The Socialist Club has announced the birth of a New Zealand Student Labour Federation embracing left wing groups from three of our University Colleges. This is a vital challenge to the traditional Ivory tower of the esoteric erudite. The very existence of such a body means that increasing numbers of students are not content with absorbing swags of knowledge and not relating it to life or reality at all; but that they consider practical application of their learning, not for £sd, but for the amelloration of society, one of their chief duties. That, of course, is the reason why capitalism keeps launching assaults on academic freedom: independent thinking in connection with a little serious study can lead the honest student only to conclusions highly dangerous to the status quo.

In the end, fear of the searchlight of scientific inquiry being turned on to society leads reaction to crush scientific inquiry altogether. John Strachey, in his early days, explained that "it is necessary for the Fascists, whose object it is to perpetuate our more and more irrational capitalist system, to assail in every conceivable way the supremacy of human reason." (International Literature, No. 4, 1934). A great nation like the Germans, with an unequalled tradition of scientific and academic achievement, could be plunged into the slough of unreason by Fascism, and her education sent back to a worse than mediaeval condition, dominated by the mythology of racialism: let that be a lesson to the students of the world.

Our universities must be kept independent, as strongholds of progress in the resistance to the still living menace of Fascism.

No Half Measures

The intellectual individualist, attempting to maintain his "integrity" in a world of two amassing forces, is in an impossible position. Either he must openly prostitute himself to reaction, or he must sink his self-centred infantility in the common yearnings of the people.

Whither the Individualist

Stephen Spender, once wrote: "Today the individualist withers, isolated and futile in his protected social niche. And if we try altogether to undo the development of democracy by going back to a time without political freedom, we get Fascism, a violent assertion of fake individuality by men of average or less than average understanding. To go forward, the masses must be given not merely political but also economic freedom, so that they may produce their own free individualists and their own culture. The future of individualism lies in the classless society. For this reason, the social revolution is as urgent a problem for the individualist as it is for the worker; he must break down his artificial barriers and join the workers in building up a new civilization." (Forward from Liberalism, p. 71.)

The fact that Spender, like so many other Bloomsbury "individualists," ended up by just woffling out of the Socialist movement as he had woffled into it, in no way alters the truth of his somewhat idealized argument. The man of science and learning must be rid of the fetters that shackle him to moneyed interests; he must give his services to the people. This is the only condition for his being able freely to conduct his researches for the general welfare of mankind.

The sooner the university yogis wake up to this fact the better. Strengthened Student Labour organization can be a very valuable alarm clock.