What is Congress?

Congress is all things to all men. It's certainly something different in the way of a holiday. A paradise for the swot-sickened and lecture-drugged. A haven from the drudgery of the year's specialisation in your particular subject (s) where, for one splendid week, you can skim the intellectual cream of the country with no more effort than lying in the sun.

Freed from the restraining bonds of swot, timetables, exams, conventions, landladies, fond parents, etcetera, you can explore all sorts of problems, initiate or take part in an infinite number of discussions ranging from sex to politics, from politics to religion, from religion to grog, from grog to?—your guess is as good as mine.

Someone, somewhere, once called Congress the "University of New Zealand come to life". This is an apt description. At Congress you get all your types, your masochists, misogynists, melancholies, mystics, morons, myopics, monophysites, monotheists, martyrs, maniacs, even your misanthropes! You may even meet some of those Rarae Aves, the agricultural student.

During the year your activities are somewhat circumscribed by the exigencies of your course. Even the noble Arts student—the backbone of the university—is becoming to an increasing degree the victim of specialisation. Congress breaks down barriers and gives us a wider perspective; it promotes the free exchange of ideas; it challenges the individual to define and to defend; it arouses the student from his bourgeois stultifying torpor of mind; it provides the material to think about and—that rare thing—the opportunity to do so.