Heresy

The newly elected tenth president of the University of Illinois is a man accustomed to using plain words. Last week some of them boomeranged back at him.

A famed child-psychologist and long time professor at the University of Iowa, in 1938, tweedy, babyfaced, middle-aged George Dinsmore Stoddard jolted his colleagues by demonstrating that I.Q.s (supposedly determined at birth) could be altered by environment. The methods: 1) planting some 300 children of feeble-minded parents and "poor stock" in good homes, where they turned out quite bright; 2) observing the "deterioration" of apparently normal youngsters in the unsalutary atmosphere of overcrowded orphanages.

In 1943, soon after becoming New York State's Commissioner of Education, pragmatic Dr. Stoddard had something more to say about mental deterioration. "Feeble in mind," he wrote in a book called The Meaning of Intelligence, "are the persons whose intact brains, giving the highest promise up through childhood, . . . have been so systematically drugged with the vapors of dogma, superstition and pseudo logic. . . . Man-made concepts, such as devils, witches, taboos, hellfire, original sin . . . and divine revelation . . . have distorted the intellectual processes of millions of persons. . . ."

To New York's Roman Catholic Bishop J. Francis A. Mclntyre, putting divine revelation in the same breath with witchcraft was "practically . . . blasphemous. . . ."

Last week a group of Illinois churchmen, led by conservative Roman Catholic Bishop James A. Griffin of Springfield, vehemently agreed. Said Bishop Griffin: "We want to know what we're paying for. . . . Thousands of [Dr. Stoddard's] future students believe in the objective validity of [original sin and hell]. . . . He will evidently try to dispossess his charges of their feeble-mindedness." Said the Bishop: the new president should make a profession of faith. Replied Dr. Stoddard, who will not take office until next July: "We need more religion rather than more theologies. . . . Frankly, I should be much happier if the Bishop and his group read the whole book . . . the tone . . . is intensely religious."

Said Bishop Griffin's supporters darkly: "The fight has just begun."

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