Young generation
Sir: It is interesting that Dr Rhodes Boyson's article in Spectator (March 22) should appear next to Mr O'Sullivan's. The one dealt with student unions, the' other, in point, with Young Conservatives.
The same vicious, unthinking, obsessively moderate young conservatives that Mr O'Sullivan saw growling at Mrs Thatcher in Harrogate, are the men who too often control University Conservative Associations, effectively preventing them from fighting against student unions. It is they who stand as serious candidates in students' union elections, and seek to win control of them, when any true conservative would really want only to destroy and discredit these instruments of subversion.
In Oxford, as though it were not enough to see the Conservative Association feebly trying to 'participate,' we must also tolerate the vacillating and impolitic antics of the University authorities. The Vice-Chancellor and Proctors do not, need to conciliate the left, which, in common with all students throughout the world, wields no actual power, but they persistently surrender to the demands of the left. First they re-organise the disciplinary structure, next they recognise a students' union, then they admit in principle the need for 'central social facilities.'
Only when University authorities and Conservatives everywhere finally realise that the sole function of a students' union is as a training ground for subversives, and that Universities are best governed by their ancient paternalist constitutions, not by students to the immediate short term. interest of students, will there be any hope of destroying the NUS and its branches.
, C. N. Jordan President, the Oxford University Monday Club, University College, Oxford
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