Trinity College Newsletter, vol 1 no 3, June 1968

TRINITY ~/ ews/e1~er COLLEGE A PUBLICATION OF TRINITY COLLEGE WITHIN THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

JUNE, 1968

No. 3

APPEAL IN FINAL STAGE

-150,000.00 135,000.00.

TARGET APPROACHED

120,000.00 105,000.00

The intensive phase of the College Appeal is over and we have raised, by much hard work and the generosity of Trinity men and friends, the fine sum of $121,832.

Thank you all for your support. We can be proud of this result but not satisfied since we set out to raise $150,000.

90,000.00 75,000 DO 60,000.00 45,000.00

The Follow-On Committee, under the able chairmanship of Mr. R. K. Todd, now has the task, not only of ensuring that all the money promised is received during the next four years, but that the deficiency is made up by further gifts.

30,000.00 15,000.00 00,000.00

TOTAL AS AT

I therefore urge those who have not already done so to make a commitment on the form included in this newsletter and ensure that Trinity will not falter in

28/5/68

the future due to the lack of material support from those of us who have benefited from it in the past.

Many when contributing to the Appeal have stated that they would increase their gifts if circumstances changed, and I would ask you all to think of the College again should your personal affairs prosper.

On behalf of the Campaign Committee I have pleasure in thanking all who have helped the Appeal in so many ways. With their continued interest and goodwill I am confident that the target will be achieved.

N. H. TURNBULL, Appeal Chairman.

The Bishop of the Northern Territory Father Ken Mason, sometime Assistant Chaplain, sometime Dean, sometime Acting Warden, was consecrated as Bishop of the Northern Territory by the Primate of Australia in St. John's Cathedral, Brisbane, on 24th February. Trinity men rallied around him, amongst them the President (Archbishop Woods, who preached the sermon), the Warden, the Chaplain (who attended him) and the Senior Student (Peter Hughes).

St. John's, all creamy stone shot with violet, is perhaps the loveliest Anglican Cathedral in Australia, even in its unfinished state and despite the inherent improbability of medieval French Gothic in a tropical climate.

The raised Choir, Sanctuary and Ambulatory formed the theatre for rich processions, solemn apostolic invocations and the Holy Eucharist itself. Our photograph shows the new Bishop after his Enthronement in Darwin a week later—radiant, as the papers would say. We have already had several visits from him, once overnight in April and then for a few days early in May. Episcopacy seems to be agreeing with him.

THE LEEPER LIBRARY We began to put together a Library in our earliest days, with Bishop Perry himself as its chief promoter. Alexander Leeper backed it enthusiastically upon his appointment, and successive Wardens, Councils and benefactors have lent it their support. Today it numbers about 20,000 volumes. Books and periodicals are being added to it to the limits of the money available and in accordance with an acquisitions policy carefully worked out by a representative Library Committee.

The principal aim of the Library is to provide a useful working collection in

the main fields of undergraduate study represented in the College. There are research collections in Australiana (mainly by gift and bequest) and Theology. The Library is served by a full-time professional Librarian (Miss Mary Rusden), with student library assistants. Three years ago it was splendidly rehoused in the southern end of Leeper, thanks to a very generous bequest for that purpose by the late Dr. A. E. South.

The Leeper Library today is well worth a visit. Miss Rusden would be delighted to show you the treasures in the Muni(Continued on page 4)

Page 2

NEWSLETTER

June, 1968

THE WARDENS LEAVE ABROAD I shortly hope to present to the College Council a Report on my Term's leave abroad late last year. In this Newsletter I should just like to say something of my visits to the three Colleges from which we took our origin—Trinity and St. John's in Cambridge, and Trinity College, Dublin.

