Free Thinking

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 460, 16 April 1948, Page 5

Free Thinking

T is almost as darigerous to-day to call a man a free thinker as to call him a free liver or a free lover. Words are no longer what they used to be, and even our freedoms are changing before our eyes. If the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University had announced the other day that the Prague party was off beeause living and loving in its 600-year-old University were no longer free, he would have been regarded as a bad old man. But he did in facet say that in different words. He said that Oxford would not join in the celebrations beeate the University of Prague was now under political control-was told what truths it must love and from what knowledge it must turn away its eyes. The Oxford view was that communion of minds was impossible if truth had any price at all. He could of course have added that this is the view of British universities everywhere, but instead of saying that he added something a little more dramatic. He said that two-thirds of the cost. of maintaining Oxford came from the Government, and that the day the Government presumed to say what should be taught or who should teach it Oxford (he hoped) would "fling their money back in their faces." We have probably forgotten in New Zealand that what has happened this month in the case of Prague happened 12 years ago in the case of Heidelberg; but we had better never forst that it could happen nearer ome. It is at once the good fortune and the daily peril of the University of New Zealand that it is maintained more and ,more by the State without (so far) coming further under State control. If it can’t be said that the Government has never interfered at all, it has not interfered often or very successfully, and has-not done even that without arousing deep public uneasiness. But the danger is always there, and the only defence against it is to keep it constantly before our minds.