Fox goes home

By Tony Haas

Fullbright student Jonathan Fox left Victoria last Monday faced with the possibility of being called up for Vietnam war service in the United States military.

Fox has been working on his political science MA thesis for the last 16 months. His subject: State Aid to the Arts in New Zealand.

At Victoria he has been a prominent writer, dry humorist, satirist and actor.

For Salient he has written as an American viewing New Zealanders, and as a perceptive student viewing his contemporaries in their various stances in the Library.

As a sportsman he has represented Victoria in basketball.

For the drama club, he played Moliere. For tv, he has participated in a programme on New Zealand women.

As a parting gesture he comments on the arts on a point of view programme, and once his affairs have settled down he will be writing back to New Zealand, popularising aspects of his research.

But now, he is faced with call-up, after seven deferrals; faced with the prospect of fighting the war about which he has such mixed feelings. He says he is "spiritually uneasy" about the war. "My time has come." he puts it.

His is the dilemma New Zealand students have thankfully so far been spared, but as one who has been prominently among us during the period when so much soul searching about the justice and the wisdom of the war in Vietnam has been held, he presents vividly the meaning of a dubious war.