Scholars on an Earl

Nine scholars who had been thinking since a year ago last April about how a Tammany judge canceled the appointment of Bertrand Russell to teach at the College of the City of New York (TIME, April 8, 1940) have finally boiled over. This week they cut loose in an angry book, The Bertrand Russell Case (Viking; $2.50). Their flattering finding: the Russell case ranks with the persecutions of Socrates, John Huss and Joan of Arc, as one of history's most infamous episodes.

Editors of the volume are venerable John Dewey and a fellow philosopher, Professor Horace M. Kallen of Manhattan's New School for Social Research. Although Earl Russell is now safely berthed as a lecturer in the Barnes Foundation art school near Philadelphia, the authors believe the triumph of "fundamentalist clerics, machine politicians and professional patriots" who had him ousted from C.C.N.Y. remains a peril to freedom of learning in the U.S. Some of their points:

> The judge who ousted him, Roman Catholic John E. McGeehan, "had last distinguished himself by trying to have a portrait of Martin Luther removed from a courthouse mural. . . ."

> Russell's appointment was canceled after a brief hearing, without a trial, witnesses or an opportunity to appear in his own defense.

> The judge set a precedent where a court might interfere, on moral or religious grounds, with appointment of teachers by responsible educational authorities.

> Higher courts upheld Justice McGeehan's decision not on its merits but on technicalities. One obstacle: New York City's Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia blocked the Board of Higher Education by refusing to let the city's counsel appeal the case.

> Episcopal Bishop William T. Manning, who started the attack by denouncing Russell's works, did not speak for his church. (So says Episcopalian Cleric Guy Emery Shipler, editor of The Churchman.)

> Most caustic of the nine scholars is Yale's Walton H. Hamilton, Southmayd professor of law. Excerpts: "In an opinion of some 5,000 words . . . the judge rises to every error which opportunity presents. ... At City College there must be nothing said or read about Biblical men who looked with lust upon female flesh. . . . The student body at City College consists of males, chaste or unchaste, some of them over 18, with morals poised so delicately that, if Bertrand Russell expounds mathematics or philosophy, they are impelled to abduct and rape, while if he does not appear in their midst, woman's virtue knows no peril."

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