Trinity College, Cambridge, was Bishop Perry's College, both as an undergraduate and a Fellow, and as our principal founder he named us for it. Masters of Trinity remember him warmly, because he gave to the Lodge a service of plate which had been presented to him on leaving Melbourne. Cambridge was my base for most of my time away, and Trinity gave me dining rights. With eight hundred and fifty students it is the largest College in Cambridge. Personally I think this a doubtful honour: great size may mean great wealth but it brings problems of coherence, communication, administration and academic and pastoral oversight which smaller institutions can solve more readily and effectually. Trinity's buildings and grounds are splendid and beautifully cared for; the Wren Library on the river is one of Cambridge's treasures, and the Great Court on a misty autumnal moonlight night is one of the finest sights this world affords. The Prince of Wales and 1 arrived at the College almost simultaneously. After a day or two of excitement he slipped quietly into Cambridge life and out of the headlines. One saw him here and there; a nice boy. The present Master of Trinity is "Rab" Butler —Lord Butler of Saffron Walden. Somewhat incongruously for such an "establishment" figure (the Mastership is a Crown appointment), he is also Chancellor of the most radical of the new English foundations, the University of Essex. Professor Kitson Clark, a wellknown Trinity history don, remembered here in Melbourne for his visit some years ago, was especially kind to me, as he was to A. G. L. Shaw, who also linked himself to Trinity in that Michaelmas term. When on form in the Combination Room after dinner, Kitson Clark is an outrageous and marvellous conversationalist, with a prodigious taste for claret and snuff. In late November, both Professor Shaw and I attended the Feast of the Audit. The scrubbed oak tables were dressed with superb Georgian silver, and we dined on such delicacies as turtle soup, roast pheasant, iced soufflé Rothschild and baked apples with comfits, washed down with champagne. A gallery choir sang seventeenth century madrigals, including the apt audit air, "Late in my

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rash accounting". Through a small window opened for the occasion in the panelling, the ladies looked down on the feasting, and the gentlemen joined them afterwards in the great Elizabethan drawing rooms of the Master's Lodge.

Two of our founders were of St. John's College Cambridge: Professor Wilson and Mr. Justice Stephen. John's is second only to Trinity in size, with over seven hundred students at present, and the two Colleges are traditional rivals. The most beautiful thing in John's is the long Elizabethan Gallery or Combination Room, where I spent one pleasant evening drinking port and coffee by candlelight and comparing Oxford to Cambridge. But I predict that in a hundred years visitors will come equally to see the College's new Cripps Building, which I regard as the finest example of modern collegiate building I have seen anywhere; it shows what you can do when someone gives you £ 1 million.

Trinity College, Dublin. No need to remind Trinity men that this was Alexander Leeper's alma mater, but perhaps it is just as well to mention that it was also the university of the remaining two of our founders, Dean McArtney and Sir William Stawell, and of the first Acting Principal, Dr. Torrance. Save for a modest and unobtrusive additional building for the library the core of T.C.D. must be much as it was when these men knew it. Indeed, the same could be said of Dublin itself, so strong is the impress of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries upon it. I was not prepared for the elegance of the T.C.D., for

the dignified assembly of buildings around spacious squares, receding one behind the other from College Green. The ViceProvost took me to lunch, I met staff and students and was shown over the principal buildings. If there is a sense in which the College seems to stand a little apart from the life of the modern I rish Republic, it is only one of the many endearing contradictions of an exasperatingly lovable country, where English money still circulates freely, Gaelic is dying out for the second (and last?) time, and nobody asks for your passport.

In a way, I felt my visit to T.C.D. to be my most sentimental pilgrimage on the College's behalf, for here so many of the forces which directed our early life were shaped and formed.

The Annual Dinner of the Union of the Fleur de Lys will be held in the College Dining Hall on Friday, 7 June 1968 at 6.15 p.m.

Former residents of the College are invited to attend. They should contact the Secretary of the Union, Mr. James Court, 430 Little Collins Street, Melbourne 3000 by 4 June. The usual cost of the dinner is $2.50.

Membership of the Union of the Fleur de Lys is open to former members of the College who should contact the Secretary, Mr. James Court, at 430 Little Collins Street, Melbourne 3000.

The annual membership fee is $1, life membership is $16.80.

GROUNDS IN THE GROUNDS Over the last long vacation a new building arose on the Tin Alley boundary between the tennis courts and the Deanery. It is wooden, but we have resisted the temptation to christen it the W**d*n W*ng. To shorten a long story, the College agreed for an initial period of three years to allow the University to move the building in question to its present position, primarily to house what is now called the "Alice Paton Pre-School Centre", for which we have provided a

separate entrance off Tin Alley. The College has incurred no costs in the matter.

In return for making the site available, we have the exclusive use of three rooms at one end of the building and joint use of a larger central room. This is of very great advantage to us, as we have been able to set up the three smaller rooms as tutorial rooms.

Temporarily, therefore, the problem of tutorial room space has become less acute.

Of course we have grander plans for that area in the long run, as the Appeal. literature disclosed, but for the time being the "Kindergarten" is a real asset to us.

