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The Spike
Or
Victoria University College Review
1933
Editorial

It was only last year that the affairs of Auckland University College were the subject of outside intervention, and the President of the College produced his Memorable Memorandum. Spike made editorial comment at the time on the serious significance of those events, which were tantamount to disciplinary measures to restrict the public utterances of Professors and Lecturers.

We had hoped that such an attack on the life of the University would have been impossible at Victoria, or that if it had occurred, it would have been met with prompt, definite and drastic action. But in this year of grace 1933, we live to see our hopes disappointed. And to our even greater amazement and regret, we find that in our case it is no outside power that has intervened, but the organisations of the College itself, from the Students' Association to the College Council, that have failed in their highest responsibilities to the spirit of University.

The actions of the Free Discussions Club were the starting point, and from the day that Student first appeared, inch by inch and yard by yard we have seen the University recede from the position of strong and noble independence which it had ever before endeavoured to maintain.

First we speak of the Students' Association, acting to begin with through its Executive, and later at General Meeting. An independent paper of radical views, and of no literary ability or pretensions whatever, was promulgated by a College club which has always consisted mainly of students forming the minority elements in the University. After two issues had appeared, the Executive banned further publication.

The grounds for this action are recorded in a document which we cannot but feel is the most puerile piece of correspondence that an Executive has yet put to paper. The letter (written, unhappily enough, on the 13th of the month) made three allegations in support of the ban. First, there was already one periodical in the University and it was superfluous to publish another. Secondly there was a definite tendency on the part of the committee page 4 to publish only articles of which they were in favour, and that this was definitely contrary to the aims of the Free Discussions Club. Thirdly, no effort appeared to have been made to ascertain that the articles were free from libel and misstatements, and if any trouble arose, the Association as a whole would have to bear the responsibility. "My Executive," wrote the secretary, "is not prepared to allow you the opportunity of bringing opprobrium on the University."

At the risk of having it said (in the ever apt words of The Post) that our editorial comments are "neither witty nor brightly original," we again review this action by the Executive of the Students' Association, and the implications of its astonishing reply. In the first place, the Executive in effect forbids the publication of any student paper other than the official organs of the Association. On this ground, no club may ever circulate a paper among its members: there is already one in the College. The second reason plainly forbids the publication of a paper devoted to minority views. Apparently it is now improper to express views not entertained by the majority unless they are to be completely nullified by immediate rebuttal. True, no political bias should have attached to the editorial policy of a publication from an independent club so catholic in its interests and agnostic in its viewpoint; and we would commend any effort of the Executive to keep a Club to the activities reasonably comprised in the terms of its constitution, bur an Executive ultimatum is surely a new method for discussing matters of club policy. The third charge, after giving a questionable interpretation of the law of libel, presents the most ill-considered utterance of the entire letter: "The Executive is not prepared to allow you the opportunity of bringing opprobrium on the University."

To be sure, it was following "an old Executive custom" that the Executive appeared in these robes of sancity as the preserver of the University's virtue. This Evangel of High Public Esteem has long been the favourite office of our elected representatives and their henchmen. One remembers, for instance, that in 1924 it was urged that support be given to the visiting Oxford Debaters only on condition that no arguments of a Bolshevistic or Socialistic nature were made use of. It is the same story, and in the same role the Executive "puts forth all its efforts to make the name of Victoria College a symbol of all that is noble and true and dignified in life, and to raise the tone of the College which, in spite of their single-minded efforts, has degenerated."

This defence of accepted beliefs as the criterion of University activities indicates the typically Fascist intolerance with which the Executive is determined to keep Victoria the revered, respected and Perfectly Reputable place it is. The virtue of other methods of maintaining the integrity of the College has no more occurred to the present Executive than to its predecessor for whom an Editor of Spike once wrote: "There is a constitutional way of reforming the tone of the College. That is to join the offending Clubs, and by strength of personality, by process of clear thought, by overmastering weight of argument, to bear down opposition." Doubtless this task has little to commend it when methods of repression are so much more convenient.

With the subsequent issue of Student in defiance of the letter of the Executive we have no sympathy whatever, and we do not in any way intend to suggest that the authority of the Executive may be flouted in such a manner. It was largely on this ground, we believe, that the disaffiliation of the Club was later approved by a majority at the Annual General Meeting of the Association.

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But the matter did not rest here, for the Professorial Board proceeded to uphold the action of the Students' Association. In the first place we were assured that the authority of the Executive had to be upheld, and the Board endorsed the disaffiliation of the Cub for disregarding the ban. Having done this much, however, members of the Board proceeded to make it clear, at meetings of the Board and Council, that far from merely upholding the Executive's authority, they were in fact influenced in their decision by their opinions of the magazine itself. The Chairman of the Board is reported as saying that "he did not think that the magazine was a desirable publication, and one of his reasons was that it was not of a literary quality that would do credit to the College."

We deeply regret that the Professorial Board did not see fit to specify any other reasons than the "shocking editing," for we do not seriously imagine that literary disapproval is a justification for so drastic a move; and we have wondered how the other reasons could be reconciled with the views which we had always accredited to the Board. Only last December the University Teachers' Association, to which members of the Board belong, subscribed its name to a letter which declared: "The University has no concern to maintain the social, economic or religious status quo. On the contrary, it ought to be the home of relentless questioning."We find it hard to construe the actions of the Board as a valiant defence of this conception of a University. On the contrary we are more likely to ponder rather rue-fully over the pointed reminder, in a letter to the Students' Association, that matter published in College magazines is accepted as an expression of College opinion.

From the Professorial Board, the matter passed (after tarrying awhile in the correspondence columns of the press) to the College Council, which eventually decided to set up a Committee of Inquiry. At the outset we readily admit the right and duty of the University staff to defend itself from slanders from whatever quarter they may come, and we fully recognise that the Committee may have enabled that defence more readily to be made. But there is another aspect of the question, an equally important aspect, which the Council and the Professorial Board alike ignored. The innuendoes to which exception was taken do not merely constitute a charge against the impartialiry and uprightness of professors and lecturers. The attack is equally directed against the right of freedom of opinion within the University, for it proceeds on the assumption that members of the University staff may at any moment be called to the bar of public opinion to defend their teachings whenever they are in advance of the conventional standards of the common herd. By joining issue with the critics on their own ground, the staff and the Council have protected themselves from one onslaught only by leaving the University completely exposed to another. For when the staff are to be examined, or charges are to be received respecting the tendency of their teachings, almost immediately they assume the position of having to assert: "We deny that we have ever intentionally said anything subversive of loyalty to the British Empire, our present democracy, our economic system, our religious faith or our current code of morality." The Professorial Board or the Council should surely have declared, in terms that would have been remembered to history, that the University is and must be absolutely independent of accepted standards and creeds, and accountable to no section of Church or Stare for giving instruction in facts and theories inconsistent with those creeds.

The University, as guardian of a great tradition, has abandoned its honoured post, and taking its eyes from the far light on which once it gazed, turns now with happy confidence to that will-o'-the-wisp, public opinion. Proudly it has declared its orthodoxy: "You will not find a better staff of teachers within the British Empire than at Victoria College. If anything they are conservative in their political outlook."