Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), Friday 16 July 1954, page 6


UNIVERSITIES'

ROLE IN

FREE WORLD

V -1

The Vice-ChanceHor of the University of Leeds, Sir Charles Morris, said yester-day that the peoples of the world looked to universities to play a tremendous part in preserving freedom and dispassionate study.

He said a solution had to be found to the intellectual and spiritual battle or fer-ment going on now, if civili-sation and human happiness

were to survive.

Sir Charles was speaking at a ceremony in the Great Hall of Sydney University after the Chancellor, Sir Charles Bick-erton Blackburn, had con-ferred on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters.

Sir Charles Morris, who reached Sydney on Wednes-day by air, is visiting Aus-tralia at the invitation of the

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Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee, and will deliver addresses to university groups in capital cities and in Armi-

dale.

He is the chairman of the Home Universities' Committee of the United Kingdom, and an authority on university government and administra-tion, and on adult education.

Sir Charles said: "1 think that peoples and Governments have an instinctive feeling that, in our time, there is an intellectual and spiritual battle -perhaps I ought to use a more neutral word and say 'ferment'-going on, to which we must find a solution if civilisation and human happi-ness are to survive.

FEAR OF FUTURE

"The advance of the techni-cal spirit, the triumphs of technical skills in a world in which people perhaps expect too much of techniques, has brought us to a state when many of the young are in danger of feeling some fcai -1 won't say despair-about the future.

"Everyone knows that the ancient wisdom, the know-ledge about human nature which comes from the great studies which universities have always conducted, from history, from theology, from philosophy, from the study of the classics and the ancient world-those things must be married with the things which we are so good at discovering to-day, or else we perish.

"That is particularly empha-sised at the present time by the predicament in which free-dom, or our view in the West-ern world of what freedom is, finds itself.

"Freedom is a .precious thing necessary to our survival and if freedom is. lost, all is

lost."_