We believe that the building, which once formed part of the Architecture School, was designed by Roy Grounds.

We like to think, in our more euphoric moments, that it was his trial run for the Cultural Centre.

June, 1968

NEWSLETTER

Page 3

THE TUTORIAL SYSTEM en for The Editors have asked for a brief "background" note on the tutorial system and the function of resident tutors.

It would be possible to meet their request by saying simply that resident tutors are the essential distinguishing characteristic of a university college. But I shall try to set out in a perfectly general way what seems to me to be the fundamental propositions from which discussion should proceed. Any resemblance between the ideal beings here presented and a particular living person is a figment of the reader's imagination.

A university exists primarily for the sake of ideas—to teach men to think rather than to train them in the practical application of ideas. Similarly, a university college, although it provides food (which is by definition inedible), beds (which are frequently unmade) and some degree of creature comfort, is first and foremost an academic institution whose highest aim, rarely achieved, is the stimulation of original and creative scholarship.

The teaching function of a college is its most important attribute. Education, especially at university level, must be thoroughly personal if it is to be worth anything. The best results can be obtained only when an educational community is small enough to ensure a high degree of personal contact between teacher and learner. In contemporary Australia, however, education at all levels is characteristically both a mass process and a specialised training. It is moreover, quite certain that these characteristics will become increasingly dominant as the problem of numbers becomes more urgent.

In any group there is a point beyond which personal contacts become dangerously attenuated. Up to that point it is fairly simple to know something about each individual—and to know some of them very well.indeed—to avoid the formation of cliques, factions and splintergroups, and to keep administrative procedures few and simple. In a college, in

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my judgement, the point of cleavage is round about 125 undergraduates. Ten years ago only one or two university colleges in Australia had reached that figure and it was fashionable to ask whether colleges could justify maintaining, much less extending, their rudimentary tutorial systems in the face of the increasing demands of formal teaching programmes in the universities. Today, when many colleges are about to pass the 200 mark (as many first-year university classes have already done) it is generally agreed that such growth can be justified only if contact and traditions can be maintained by an adequate framework (about 10% of the collegiate body) of senior members and resident tutors.

In this situation, the most important function of a tutor is to know students and what they are doing, or not doing.

This does not involve either paternalism or regimentation. But it does involve having enough knowledge and experience to take part usefully in discussion of at least some individuals in the college and to offer a judgement about their academic and other prospects. It would, of course, have long been a relatively simple matter to reduce dramatically the College list of failures each year by the removal of those gentlemen who received an adverse tutors' report at the end of the First Term. That this has seldom been done merely demonstrates the excessive optimism with which all who take even the humblest part in the educational process must be endowed.

Even the most experienced tutor retains an abiding confidence in the efficacy of his particular pastoral gift for encouraging and persuading even the most obvious misfit to greater efforts and higher things.

The second function of a tutor is to teach, both in formal classes and by being available for discussion and consultation.

Informal contact to deal with particular problems can frequently be more effective than a formal tutorial. Indeed it is worth recalling that the original—and still the best—form of the tutorial comprises one tutor and one student; and that in this

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combination it is the student who is expected to make the major contributions.

Finally, and least important, the tutor has a right to restrain stupid, anti-social or unreasonable behaviour by disciplinary action. The developing adolescent moving from school to university and finding himself expected to make decisions and accept responsibility for them, frequently becomes confused between the concept of a voluntary association—which the College is—and that of a free society—which it is not. In the same way, he sometimes seems to believe that the encouragement given to freedom of thought and the expression of ideas somehow also involves untrammelled and unlimited self-expression on the emotional and physical plane.

In brief, tútors are the cement in the corporate structure of a college, the keepers of intellectual standards; and, like the gardener in "Richard lI", they "bind up the dangling apricocks and root away the noisome weeds that suck the soil's fertility from wholesome flowers".

Those who are interested in pursuing this matter on an informed basis might begin by reading the report of the subcommittee of the British University Grants Committee on Halls of Residence, especially the section entitled "The Warden and Senior Common Room", remembering that what is there presented is a desirable minimum standard in a hall of residence, which is a lower form of life than a college. The general view of the sub-committee is summed up thus: "When the students have been selected and come together, they are still just the raw material of a (college) . It requires the efforts of some generations of students under the influence of an able warden and senior common room to produce a responsible society, spirited and intelligent, with a tradition of corporate life.

On the warden and senior common room rests the greatest burden, for they are not only the responsible authority, but also have to carry on the continuing tradition which distinguishes a (college) from a dormitory."

