SIR,—Mr. George Gardiner's letter, in which he believed that he
was correcting some of Mr. James MacGibbon's statements about the social and political attitudes of Oxford undergraduates, was so absurdly inadequate and so patently illiberal that it would be little short of disastrous if his was to be the last voice on these matters. Secure in his prema- turely wizened superiority, Mr. Gardiner believes that participation in campaigns against '14-bombs, the Monarchy, the BBC and Freemasonry' is 'first-class evidence of student immaturity.' Yet he manages also to think, in a. wonderfully bogus phrase, that 'we have come to recognise the complexity of political issues.' Now he does not define a 'campaign,' or it might have occurred to him that there is a difference —a mere matter of life and death—between discus- sion and criticism of the Monarchy or of the BBC on the one hand, and their movement for Nuclear Disarmament on the other. For the mature Mr. Gardiner, all this social/political activity is irrespon- sible, inspired by nothing except 'Righteous Indigna- tion.' What, I wonder, does Mr. Gardiner do with his vote; perhaps he refrains from using it, on the grounds of his own unworthiness? But gibes apart, his lofty and pationising scepticism gives him no warrant to speak for the many undergraduates who regard the question of the hydrogen bomb, for instance, as seriously as full membership in a political community entitles and requires them to do. Isis faced up to these questions pugnaciously and responsibly under Dennis Potter's forthright and intelligent editorship; whatever else the magazine i was, it was never boring. True, it did not indulge in university gossip and scandals,• but left that task, by which we may laugh at ourselves, to a magazine called Parson's Pleabre, for which there is and always was a market in Oxford. Further, the issue at stake in the Isis editorial controversy was the freedom of. the unr'...lrgradua:::: press, which was tem- porarily endangered by the ae,-ion of an extra- University firm • of printers in refusing to accept, against well-established tradition, the outgoing editor's nominee.
Finally, Mr. Gardiner's letter is infected with this damnable heresy that Anger plus Youth equals Irre- sponsibility, and that it is a sine qua non of the under- graduate that he or she is immature, mad and wrong- headed—a kind of superior juvenile delinquent. This heresy is a terrifying condemnation of those who sub- scribe to it; has Mr. Gardiner forgotten the students of Budapest? During the Suez crisis, he was perhaps
so busy getting his own 'role in the political process into perspective' that he was unaware of the effect of that episode on his fellow-undergraduates, for many of whom it was the beginning of committed political activity.—Yours faithfully,
ANGUS MACINTYRE
Hertford College, Oxford
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