War on the Campuses

War of the Campuses

Nowhere in the U. S. did the rumble of war re-echo more loudly last week than on college campuses. Professors, undergraduates alike began to realize that they were confronted with a Great Decision. But few as yet were prepared to make it, and from U. S. campuses arose a Babel:

> Five hundred members of the American Association of Scientific Workers--among them University of Chicago's famed Professors Arthur Compton and Anton Carlson--petitioned President Roosevelt to keep the U. S. out of war. To the President promptly went counter-petitions, urging help to the Allies, from Albert Einstein, scientists at Princeton, Harvard and California Tech.

> In his annual Handbook of Private Schools, tart old Porter Sargent charged that U. S. universities, led by Harvard, were leading a propaganda parade to war.

> At Williams, as famed History Professor Frederick L. Schuman climaxed a series of pro-Ally classroom lectures with a prediction that "we are rapidly approaching . . . the end of Western civilization," the Williams Record exploded with a front-page editorial blast: "Is This Education?" Stormed the Record: "Day after day, lecture after lecture, he indulges in his own prophecies. . . . It violates all the ethics of the teaching profession."

> At Harvard, members of a student "Committee for the Recognition of Classroom Generals" picketed (in gas masks) a class of interventionist History Teacher Paul P. Cram, sent tin soldiers and armchair professorial citations to five other professors. Meanwhile 34 members of the class of '17 sent a letter to the Crimson deploring undergraduate pacifism.

> At Yale, 1,486 students signed a petition to President Roosevelt demanding that the U. S. send no supplies, money or men to Europe, were roundly denounced for "muddled thinking" by Professor Arnold Whitridge, grandson of Matthew Arnold. Said he: "If we wish to stay out of war . . . we should do everything possible to furnish such aid to the Allies as will enable them to win the war."

>At University of North Carolina a student peace meeting was showered with eggs by other students.

>Disturbed by undergraduate pacifism. Yaleman Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress, accused the writers of his own generation (Ernest Hemingway, Walter Millis, John Dos Passos, Richard Aldington, et al.) of disarming the U. S. Said he (at a convention of the American Association for Adult Education in Manhattan): "The moral and spiritual unpreparedness of the country is worse than its unpreparedness in arms. . . . The effect [of these authors' books] has been to immunize the young generation against any attempt in its own country by its own leaders to foment a war by waving moral flags and rhetorical phrases. But they have left it defenseless before an aggressor whose cynicism, brutality and whose stated intention to enslave present the issue of the future in moral terms.

"I am not undertaking to judge these writers. I have no right to judge them, and if I did my hands would be tied because I felt as they did and wrote, so far as I was able, as they were writing. What I do undertake to maintain is that what they wrote, however noble it may have been as literature, however true as a summary of experience, was disastrous as education for a generation which would be obliged to face the threat of fascism in its adult years. . . .

"Unless we regain in this democracy the conviction that there are final things for which democracy will fight, unless we recover faith in the expression of these things in words, we can leave our planes unbuilt and our battleships on paper, for we shall not need them."

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