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Salient: Victoria University of Wellington Students' Newspaper. Volume 31 Number 19 August 6, 1968

Protest

Protest

Sir—I congratulate you on printing Professor I. D. I Campbell's article on student demonstrations and political involvement This is something that is important to all students and Prof. Campbell has obviously thought deeply about the subject with an aim to be much more than flippant or controversial which most political feature writers for Salient, concerned with things that are unimportant and dubiously motivated have not. His views are worth respect, because of this.

Yet however much I admire Prof. Campbell for thinking seriously about student affairs and even more for bothering to see them printed in Salient, I cannot admire his inability, caught as he is between sympathy for the student protester's cause and the ideals of the liberal academic to say anything straightforwardly or with enthusiasm.

In this he represents a class; the class of the liberal-minded parents of today's students whose beliefs in socialism, nationalism and pacifism have become ambivalent with personal success. Once they were students who sent their untried idealistic moral support ten thousand miles, from this green and pleasant land to the Spanish battle-lines or to the Oxford debating hall where it was resolved that England and the King would remain undefended. They are now professors, doctors, lawyers, scientists or businessmen who may still donate to Amnesty International or read the New Statesman but who with their wives, children, jobs and social position can only act so that the status quo is not upset and will only advise others to do the same.

Faced, with Negro riots in America or with the violence of the anti-Vietnam demonstrators, their answer is a comforting generalisation, a full page ad. and a march to parliament.

Prof. Campbell says "I have advocated involvement over a wide range but with great restraint in method". Fine sure, but what are you to do if you are a Negro in the US, feeling the heat coming in, seeing the self-satisfied cop-cars cruising about your Negro streets, facing workless weeks, condescension, hate, embarrassment and evasive unwillingness to do anything about anything, or if you are an American boy faced with call-up to a war you believe to be stupid, immoral and hypocritical, or even if you are a New Zealand citizen faced with a similar government and a similar alternative government who are inefficient to boot?

What are you to do? Sign another petition? Write a satirical poem? Organise another committee? March again? No, the answer can oly lie in action outside the up-till-now accepted code of protesting behaviour, indeed outside the sort of society that bred the problems we have to deal with.

I am etc.,

Simon During.