Henry Frendo was the first University of Malta academic to deplore the appearance of a lengthy, nauseatingly hagiological article on Dom Mintoff written by a fellow academic, Raymond Mangion .

Those who, like me, lived so many years when Mintoff was in power, remember all too well that this clever but shockingly authoritarian politician, while responsible for important social reforms and for his clever negotiations with the British government, was frequently the deadly enemy of the then mostly not well-to-do middle class and notorious for the often humiliating way in which he dealt with the many outstanding public officials who did not see eye to eye with him.

I should have thought that someone like Mangion, a graduate of this University and a teacher in it, would have criticised, strongly or mildly, Mintoff’s hostility to our University in which he tried in different fashions to kill its budding research programmes and in effect to kill it in spirit.

His student-worker scheme will forever be remembered for the comment made by a prominent German academic, Ralph Dahrendorf, that it produced neither good workers nor good students.

When will one or two of the academics who were deprived of their teaching at the University and sent to work in the National Library or elsewhere tell Mangion what they think of him? Godfrey Wetttinger is dead but where are all those others who are still alive?