Peter Pan.

An apology to freshers.

I feel that some apology is needed, for the "Advice to freshers" tendered by R.L.M. in your last issue, and that this outburst should not be allowed to pass unchallenged as representative of the attitude of the mature students towards freshers.

With the material of R.L.M's article I do not quarrel - every man has a right to formulate and express his opinion; but with the manner of its presentation the position is different.

It is a great pity that a man, once - presumably - a fresher himself, holding the beliefs and assumptions with which he charges freshers, should have arrived towards the end of his university career at such a state of acedemic patronisation and smug self-satisfaction.

We are glad to learn that he has triumphed over the bourgeois influences of his youth, found the magic co-ordinating principle of Marxism; we wish we had witnessed the blinding revelation moment in which he discovered sunsets, passion, God and Keats and Mr. Trevor Lane.

But we are sorry to recognise that R.L.M. has not also learned the lesson of tolerance. His contemptuous dissection of the fresher mind was hardly in the best possible taste, and furthermore could only be detrimental to the first impressions of V.U.C. gained by many freshers. It is to be hoped that in future he will cease making "Salient" his Hyde Park, and release his repressions somewhere else; remember that he, too, was once fisher, and that he has attained his present philosophy without the unnecessary and unwanted interference of another.

Certainly, freshers, think! stocktake! be awake to your privileges and the responsibility which is yours to exercise them widely and fully, for your own benefit and that of society. But for heaven's sake strive also to acquire a little of the old- fashioned virtues - tolerance, understanding, humility.

frank.