This is the Friends Vistory Debating Society, six capital, six points of view with Professor

H. J. Mackender, International Relations. I mentioned D.C., but Washington is oddly not in the

argument right now about what's happened in America since the mid-east war broke out.

Demonstrations on campuses, conduct by undergraduates, all vowed safe under the freedom of speech

under the First Amendment, under the right of assembly, all correct. The puzzle is what is to

be done with the administration set here to four were throwing people out of the campus, throwing

them out or in some way inhibiting them because of what was understood to be in correct language

or in correct conduct. Professor, you have experience in campus that I do not. I perhaps read

only negative things about campus life. However, it strikes me that several universities have

distinguished themselves for contradictions. I'll leave it there about freedom of speech. Do you

believe that this is an opportunity for them to reorient themselves to understand the First

Amendment? Is that I'm looking for a positive outcome here? Well, I think you're going to have to

look very hard. A wise colleague of mine once said that if you look at institutions in history,

they usually follow a trajectory of rising, reaching an apogee and then falling and that fall is

irreversible. The only exception we can name is the Roman Catholic Church, which survived the

reformation and then went on to, I think the membership of the Roman Catholic Church today is one

and a half billion and it's huge, but it is beset by crisis now too. Whether the university has

been recovered is a very, very, very, very important question. If the answer is no, we are in trouble.

And the reason is this that ideas do matter. If you're approaching something like the international

situation, you cannot say as the George H. W. Bush said, I'm a pragmatist. I don't bother

myself with all of this high-flow intellectualism and everything. I'm a practical man. As Lord

Cain said, the majority of practical men are in fact the slaves of the French political economists.

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