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Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Student's Newspaper. Volume 31, Number 10 May 28 1968

Editorials

Editorials

May 28, 1968

Opinions expressed in Salient are not necessarily those of VUWSA.

Students shaping and dominating politics in the area our University's Geography Department labels the Third World are not anything new. What is new is students playing the same role with similar effect in the Western world where tame political scientists have so long assured us, affluence has made radicalism irrelevant. The combination of students and trade unions in France, which currently imperils the existence of the de Gaulle regime, and the protest by German students against constant incitements to right-wing violence by the Springer press which has led to the assassination of student leader Rudi Deutschke, the student movements for civil rights and academic freedom in the United States all look to student militancy in the world's poorest countries for inspiration.

While it would be very foolish to decry student concern with politics—and certain members of our executive and certain editorials in our local press have not hesitated to do just this—students will not succeed in achieving their objectives if they ritually copy the Third World's politically fashionable guerallaism and its ultra-simplistic theories of imperialim. Adoption of such fashions, however, does express the extent of the alienation of students from the communities which environ them. Student militancy in the West is simply a recognition by students that they share common interests which should find expression in politics—the birth of student unionism a hundred years after the birth of unionism among industrial workers. A new unionism is always exceptionally politically conscious; after the initial burst of enthusiasm which accompanies the sense of the union as an innovation, this consciousness tends to be dissipated, if the history of industrial unionism is any guide. What we are seeing now in France, Germany and the United States is the first euphoric phase of a general acceptance by students that they are unionised, and this is leading to what is at times an over-simplistic and at other times a very realistic solidarity with other allies of students in society, particularly those other unionists in the traditional trade unions.

It may seem a far cry from the heroic phase of student unionism in Europe and North America to our very unheroic negotiations for student power with the administration of this University. One doubts whether many of the students involved in these negotiations have any sense of identity with the students defying the police on barricades all over Europe. This, too, is student unionism—the setting up of grievance committees, and machinery for collective bargaining—and although it is not exciting it is a kind of activity we might well have copied from our local trade unions rather earlier than we have. It reminds us though that union officials can as easily be conservative and bureaucratic as they can be charismatic. We need not only a voice in our University but a' voice in our society, and if events overseas prompt ever so slight a reflection of our French or German colleagues' concern for their society, it may make the union to which we all belong as alive as it ought to be. NZUSA is after all affiliated to an international student organisation which has urged student unions to act in a vanguard role in their societies. The history of the early Labour movement exists not just for us to copy. It is still to be made. The extension of unionism to groups such as students in the past often far removed from the traditional Labour movement shows that Labour-orientated efforts to change society have a future beyond the dreams of Harry Holland or Fintan Patrick Walsh.