The Press: 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...

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