Doors Wide Open

If I held the views M.D. does, and I wanted to form a religious club. I would form it outside the College. I would not be sufficiently conceited to think that any exclusive coterie of which I were a member was entitled to be subsidised by the student body.

The arguments M.D. adduces to the contrary are so infantile that I wonder what the level of university entrance can be falling to. His fears that an "open doors" policy might lead to people who are ruled by "prejudice and passion" entering may be set at rest by the fact that a "closed doors" policy will let in nobody except "people who are ruled by prejudice and passion." if a few came in "for destructive purposes reflect student opinion? It reflects the only" it would all add to the spice of life, and help impress on the prejudiced and impassioned chosen that they might, after all be wrong.

M.D.'s example about Communists in the Watersiders' Union in 1951 is the sheerest fiction, garnered no doubt from the pages of "Freedom." For the record. I would point out that as far as the waterfront was concerned, the 1951 dispute was a lock-out, not a strike; the union's cause was as clearly just as that of the Hungarian workers in their recent general strike; and there was only one Communist of any consequence in a leading position in the union anywhere in the country—well overshadowed by a host of Roman Catholics, Labour Party moderates. Freemasons. Irish nationalists, and so forth.

V.U.C. clubs have a tradition of lively debate and clash of opinion of which M.D. seems to be unaware. Heretics' clubs, free discussions clubs, student Christian unions, charter societies, and the rest have always flourished in the heat of argument—and by not being prepared to accept that background, the Christian Science outfit brands itself as alien to the College and foredooms itself to either an early death or a rarified living death us an incestuous mutual bum-tickling circle.

The constitutional amendment carried at the A.G.M. licensing clubs to lock their doors must be recommitted and thrown out at the earliest opportunity.

R. McD.