With the amount of heavy artillery that has been brought to bear over the Maori Education Fund, it's surprising that no-one has thought of asking Vic's Maori students what they think.

"With one or two exceptions," a Maori student at Weir told me, "all the Maoris at Vic. are against the idea of the M.E.F."

At Weir the discussion is made more interesting by the Maoris in the House. The M.E.F., In their opinion is "premature." "only scratching the surface" and "frankly, of no benefit at all." One student felt that the money, little as it was, would end up by only going to Maoris with a family name. The students to worry about were the ordinary ones who were neither exceptionally bright nor of the Maori aristocracy.

Another said that any mass-movement such as this had to begin at the top and there were just not enough leaders with University educations. The trouble was, he asserted, that when one or two people such as Peter Buck and Apirana Ngata were the only Maoris whom people considered able to meet Europeans on their own grounds, this distorted the picture. "The intellectual leadership, if you can call it that," he said, "must be divided among more Varsity graduates." The first step, he thought, was the one between secondary school and Varsity.

Maori students also commented on the existence of "native" schools in the backblocks, and the real hurdle that this was to Maoris when they finally mingled in "European" city society. "I didn't even learn to speak English until I was nine" one told me. But opinion definitely divided on how much of Maori culture should be preserved, although everybody agrees that the commercialising of it in the Rotorua manner was not a good thing.