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Salient: An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 12, No. 1, February 23rd, 1949.

"Students behaving as if their minds were closed . . ."

"Students behaving as if their minds were closed . . ."

What does Mr. Sullivan mean by a "closed mind?" Does he mean, for instance, that I, a Socialist, who have spent years in reaching certain "leftist" convictions will as the result of a few hours' discussion, be prepared to abandon standpoints of which I have long-been convinced, merely because they are challenged in argument? And does he mean that he, as a Christian, will similarly be prepared to abandon tenets he has for years regarded as essential to his faith?

I am sure he does not. Why, then, does he expect communists to do so? To put it mildly, the mind of a communist stubbornly adhering to Marxism is no more closed than that of a clergyman cleaving devoutly to the Apostle's Creed. The communists at the Congress were quite prepared to have their philosophy run the gauntlet of criticism, and in my opinion they by no means had things all their own way, even if a forward-looking group of young people concerned, in a rapidly changing age, for the future, did register a swing away from an orthodoxy which the eighty-year-old Mr. Shaw termed a "huge mass of obsolescence."