Eastern View

University of Wisconsin as an institution has a long-standing liberal tradition. But not all Badgers are liberals. Month ago the conservatives on Madison's Langdon St. (Wisconsin's swank fraternity row) routed the liberals, elected their ticket* to the board of control of the undergraduate Daily Cardinal. Next day the new board ousted curly-haired Richard J. Davis, a New Yorker and no fraternity man, who had been elected executive editor by the retiring board to succeed New Yorker Morton Newman. The new board complained of Editor Davis' Leftist leanings, said he could not work in harmony with the diverse groups producing the paper. But one member blurted: "We don't want another Jewish editor." Around the campus spread word, later denied, that two facultymen had seconded this view.

Thereupon half the Cardinal staff walked out and published an opposition paper called the Staff Daily. Some 2,500 students signed an unsuccessful petition for a referendum to recall the board of control. And last week white-haired, conservative Dean George Clarke Sellery, who was Wisconsin's interim acting president after Glenn Frank's ouster last year, pushed the university into the national limelight again by charging that racial bigotry had reared its head on Wisconsin's campus. Said he: "When an effort to put [the Cardinal] into the hands of a different group for next year is supported by an appeal to race prejudice, I am in arms."

Wisconsin's new president, big Clarence Addison Dykstra, facing his first major administrative crisis, quickly defined a liberal by acting like one. He declared himself neutral in the controversy, said the students "must settle their problem as a lesson in self-government." He also hazarded the opinion that the dispute was political, not racial. Said he: "Doubtless in the heat of the Cardinal campaign some opposition to individual Jews has been expressed, but I feel sure that this opposition has not extended further than to specific individuals. I have found no anti-Semitic trend or temper in any of my conferences. . . . Because the last two elected editors do not happen to be Wisconsin-born, the feeling has grown that they represent an eastern class-struggle point of view rather than the liberal Wisconsin tradition."

At week's end Wisconsin agreed to hold another student election this week to pick another board to pick another set of Cardinal editors.

*Including Dorothy Boettiger, daughter of President Roosevelt's son-in-law, John Boettiger.

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