Peter Carr
About 25 years ago I made a friendship with an American logistics consultant while he was visiting New Zealand.
It resulted in our visiting him and staying at his home in San Jose, California. On the way we made the obligatory two-night stop at the crassness of Las Vegas and then dropped gently into San Jose airport. It’s about an hour’s drive south of San Francisco.
My friend met his wife more than 60 years before when they were students at Stanford University – a magnificent campus created from a 3,240ha stock farm belonging to Leland Stanford. He had become amazingly rich by supplying provisions to the gold mining 49’ers and later – when he was a major investor in the creation of the Central Pacific Railroad which (with the Union Pacific) joined the two main coasts of the USA – causing California to boom as a result.
Stanford Memorial Church seen through arches passage. Photo: Siva Seshappan, Pexels.com.
Stanford – proper title Leland Stanford Junior University – was named after the magnate’s young son who sadly died of typhoid. It is a huge campus very much dedicated to academia – not for them the sports-strength prowess prevalent at the eastern Ivy League colleges.
My friend and his wife had always resided close to Stanford and were hugely involved with the continuance of a highly successful alumni. In fact, when we toured the campus, we were honoured to visit a magnificent new art gallery. The creation of it was causing the university elders grief as they dared to name it after the benefactor (named Anderson) and feared they would upset the Stanford family.
Stanford rests on enormous financial reserves thanks, in the main, to alumni-related sponsorship or donations. A sad reflection is the lack of such largess in this country where our universities are struggling with the ability to keep staff – or courses – due to lack of funding.
The ridiculous ‘free’ first year over recent years (instead of dangling the carrot for the final year) brought to the universities a plethora of young people who squandered away a year with no intention of continuing.
Meanwhile we are also watching the antics (and politics) of the possible creation of a third medical school at Waikato. This, a university in the heartland of agriculture, which scrapped their mainstream agricultural courses for reasons that were never fully explained. Now they want to become famous for a seat of medical learning aimed at producing second-level medical doctors to patch up the growing chasm apparent in the GP arena. And where will the money come from?
Coincidental to this is a notable number of very bright young Year 13 students who yearn to become medical doctors and are held out of the opportunity by the crazy government rule that keeps places for some of lesser academic talent due to their ethnic background. Now I am not in any way trying to start a war here but if a university has the teaching ability to produce the brightest and best in a nation – where doctors are walking away from their country – what are we left with?
Stanford University at sunset. Photo: Zetong Li , Pexels.,com
