NAZI HOSTILITY

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 101, 1 May 1941, Page 8

NAZI HOSTILITY

TO SEATS OF LEARNING

WARNING TO NEW ZEALAND

COULD HAPPEN HERE

"The truth is that Nazism and the University spirit are irrecon- . cilably opposed, and wherever the Nazis have gone the first institutions to be closed down have been the universities, and the first sections of the people to receive the unwelcome attention of the Gestapo had been the students and intellectuals," said Mr. W. P. Rollings during his address at the Victoria University College capping ceremony in the Town Hall last night. Mr. Rollings had previously been referring to the attacks which apparently, were now the fashion to make on institutions of learning in New Zealand, even to the extent of questioning their loyalty. "Let those who would criticise universities in the free countries ponder well the reasons for this unenviable distinction of the student classes of being the first to come under the Nazi axe," said Mr. Rollings. "We in this country are by no means intolerant of criticism; on the contrary we welcome it as helpful to progress. "But I invite those who would make unfounded attacks upon institutions of higher learning to look at what has happened and is happening in Europe, and ask themselves whether they are i not doing Hitler's work for him, and allowing themselves to become the tools and utensils of Fascism. j IF HITLER WON. "Can anyone doubt that what has! happened in Czecho-Slovakia -would i happen here if the Nazis were to/overrun New Zealand? Can anyone doubt that our system of higher education, which has been laboriously built up during nearly 100 years on the basis of freedom and progress, would be completely emasculated, if not utterly destroyed, if Hitler has his way? It is evident that in this war the universities are fighting for the freedom to exist, and that accordingly the primary task of those who believe in higher \ education is to defeat Hitler and crush Nazism." He would have liked to give definite information as to the extent to which Victoria College was participating in the war but it was usually not till after a war was over that reliable figures could be compiled. He had no doubt whatever that at the end it would be found that the records for this war would more than bear comparison with those of the last, when 662 ex-students served with the armed forces, 150 dying. INTELLECTUAL OFFENSIVE. The urgent task of the present time, and a still more urgent task when the war was over, .was to relate the fundamental principles of the, political and social structure which democracy, had built up "to the changed conditions. Like our troops, .democracy had been fighting rearguard actions, but the time was now ripe for a long-range intellectual offensive against the ideological bastions of totalitarianism. Let us understand in all their implications the principles of democratic faith, and having understood them ourselves, let us become propagandists of them to others," he said. "Let us learn to recognise the totalitarian spirit wherever it shows its head, and take off the gloves to it."