It is odd that this year there will be again among us a new generation at Victoria College, which is due to regard the Executive with the solemnity usual to the consideration of what is pictured as a grave constitutional element. Remote, sapient, far-sighted; conducting the responsible affairs of a University College with intelligence, initiative, and statesman-like comprehension. It is, too ironic, that these same Freshers, at the end of the College year, will rub their eyes and fail to recognise in insignificant, unimaginative, if systematic dullards, the once splendid seeming being of the first term.

Juvenile Bureaucracy.

For, with the passing of a whole University year will have gone the hampering insubstantial idealisms which accompany the average public school product to the threshold of a University. A perception quickened by the loss of the narrowing conservatisms implied in the Public School tradition will see, not up-to-date body but an administration, which while efficient within the well-defined groove which it has fashioned for its own convenience, is too smug, too obtuse, too querulous, to make it anything more than a form of machinery which requires its motivation from outside and is incapable of independent and original action.

Comparisons, it is said, are odious, and this will be appreciated only too well by the members of our Executive when mention is made of the executive bodies of Otago, Canterbury, and Auckland Universities. For in each of the above instances the administrative body is a positive one, and the measure of effectiveness of each can be gauged by the relative position of the Universities concerned in their respective cities. Surely in a University the logical method through which it affects its environment is through its Executive, and in this one tremendous factor the Victoria College body is and has been for some time, unquestionably a negative one. In what regard has this College been held at various times, by the citizens. As a night-school, as an irresponsible, flagrantly mischievous institution, as an assembly of students having neither decency nor stability merit nor desirability.

"Emasculate Deference."

Largely the blame for the persistence of such has been attributable to the obsequious and emasculate deference of the Executive to every whim and nuance of public sentiment which has had the luck to find expression.

Commercial thoroughness and systematic industry we do not deny them: but imagination and perspective we could not, however, exhaustive our appreciation, lay to their charge.

It is a ludicrous anomaly that the general opinion of Victoria College on all matters which affect it closely: whether they be social or otherwise, should not find sympathetic response in the body which is elected to centralise that opinion, and diffuse it through the social fabric of which it should be a compelling element.

It was pitiable indeed to see their aggressively eager countenances at the Freshers welcome.

On such occasions each year they find their own level, and reinvest themselves with the import which older generations have already discovered to be specious.

—Bayard.