Itait/1111W:

11

This year the College offers tutorials in 111 University subjects. Academic areas include Agricultural Science, Architecture, Arts, Commerce, Dental Science, Engineering, Law, Medicine, Science and Veterinary Science. There has been a systematic increase in the number and scope of science-based tutorial subjects offered.

Timmitilli ' of rill& students to . Ai

®bituar, SIR REGINALD LEEPER We note with regret the death in London in February of Sir Reginald ("Rex") Leeper, a son of the first Warden. Rex Leeper left Melbourne in 1913, and was never to return. He had a most distinguished career in the British Diplomatic Service, and was Ambassador to Greece and to Argentina. A very warm appreciation of him appears in Harold Macmillan's "The Blast of War". Dr. Sharwood called on him at his home only a few months before his death, and was able to tell him of the College he had not seen since his boyhood but remembered vividly and with much affection.

NEWSLETTER

Page 4

June, 1968

SOMETHING IN THE WOODSHED Not necessarily nasty, of course, although memories can jolt us a little uncomfortably at times. We are thinking of that old tin trunk in the corner, jammed with Trinity relics of a by-gone age. If you don't want them — or your wife doesn't want them — we might. Photographs, play-bills, programmes for dances,

College magazines and more ephemeral publications, presentation pewter, crested china — anything and everything Trinitarian from Dr. Torrance's day onwards will add usefully to the College archival collections. We want to document College life as fully as we can for the cen-

tenary celebrations so soon to be upon us.

If need be, we'll send round a van. Don't agonise over the sorting-out process— leave that to us. Send it all to the Warden, or ring his Secretary (34 1001) .

And we'll file your reminiscences, too, if you would like to write them.

... bìnner... even at

trinity College.

Melbourne university.

irida,.

290, :WY, 1904.

In hOnOUr of IRr. ,i. C. V. Behan,

irst Rbodcs Scbolar i

for Victoria.

THE LEEPER. LIBRARY

FROM R. K. TODD TO YOU

(Continued from page 1)

ments Room. She would be even more delighted to receive gifts of books. We welcome anything: if we don't want a book, we can give it to someone who does. Our Australiana and "Trinitiana" collections are particularly dependent upon gifts. There is a group known as "The Friends of the Leeper Library"; once again, Miss Rusden would be glad to tell you about it.

After some years of negotiation, we arranged last year to house the diocesan Mollison Library in the Lower Bishops' Lecture Room. This is a separate collection from Leeper, separately administered, but it is open to all Trinity students and complements the Leeper collections in a number of important areas, especially in Theology.

At its meeting on 15 May, the College Council will have been asked to decide upon the building project to be undertaken during next long vacation.

The Trinity Appeal has entered its final stages and its running is now in the hands of the College. We should have preferred by now to be concerned only with seeing to the collection of what has been promised, but quite a number of men have not yet been asked personally for donations. This is regrettable because of the generosity that has been displayed by those who have been approached. The average individual five-year donation stands at $200, which I understand is high for an Appeal of this character and is a real reflection of how highly the College is regarded.

In the light of these facts, I do not believe that the target of $150,000 was too high or that it is unattainable. The total at present stands at $121,832, but

My gift to the TRINITY COLLEGE APPEAL will be YEARLY $

APPEAL STILL OPEN

for five years being a

TOTAL of $

on the understanding

that I may vary the amount if necessary.

Signature

Date

Mailing address First contribution in the month(s) of commencing 196

Please send reminders.

about 400 have still to be approached or have not yet replied.

I am sorry that everyone has not been seen personally but I am hopeful that those who have not will feel able to respond to the Appeal and an Appeal card is printed below which can be used for the purpose of making your donation.

I am anxious that the work of the Appeal, insofar as it involves the seeking of promises in support of it, should be brought to a speedy conclusion. Your answer therefore, by return of the card to the Appeal Office by the end of the month of May (before the Fleur de Lys Dinner) would be much appreciated.

R. K. TODD, Chairman of the Follow-on Committee.

Cheques should be made payable to the Trinity College Appeal.

The Follow-on Committee has taken over responsibility for the Appeal and is continuing approaches where possible.

If by any chance you have not yet been contacted, either personally or by mail, or if you have mislaid your gift card, please use this form to make your gift. You may also use it if you wish to make an additional gift to the College.

Cut out this form and send it to the Warden.