petty lobbyists and empire builders. The best brains in the university are absorbed in a self-generating process of committee work, caucusing and canvassing. Having thus ensured a quiescent staff, Vice-Chancellors can get on with their real jobs: making speeches about the Muldoon threat to intellectual integrity, lobbying for appointment to the Broadcasting Corporation, deciding whether to refer the Capping Magazine to the Indecent Publications Tribunal, or applying for jobs overseas.
The universities should do four jobs. First, they need to expand and order the body of knowledge. They do this now, but achieve an output of only 0.8 articles per capita per year, and that mainly by taking overseas experiments and research and duplicating them in New Zealand. With a little more productivity and a bit more attention to New Zealand subjects, all would be well. Even the second job of communicating knowledge retail to the detainees is well enough done, though the aerosol approach is preferred to the hand polishing Oxford considers appropriate.
The third job is to turn out, not working models of professional men on to whom a little knowledge has been grafted without immediate rejection effects, but intellectuals, people whose thirst for knowledge is like an addiction. The universities don’t attempt this. The public image of students is of ignorant, drug crazed militants. In practice most are quietly conformist: in the years I was one of the trustees of the De Tocqueville Fund, to award an annual prize of $200 for the biggest insult to authority in any year, we never had one entrant, beyond a case of accidental pant wetting at a north Dunedin kindergarten. Students are drawn overwhelmingly from middle class backgrounds, with as few as a fifth from manual working homes, a proportion only double the contingent from overseas. Thus background insulates them from the infection of new ideas. Staff-student contact is minimal. Where it exists it is largely confined to the one department: in a survey only one in ten had had contact with staff from another department. Cross-sterilisation seems more appropriate than cross-fertilisation.
A last role—spreading knowledge out into the community—is scarcely attempted. Few are more academically snobbish and purist than the academically dull. Even the academic branch of show biz, so flourishing in Britain, does not exist. The University of Canterbury viewed my television appearances as if I was running a house of ill-fame on the side. New Zealand universities are inward-looking, preoccupied with themselves, isolated from a community which desperately needs the information, the ideas and the stimulus and diversity universities could provide. Unfortunately to do so might upset people.
Seriously though, these universities are the best in the world. Don’t ask the students, they’re biased. If you don’t believe me, ask the staff. You’ll find them either doing their gardens or Post Restante, c/o University of London.
THERE ARE SOME aspects of life in your new home I’ve hesitated to talk about. People who let their gardens get overgrown, Invercargill, bodily odours—all these had to be left until you are strong enough to bear the shock. So had politics.
In God-Zone you approach different topics with an adjustment of your volume control. With sport, shout; with sex, whisper; with politics, mutter. America’s silent majority is New Zealand’s muttering majority. If you’re afflicted by that rare perversion, a passion for politics, you’ll have to mutter more than a German with a severe Oedipus complex.
In the small amount of spare time they have left over from their main job of defending themselves against Mr Muldoon (the Genghis Khan of finance), the political scientists have been able to write numerous books and articles. By Mitchell’s Law, as the life goes out of politics it is replaced by analysis. This simple rule of taxidermy means that the duller politics become, the more frenzied and sophisticated is the attention that the burgeoning profession of political science devotes to the corpse. Voting turn-out down—analysis of elections up.
You will look in vain for the rapier shaft of wit which, in overseas systems, has produced such classics as ‘the thousand best jokes of Richard Nixon, the Abraham Lincoln of North Vietnam’, or ‘the wit of Edward Heath, the Bexley Bismarck’. You won’t find the sense of style which lyrical public relations men conferred on President Kennedy (‘with new DIGNITY!’) , or even the ersatz version the early Harold Wilson (‘You don’t use Wilson—Wilson uses you!’) had, until the aerosol ran out. True, Brian Talboys was run for a few months as an import substitute Jack Kennedy (it’s amazing what they can do with silicones), but he was too good-looking. Nor will you discover new philosophical insights. The Thoughts of Chairman Norm have not yet joined those other slim volumes, Italian War Heroes and Arab Victories, in published form. There’s no Watt on Political Theory, and Linear Demand Coefficients in Econometric Predictive Models by R. D. (The Turk) Muldoon and Naval Heroes from Drake to Me by Fraser Coleman have yet to hit the waiting world. The people have rugby for national catharsis, and assassination of politicians has never caught on here. Ignoring them is so much more effective.
Politics is best compared with the septic tank. Septic tanks have no tradition: they are plumbed in with the house. Septic tanks have no elegance and no wit, though you may get the occasional gurgle. You don’t talk much about septic tanks. They burble along nicely with a triennial overhaul. Yet they do serve a certain purpose.
Most countries have only one system of government. Just as a high standard of living gives New Zealand more consumer durables than other countries, so it gives more systems of government per capita. On the latest count, there are four, changed in regular rotation with the seasons, like vests.
In January there is neither system nor government. Everything must stop for the summer break. If, by some divine oversight, the second coming falls due at this time of year, a third and final appearance will certainly be necessary to transfer Kiwis to another (and possibly inferior) heaven. In January such a happening would be as little noticed as licensing laws on the West Coast in the old six o’clock closing days. You may find it surprising that revolutionaries don’t take the opportunity offered by this interregnum to take power and seize the reins. No real danger. Thoughtful immigration laws keep out people like Tariq Ali or Cohn-Bendit, excluding brown, pink and yellow with equal impartiality. And the local revolutionaries are all dinkum Kiwi. In January they’re on holiday, the one at Ninety Mile Beach, the other on his power boat at Taupo.
In February the country slips into its totalitarian phase, which lasts until May. Cabinet meets busily, its working hours coinciding neatly with the old pub opening times (which Orthodox boozers still keep, even if the Reformed Brethren don’t). To remain busy in the lunch break, the ministers put on morning suits, transforming themselves into the Executive Council, or Cabinet sitting pretty. On days Cabinet does not meet, ministers while away the time with tours of the country finding out what their departments are doing, or where they are. A minister’s ability is usually measured by his mileage.
These are the months of decision, when the beehive buzzes with activity. Import licensing is imposed or taken off. Subsidies are abolished. Controversial decisions are announced, usually on a Friday night so that newspapers, printed without journalists on Saturday and Sunday, can deal with them only when they’re dead issues. Troops are dispatched to wherever our allies (collectively known as the logic of destiny) would like them to go—usually Southeast Asia, an area the Kiwis are anxious to make safe for mutton. It’s moments like these we need SEATO.
All decisions are unchallenged. Parliament stands silent or is hired out to international organisations needing a veneer of respectability for their gatherings. The Opposition hibernates in some undiscovered retreat in the South Island. Both Parliament and the Opposition will discuss all in due course,