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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University College, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 21, No. 11. September 17, 1958
[Introduction]
The R.I.C. report on student conditions in Hungary consists of 44 pages of tightly documented material. The original team set up to make the report—a Sudanese, an Indonesian and a Dane—applied for visas to visit Hungary, but had no success. In the end, most of the investigation was done in Austria, Switzerland and London, which means that the report must, of necessity, be unsatisfactory in many respects. It was adopted without opposition by the 7th International Student Congress at Nigeria last September.
"A period of intensive academic work in the universities. L Scholars dismissed by the conservative governments and the short-lived Nazi regime were re-appointed to their posts. A few brilliant communist ideologists such as George Lukacs were also appointed. The universities now gave special facilities for study to students of the working and peasant classes, and courses of instruction aimed at preparing them for university work were arranged. The universities themselves were taking steps to provide higher education for the worker and peasant students."
From 1948 on began a policy of encroachment on the universities by the state, now in the sole effective hands of the Communist Party. Statutes were enacted placing on the universities an obligation to "provide well-trained students faithful to our People's Republic with a thorough Marxist-Leninist knowledge", which in practice meant yes-men of the regime. "Marxism Leninism", National Defence, and Russian were made compulsory subjects.
The statutory requirement that the children of workers and peasants be given precedence in admission and advancement over students with other social backgrounds, while perhaps not reprehensible in itself in consideration of Hungary's agonizing social history, opened the way to political jobbery in the universities. The report cites examples of this which not only led to gross personal injustice but worked even against the interests of the state itself by producing a high proportion of graduates of mediocre calibre. It was accompanied by a system of police surveillance on the leisure activities of students for the purpose of checking on their political reliability. The report includes copies of some of the material on personal files compiled under this system.
Representative and independent student organizations were replaced entirely by the Student Section of the Party's junior auxiliary, "The Union of Working Youth", which was committed by its constitution to inculcate "unshakeable faith in the Soviet Union".
Results were so bad that even the Minister of Education was stating publicly by September, 1956, (after "de-Stalinization" had begun) that "There must be more independence for the universities. . . . The present excessively restrictive system must definitely be relaxed."
But by this time, the remedy was out of the authorities' hands. Some relaxation had led to groups within the official organizations, such as the Petefi Club (a forum sponsored by the Union of Working Youth as a place where intellectuals could let off steam), and the Writers' Union, formulating demands for reform. It was around these demands that the demonstrations of 23 October, 1956, were organized, and it was police action against the demonstrators that provoked the uprising of the following weeks which unseated the Government and was put down in the end only by Soviet military force.