God & Vanderbilt

Out of Vanderbilt University's new $1,300,000 divinity school last week marched Dean J. Robert Nelson on a grim mission of conscience. He strode across the Nashville campus and handed Chancellor Harvie Branscomb a terse letter of resignation. By week's end ten other divinity-school faculty members followed Nelson, 17 students quit, and three recent graduates returned their diplomas. It was the worst ruckus in Vanderbilt's 87-year history.

At issue was the expulsion last March of a Negro divinity-school student, chunky, spectacled James M. Lawson Jr. A Methodist minister, the Rev. Mr. Lawson, 32, was fired after leading sit-in strikers during Nashville's lunch-counter demonstrations. For Dean Nelson and his colleagues. Lawson "came to symbolize a great set of principles--freedom of action, freedom of conscience, the nature of a university and the struggle of the Negro for his rights."

Obey the Law. An advocate of militant passive resistance against segregation. Pennsylvania-born Lawson is the son of a Methodist minister. He served a year in federal penitentiaries as a conscientious objector, later spent three years in I ndia as a missionary and avid student of Gandhi's techniques of nonviolence ("Gandhi helped me to see the Christian life"). To earn a bachelor of divinity degree, he entered Vanderbilt in 1958, organized Negro students on the side.

Ironically, Vanderbilt is one of the South's most integrated campuses. A Southern liberal, Chancellor Branscomb persuaded his conservative board of trust to admit Negroes in 1953, and he is personally sympathetic to the sit-in strikers' goals. But "civil disobedience'' is something else again. Branscomb firmly believes that whites and Negroes must equally obey the law--or face race riots. And at the height of the sit-in tension, Lawson told city officials: "The law has been a gimmick to manipulate the Negro."

On to Boston. Asked to explain whether he was encouraging Negroes to "violate the law," Lawson told Branscomb: "When the Christian considers the concept of civil disobedience as an aspect of nonviolence, it is only within the context of a law or a law-enforcement agency which in reality has ceased to be the law." Unable to accept this reasoning. Branscomb asked Lawson to leave Vanderbilt. He refused--and Branscomb expelled him.

One-quarter of the university faculty (112 professors) signed a petition supporting Lawson. When he was arrested for conspiracy to restrain trade and commerce, the divinity-school faculty chipped in $500 for bail. The faculty stirred such a fuss that Dean Nelson set about readmitting Lawson. But last week Chancellor Branscomb vetoed the idea, and Nelson quit.

What pained Nelson was the fact that Boston University divinity school promptly accepted Lawson, who expects to get his degree there this summer. "I feel a great sense of tragedy," said Nelson. "This happened just when we had reached prominence as one of the half-dozen best divinity schools in the U.S." His job was offered to Dean Walter J. Harrelson of the University of Chicago divinity school. If Harrelson accepts, it may be under certain conditions that might even include the readmission of Lawson and the retention of Nelson as a professor. Whatever the outcome. Chancellor Branscomb is adamant on one point. "We are a university in the South trying to find a way," said he. "But we will not tolerate civil disobedience."

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