Enter the new fascists
)'" LETTERS
From: G. Singh, J. H. Huizinga, Graham Hallett, John Biggs-Davison, MP, Lord Morpeth, Peter Stein, Peter Jay, Robert Non, Robin Bou.sfield, Teor Davis, Denis Mark Smith.
Sir : In your last number (25 October) there were three very good items and therefore three very good reasons for recommending it to those interested in academic and university life. (I) The editorial 'Enter the new fascists'—a very bold, precise and realistic assessment of what lies behind the students' demonstrations; (2) Mr MacGregor's article which, among other things, offers an admirably lucid and diagnostically accurate account of the causes and pseudo- causes of the students' revolt; (3) Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper's suggestion (in 'Who gets the chair?'), that 'we could even, now, elect a Cambridge man, like Dr Lea vis.' If this happened, that is, if Dr Leavis got elected to the Chair of Poetry at Oxford—I fail to see Pro- fessor Trevor-Roper's point in suggesting 'a Cambridge man, like Dr Leavis' as if at Cam- bridge there were a dozen or half a dozen people like. Dr Leavis !—it would confer on the Chair in question a distinction and a seriousness that it has seldom known ever since Arnold vacated it—the distinction and seriousness implicit in a life-long concern for literary criticism, resulting in a first-rate and influential body of criticism.
But the chief reason for writing this letter is to support your editorial thesis that some of the university teachers' direct participation in, or indirect support or encouragement of the students' demonstrations, marches, protests, etc, is a significant, if not the only cause of much of the trouble between the students and the university authorities, and to show agreement with your linking such teachers with what you call the 'intellectuals without intellect' type. This, of course, raises a number of questions, the portentous nature and import of, if not actually the answers to which ought to have been, one imagines, pretty obvious. Are teachers holding full-time jobs, and therefore supposed to be engaged in full-time research, teaching and other academic occupations justified in giving their time, energy and effort to what is not merely unrelated to their profession, but which is even detrimental to it. or detrimental to the normal working of the institution which employs them?
And even if some teachers might be able to manage to combine the two activities or to keep them in watertight compartments, how can they possibly expect the students to be able to do so, especially when, apart from their relative inexperience and immaturity, their time at the university is obviously so limited and their capacity to use and organise that time in an academically fruitful way is even more so? Moreover, since not all teachers, nor even a great majority of them—fortunately—take part in the demonstrations, are not those who do creating a confused picture in the student's mind as to the sort of help, cooperation and guidance he may expect from his teachers? Would not perhaps the more unsubtle and more easily gullible type of student be encouraged to feel that the teachers who choose to side with him and join him in his demonstrations are really more helpful to him than those who don't? Is this, though a more popular, also a more useful form ultimately of helping the student in his own intellectual, academic and educational interest and pursuits or even a more desirable form of the teacher-student contact? How would the politically and sociologically orient- ated teacher relate his new sense of purpose with that which has always been considered to be the aim and ideal of a university teacher since the days of Chaucer's 'Clerk at Oxenford' =And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche' —a role in which many—most?—teachers still recognise themselves and their raison d'etre?
G. Singh Reader-in-charge, Dept. of Italian, The Queen's University of Belfast
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