| Militancy in Oxford has owed
its support to the claim that a moderate approach is deflected by entrenched
conservatism. For if moderation and reasonable progress were seen not to
exclude one another, extremism would be clearly visible as the isolated fringe
element it essentially is. But in fact there have been instances of
stagnation and complacency in Oxford administration: and if the authorities
are to be reinvested with fairmindedness in the eyes of the undergraduate
there may be need of the occasional prod. This is ammunition for the militant: only in the brief hush after he has screamed, he will point out, can rational progress be made. Soon the cloying chatter closes in and he must scream again. A system which depends for its effectiveness on such periodical recharging must surely be rotten. If moderation only works where militancy has forced a passage, the militant is understandably put out when the moderate castigates him for the boorishness of his approach. This is a reason, in the cause of the improvement of relations between senior and junior members, for dons to be steadfast in accessibility and sympathy. But senior rigidity is matched by junior rashness and arrogance: the undergraduate’s continued standing as a reasonable being depends on his realising the limitations on his own insight and the presence of that quality in others. Proud and inflexible extremism, besides being misguided, only antagonises and thus has its aims frustrated at the start. At all levels of the University moderates have a positive duty to make it clear both that they are in the majority and that they have the right approach. No one with the well-being of Oxford at heart can afford to embrace extremism at either end of the continuum. Change or lack of change for their own sakes are blind applications of principles which are not designed to be universally applied; the decision to preserve or to alter the status quo must be the outcome of ad hoc discussion. Champions of the unique authority and enlightenment of dons should bear in mind that members of an institution which fosters a hypercritical attitude in academic matters cannot be expected to knuckle unquestioningly under in the face of the given system – even if this were the right thing to do; apostles of ultra-democracy or anarchy, that it is lunacy to discard like soiled undergarments those features of Oxford which are the fruit of hundreds of years of progressive development, for they give the University the stability upon which is founded its responsible standing. And the loss of that standing would entail the loss of the academic freedom which attaches to it. To this extent militancy sets its face against the ideal under whose banner it marches. |