There are countries in the world where students traditionally play a constant, or at least recurrent, role in national politics. This is, generally speaking, not the case in Europe. Part of the tradition of European universities is a disdaining aloofness from the surrounding society and its "petty politics." This tradition did not exclude endless and passionate theoretical debates on the "perfect state," with recurrent Platonic dreams of an intellectual aristocracy governing the lower race, but if did not encourage a student to "dirty his hands" with real politics. If some students betrayed their caste by getting involved in outside politics, they soon dropped out of sight of their colleagues, and, more likely than not, out of their, courses as well.

To be an eye-witness of revolutionary events has never been a guarantee of accurate observation, but it helps in sensing an atmosphere which otherwise soon evaporates. Hence my tentative conclusion that what happened in Paris in May-June of this year was a revolution in the 1789 sense of the word; if it did not become 1792-3-4 (anyway, not yet), it is because General de Gaulle is less honest and more firm than was Louis XVI. On May 30, in a four-minute speech, he said No! to disorder, and permitted this speech to become the instantaneous rallying point for various opponents of revolution.

It seems to be that this year above all years we shall not want to or be able to confine ourselves to the examination of our instruction and guidance or purely the educational program. We are obliged to relate what we teach and how we teach, and the way in which we and our students live and study together, to the large and very serious concerns of our society in these most unquiet times.

Anyone who witnessed the recent events in Chicago must be more concerned than ever about the state of the union. Everyone who saw the violence in the streets and the incivility of the political scene indoors was shocked. But the tragedy is that few could have been surprised.

To look at some of the most prominent conditions of contemporary politics, is in fact to identify the circumstances within which the Churches must work in trying to promote human rights. Human rights may be identified abstractly, but they do not exist abstractly. Tbey exist, where they exist at all, within political confines; and these same confines suggest what the proper role of the Churches may be. If this seems a harshly limited basis for defining the Churches' role, it is not because this writer seeks to limit, but rather because the limitations are genuinely there, and the Churches are unlikely to do effectively even their limited task unless they concentrate their energies on these channels.