The Petition Syndrome

Asked recently to sign a Viet Nam petition of some stripe or other, Oxford Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper was finally moved to sound a long-felt complaint. "If I have anything to say, I prefer to choose my own words," wrote he in the London Sunday Times. "I realize that in this I may seem a traitor to my class. No class seems readier than university teachers to join in these orgies of collective public signature. Only a few days ago almost an entire page of the London Times was taken up by a flamboyant round robin, also about Viet Nam. It was an impressive show of massive conformity by nearly 1,500 academics."

Why do they do it? he wondered. "No other profession behaves thus. Why then do dons follow a rule of their own? Are they so much more intelligent? Or can it be that dons are more self-important? Alas, I fear that it may. It may also be that, as a class, they are less individualist, more conformist than other men. Especially, I fear, in a lab. I have not analyzed all 1,500 names. But I have made a sample check." As is true in the U.S., "the scientific preponderance is overwhelming. It is the astrophysicists and the microbiologists who feel themselves most called upon, and best qualified, to solve the complexities of international affairs.

"Perhaps this is quite natural. What is less natural is that the rest of the world should take them seriously." Fortunately, though, no matter what the "public may think, worldly politicians know too well how it is done. They know the vanity of the tribe. They go on as before."

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