Take a Pride in Salient and Take Politics Out of its Administration:

There must be a profound reorientation towards Salient on the part of students at Victoria. Guidelines for a physical reorganisation have been laid down in Auckland University's establishment of a Craccum Administration Board. This is a wholly administrative body —it hires and fires, it allocates sums within a budget which has already been mapped out in broad terms, it discusses in depth precisely the kind of problems that this letter has page 13 sought to deal with. This year, the Craccum Administration Board was given $8000 by the Auckland Executive (Salient, has, by comparison, approximately $5600-a dollar for every student) and charged with the task of producing a weekly Craccum. In that, the Administration Board has succeeded, whatever the failings of Craccum as a whole, and it has succeeded for two reasons: (i) the Board is an administrative body, and (ii) the climate of student opinion at Auckland is very pro-Craccum (and has been for several years, regardless of the paper's politics-President Mike Law gives copies away to Rotary meetings!)

I'd be happiest if there were no SRC members on the Publications Board. The only valid argument for their inclusion is the training of new Publications Officers. The contribution they've made has been even worse than my initial and fairly uncharitable estimation of its unlikely value. As far as I am aware, none of them has ever reported back to the SRC, so we're not even benefitting from some public relations. For all the impact the SRC appointees have made, the Board is just as 'unrepresentative' as it ever was. The only SRC appointee who has shown any real imagination and understanding in discussions hardly ever attends meetings. Then there is the subcommittee itself: discussion of reversion to weekly publication of Salient has been crippled by the fact that the members of the subcommittee cannot even be persuaded to gather enough energy to meet. And two members of the subcommittee are SRC appointees elected on the basis of a shrill promise for a weekly Salient. Now the Executive appointee on the Board is no longer a member of the Executive—as was the clear intent of the new constitutional provision—but Simon Arnold, whose contribution promises to be as completely negative as it has been in the past.

This is chaos. You have no right to expect that a good Salient will emerge from it in 1971. One may emerge in spite of this administrative cock-up. The appointment of an Editor is not per se a political matter. Allocations of funds within a budget for salaries, materials, expenses and so on are not per se political problems. Weekly publication is not per se a political question. Politics can be brought into these questions, but for the health of the newspaper it must not be allowed to enter into discussions.

We have already seen three instances this year of gross political interference in Salient: the first was the rabble-rousing debate over weekly publication—never has so little been said by so few to so many about nothing etc. etc. ("if the Dominion can be published daily, why can't Salient be published weekly?" asked one moron); the second was the successful move to introduce politics into the appointment of the Editor of Salient-a move which, more than any other single step, seriously threatens the editorial independence of the paper; and the third was a move to suspend payment of my salary until weekly publication was resumed or, when that gambit failed, to cut my salary in half. (I, presumably, was expected to assume a total and personal responsibility for a decision by the Publications Board to suspend weekly publication). I am often accused of placing too much emphasis on personalities—and I admit that I do tend to feel that it is hypocritical to conceal the fact that one detests someone if one does in fact detest him—but the members of the subcommittee may understand my point of view a little better if they recall that Arnold and Logan were together involved in the first two attacks and Arnold, at least, was prominent in the third. I don't know whether Arnold and Logan feel that they have the interests of Salient at heart or whether they simply feel the same way about me as I do about them. If the former is the case, I would suggest that they have done Salient no good in the positions they have adopted.

All of which leads me to this point: just as some changes (administrative ones, principally) can be made, so some changes can be led. Here I look to the individual members of the subcommittee, to the Publications Board as a whole, to the Executive and to other students who care about Salient to start espousing a feeling of pride in the campus newspaper. Salient is a good newspaper. I don't think one has to be a friend of mine to see that. It is worthy of support. And one doesn't have to agree with all of the points in this letter—or any of them, I suppose-to reach the conclusion that a good Salient is a vital factor in this community. If one agrees with this, and I hope that your subcommittee members can prop themselves into wakefulness long enough to concede the point, then I'd suggest that the questions outlined earlier need to be discussed seriously and dealt with now. It's getting nearer and nearer to the time when students won't be talking about 'Harcourt's Salient' any more-it'll be somebody else's (in that strange sense of 'possession' which appears to mean something to everybody but the Editor of Salient). And it'll then become clear, perhaps, that what was at issue was not 'Harcourt's Salient', just Salient. Then someone will have to make some decisions in a hurry. They might as well be made now and they might as well be fully informed.

I'd very much appreciate an opportunity to discuss the question of weekly publication of Salient with the members of the subcommittee.