New Zealand students are far too prone to merge themselves entirely into the New Zealand community, which already suffers from being one large undifferentiated mass.

This is the opinion of Mr. N. W. Kingsbury, who spoke recently in the Memorial Theatre on "Students in Society." Mr. Kingsbury spent three years as the chief organiser of the activities undertaken by COSEC, the permanent secretariat of the International Student Conference, which has its headquarters in the Netherlands. He is now Assistant Registrar (Academic) at VUW.

In the course of his work with COSEC, Kingsbury visited national unions of students in many parts of the world. He now considers that students in New Zealand influence public opinion far less than students in most other countries. This is mainly because New Zealand students do not feel any special responsibility as students to their society. They do not feel they are being fitted for any special role of leadership. They do not take action on things in society which they feel should be changed. This is not to say that students in New Zealand should be organising political revolutions or stoning embassies. This sort of revolution is not what is needed in New Zealand. But New Zealand does need strong voices to make our community more critical—in town planning in mental health, in our attitudes to the Pacific (he commended V.U.W.S.A.'s work in promoting awareness of the problems of the Cook Islands), in our international politics, in our race relations, in our architecture. Students are almost silent on national issues.

He contrasted this with many of the newly emergent countries where students played important roles in struggles for national independence or against dictatorial regimes. He illustrated this by discussing situations in Angola. Algeria, Spain, Paraguay, Hungary, East Germany, the Dominican Republic, Iraq, Turkey, and Korea, where students believed so strongly in their ideals that they were prepared to sacrifice their lives for them.

European and North American national unions of students also seemed much more conscious of the responsibility of students to their societies than was the case in New Zealand and Australia. It is expected that the universities will produce leaders of the community, not just in narrow specialised fields, but leaders of thought, of public taste, critics of public bodies, innovators and reformers, upholders of freedom—people who are not afraid to slick their necks out. As well as aiming at a high level of student welfare, national unions in North America and Europe interested themselves in the situation of students in other countries. They are more conscious than we are of the problems in Angola, South Africa, and Paraguay. Kingsbury described how the Norwegian National Union of Students pressed their Foreign Ministry to take up the cause of Southwest Africa in the United Nations.