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The Spike: or, Victoria University College Review, June 1921

Editorial

Editorial

Devil hammering nail throuhg mortarboard

There are some noises which are pleasant to the human ear, such as music on the waters, the voice of a beloved one, or a tinkling dinner-bell; but there are others which are abominations, such as rusty engines, foghorns, and certain undergrads. at public meetings.

We know the "old tradition that youth should be a romp." We heartily believe in it. We think it unnatural for youth to go about silent and sober-minded. That young men and maidens should overflow with the joy of living, with vivid interest in their surroundings, with health and happiness, has been from time immemorial the way of nature and the way of life—it is our inheritance from the Golden Age.

When man is first born into the world, he usually heralds his entry with noise. To some infants-alas, we think many of our undergraduates were of this type—life is one long noise, punctuated fortunately with sleep. The noise is mostly meaningless and seldom musical. And so, when the unfledged student comes to College, he has made a habit of thinking himself the big noise. We rather like this habit in its proper place. We frankly enjoy ourselves in Capping Processions and at the Haeremai Club. But at public meetings—

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Perhaps we have been brought up differently from other students. We were always taught that, it was wrong when someone had come to speak at a meeting and many others had come to listen—that it was wrong for us to prevent his speaking and their listening. That we should be so selfish and self-opiniated is too awful to contemplate. When we are at the theatre or visiting a friend, and somebody comes forward to play or sing, etiquette forbids our interrupting him or talking and shouting during his performance. And when our hostess chats with us, we have more decency than to monopolise the conversation and to drown her every attempt to speak. Yet somehow there is a class of undergraduates whose conduct is not so regulated. They are a minority, certainly—a close inspection at any meeting will show them to be a small minority; but they have one of the characteristics of smallness. Like crying children, they are heard unceasingly, while their noise is even more meaningless and even less musical than that of babes and sucklings.

We should not mind if the noise were intelligent. Universities exist for the cultivation of intelligence, and manifestations of it at public meetings would be at least encouraging. Besides, a person who comes to hear a speaker or musician does not mind being entertained equally well by someone else. Yet—the statement cannot be refuted—the interjections during the last few years have not betrayed the slightest modicum of intelligence. We believe that this is due to the fact that students with any intelligence have more self-respect than to interrupt. There has been nothing more than a confused babble of tongues—student shouting to his neighbour with an entire disregard for all his other neighbours, interspersed at times with a senseless and incoherent concerted movement.

It will not be out of place to instance the chief sufferer from this kind of self-opiniation—the Inter-University Debate. The lack of etiquette here is even less excusable than at other times. The interjector is harassing the men of other colleges, men who are speaking not for themselves, but for their colleges. It is unfair tactics. We cannot appreciate any moral difference between obstructing the speakers at the Debate and obstructing (say) the runners at the sports or the heavy-weights at the boxing. Nevertheless, at Wellington, last year, the judges were forced to stop the Debate; at Dunedin, the year before, there was a pandemonium ending in a free fight; and this year, at Christchurch, both judges and newspapers deplored their inability to hear the speakers.

We have likened these undesirables to crying children and to foghorns; but a foghorn blowing every thirty seconds through the night is like the harps of angels when compared with the "skyrockets" indulged in at even lesser intervals for two solid hours in Christchurch. The lack of originality among the Obstructors can be judged from this; they had no other ideas amongst them. And the persistent babbling and uproar can only be likened to the foghorns of a whole fleet gone wrong in their mechanism and resisting all efforts to stop them.

There are some who try to defend these uproar-makers: they say it has been a tradition since the Tournament began. We fail to see that this is a defence, even if it were true. That there is an page 11 incipient tradition, we grant you: our object is to show its worthlessness. But in the early University Debates, any interjections attempted to be witty. Their authors listened to the speeches, watching for some faux pas, some lapsus lingua' which would let them lash their whips of scorn. How different is the modern method, which refuses to hear the speakers and which howls down their every endeavour to make themselves articulate!

We believe that students should recognise that the opinion not only of the general public, but also of the majority of their own number, is against them in this matter. In the Christchurch "Stair," last Easter, it was said: "If this be the intellect of the country, Heaven keep me from the slums." In our own pages is a student's opinion: "Such individuals can be imagined playing marbles on the floor of Westminster Abbey." It was a similar feeling that prompted the adoption of a motion by the Debating Society—a motion that every Students' Association should require its-representatives to sign a guarantee not to interfere with the debaters in any way which will prevent their doing their best for their colleges, and also that the home Students' Association should give a similar guarantee on behalf of all its students. This scheme may seem visionary and useless, but it recognises that we can only hope for improvement when each individual student realises the difference between good fun and fair play on the one hand and larrikinism, bad taste, and hooliganism on the other.

We do not demand self-respect from all our student body, but we demand from every undergraduate a respect for the good name of his college; and perhaps those who are deaf to a personal appeal will think twice before they smirch the reputation of their college. We hold it to be an undoubted fact that this phase of student life receives no sympathy from the outside public; that for this reason we find it difficult to get public men to address us or to judge at our debates; and that the Press and the individual citizen refuse on this ground any appeal for University objects. The man who acts the larrikin at University gatherings injures not only himself, not only his fellow-students, who are for the greater part of a different stamp of manhood, but also, and inevitably, his college. He who does this can find no justification.