was able in some mysterious fashion to have a correspondence
course of instruction this would be a good thing, of
course but it wouldn't be that kind of education which you and
I in this place, and many others understand and benefit from.
It would be a lonely kind of inst; ruction; it would be an
instruction from books from documents not an instruction
gathered in the general rough and tumble and shoulder-rubbing
of a student community.
I remember when I first set up a committee not the
famous Murray Committee but an earlier one to give me a little
advice on what grants migh-,' be made for the lime being to the
universities, one member of the Committee, when I spoke to him
about residential colleges, said, " Oh, no, no. Residential
colleges?" I remember his words I made a note of it yesterdayhe
said, " Residential colleges are luxuries for those who can
afford them", and I have never had the same opinion of that man
since. I thought what an utterly uncivilised conception that was
that colleges are luxuries for those who can afford them, and I
remember with some satisfaction the reply I made to him, I said,
" This Committee will make a recommendation for residential
colleges or the Committee will be a luxury that I can't afford."
( Laughter) And so it came about and from there on it has grown
in strength as time has gone on.
But just to come back to theibbing of shoulders, to
the community significance of education. I don't know how people
can fail to understand it. One man goes to the university and
he is determined as I was in my time to be a lawyer, using
that term in its broadest sense, but determined at any rate to
become a lawyer. There is another man who is in the same college
o? ro oidn ththine g satmhea t gtrhoueyp wshhoo uilsd dgeette rtmo inkendow toe acbhec oomteh ear dqoucitteo r. e arVlye. ry
Laughter) If contact at the university between medical students
and law studants had been made compulsory, I don't think I could
have cross-examined so many medical men so successfully in my
later life, There is something to learn each way.
You know, I regret to tell you this but in my time at
the university if somebody were pointed out who had a rather
melancholy cast of countenance, you would be told that he was / 3
" 3
a 1theolog" ( Laughter). Yes. All I can say is that I think
nothing better could be imagined -than for theological students
and arrant sinners to be thrown together at a university-
( Laughter) ( Applause) the sinners being helped by contact with
something a little better at the right time and the " theolog"
being immeasurably improved by making the first of all great
discoveries, that he is a sinner as well as the others. ( Laughter)
This is the kind of contact that goes on. It was magnificently
described, if you will allow me to say so in his presence by the
President-General in a sermon he preached this morning, one
fragment only of which I venture to steal with acknowledgment,
That was when he said that really in this business of acquiring
knowledge what we all need to do is every now and then to look
over the other mants shoulder and see the problem with the
other man's eyes. Now you see how profoundly true this is,
It is so easy to become narrow-minded; it is so easy to become
dogmatic; it's so easy to say, " Well, I am so objective in my
approach to this matter that I forget that I am being completely
subjective. It is only my mind, my view, my general atmosphere,
my general background that concern me in studying that particular
problem," What we must learn to do and the world needs it
des erately badly is to understand something about the other
man s mind and the other man's approach and how things look to
him from his angle viewed from which the problem, the subject,
may look an entirely different shape. This is I think,
tremendously important and this is why residen~ ial colleges are
tremendously important because they get away from the idea that
a man having attended his lecture, having gone to the library and
checked up his references, having done some reading of his own,
then disappears, so to speak, into outer darkness until the next
appearance in a lecture. For men to be living in a com~ munity,
a community of good minds some better than others of course
but of good minds, a community in which brains can be anticipated
from any particular quarter, in which they can discuss things
with each other in which the man who is doing humanities of
one kind or another gets to know something about the science
student and what goes on in his mind and what is even more
important, the sicence student gets to know something about the
humanities. This is tremendously important.
It is this subdivision of learning into separate
compartments which produces so much danger for the world
the nuclear scientist so bemjused by the brilliance of his own,
discoveries that he will shrug his shoulders and say, " Well, what
happens to all this is, of course, not my business". In a sense,
I suppose, it isn't, but I imagine that he would be no worse as
a scientist and so much better as a citizen if all the time he
had the contemplation of the impact of these things on humanity
and how people thought about them, In other words If
scientists and the humanists really got together and rubbed off
a little of their gold on to each other, this would be, I am
sure, a very good thing for the world, and it is best achieved
where people live together and play together and argue together.
They have a very good chance of coming out not only admiirable
graduated students, in a variety of disciplines but vastly
improved human beings designed to live in a civilised society
because they will broaden their miinds they will know enough
about what other people do and what o~ her people think to
preserve them from the excesses of the utterly narrow intellectual
specialist, And so, Sir, believing those things, as you know
I do, I have great pleasure in being here and, woollen robes or
no woollen robes, I go through with my task and I declare this
place open.