Ivory Tower

It is surprising the number who come to the University with the sole idea of a job when they graduate. Their real aim should be to gain higher knowledge, to seek the truth and eventually to serve the community. As Fichte said: 'No one has the right to labour only for his own enjoyment, for it is only by the labour of society that he has been placed in a position to acquire that Culture.

Capitalist insecurity forces us to think of some job but without making the University an ivory tower, or a recluse of the idle rich, and realising that we still must think largely vocationally, we should not allow it to be our major incentive.

A mass of knowledge, too is useless, unless it has the driving force of a philosophy of life. It is significant therefore, that in the college, Christians and Communists are the most active. In a socialist society, when unemployment and its associated evils are eliminated, youth will have a clearer, outlook and aim in life. These words of Lenin reveal the socialist approach: 'Man's dearest possession is life, and since it is given to him to live but once, he must so live as to feel no torturing regrets for years without purpose: so live as not to be seared with the shame of a cowardly and trivial past; so live, that dying, he can say: "All my life and all my strength were given to the finest cause in the world—the liberation of mankind."