CORRESPONDENCE IN NEWSPAPERS

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25085, 17 January 1947, Page 6

CORRESPONDENCE IN NEWSPAPERS

ANONYMOUS LETTERS 1 ~ $ COMMENT BY UNIVERSITY CHANCELLOR Whether a sense of omniprescence of the State operated to any extent as a repressive influence in New Zealand was a point mentioned by the Chancellor of the University of New Zealand (Mr Justice Smith) in his address to the Senate yesterday when he said that overseas visitors had commented to him on the number of letters appearing in newspapers in this country which were not signed by the author’s name. He had noticed himself. said Mr Justice Smith, the difference between the numbers of unsigned letters in New Zealand newspapers and the almost invariably signed letters in the American magazine “Time.”

“Time” had such a large circulation that a letter published in it would probably, in the long run, make the author just as well known in his neighbourhood as a letter to his local newspaper. Figures supplied by the Reference Department of the General Assembly Library concerning 6 the letters, during the month of October for the last three years, to the daily newspapers in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin (including those letters which were published and those which were only acknowledged) showed that in 1944 268 were signed and 728 not signed, in 1945 302 were signed and 913 not signed, and in 1946 (excluding a third newspaper which was published for the first time in Wellington in 1946) 377 were signed and 1030 not signed. In the letters to the third newspaper for October, 1946, 49 letters were signed and 86 not signed. Anonymity in public expression might be a mark of modesty, said Mr Justice Smith. It might just be furi. It might only be a habit. It might be a sign of inferiority or of fear. “An excess of it would indicate, I think, that the ordinary citizen who is concerned with matters of public interest lacked some of the moral quality which he ought to have,” Mr Justice Smith said. “If cultural freedoms were being hampered, there might be an absence of open .support for better things. Interpretation of the situation is difficult, but if the last possibility exists, the university should be the more resolved to maintain the importance of cultural freedom and the need for the creation of checks and balances by the expanding State to aecure it"