Chicago-in-Frankfurt

One evening last week a shimmering four-engined transport touched down at an airport outside Frankfurt, Germany. Seven weary but grinning Chicagoans stepped out into a 35-mile-an-hour wind that felt like Michigan Avenue in November. "A little University of Chicago" in Germany had come to set up shop.

The Chicago professors expect to stay at the University of Frankfurt for the current 13-week term, then make way for a new team from the Midway. The first string: German-born Theological Historian Wilhelm Pauck, Austrian-born Zoologist Paul Weiss, Sociologist Everett Hughes, Poet-Political Philosopher Elder James Olson, the I.Q.-testing husband-&-wife team of Psychologists Louis and Thelma Thurstone, and Executive Secretary Roger Oake.

Frankfurt was picked as the site of the two-year, $240,000 experiment mainly because it is in the heart of the U.S. zone. Some German scholars had grumbled that 34-year-old Frankfurt, one of the newest German universities, was too "young" for the honor of being first to get U.S. professors since Hitler. This complaint cut no ice at Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins' 56-year-old Chicago, youngest of top U.S. universities. Eventually other American lecturers will teach at Munich, Heidelberg, Bonn and Marburg.

Frankfurt is windowless, roofless, and jammed to the bombed-out rafters. It has almost no paper or pencils, let alone books. Forewarned, the "little University's" faculty shipped provisions ahead (among the items: a Friden calculating machine, thousands of frames of microfilm, the poetry of W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot).

What Frankfurt lacks in supplies, it makes up in spirit. Explained one university official: "The days when a German campus was a place for dueling, beer-drinking and pranks are over. These students study as though their lives depended on it." As at U.S. colleges, most of Frankfurt's 4,840 students are war veterans (many seats are reserved for amputees). Knowing that many of their listeners still think like Nazis, the visitors plan to include doses of John Locke and Anglo-American political documents.

For their part, the German students seemed most anxious to hear about life in the U.S. But some could not conceal their disappointment when they learned that their new professors were planning to teach ordinary, old-fashioned subjects. They had been hoping to hear about atomic energy.

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