"We demand epidemic freedom!" By last week even fuddled urchins helping their big brothers & sisters picket New York City's Board of Education building had thus taken up the academic battle cry of 1935. Since autumn, patrioteers led by the Hearst Press and the American Legion had hounded the nation's schools with unprecedented vehemence. Last week as commencement season let loose torrents of oratory on college campuses, the pedagogs' reply was echoing throughout the land. Within a fortnight commencement speeches by the following university heads had made the following headlines: Johns Hopkins' Ames
CALLS FOR WAR ON ENEMIES OF FREE THOUGHT Cornell's Farrand
DR. FARRAND CALLS FOR FREE TEACHING Amherst's King
STANLEY KING ASKS ACADEMIC LIBERTY Rutgers' Clothier
COLLEGE PRESIDENT'S
FREE SPEECH PLEA Syracuse's Flint
DR. FLINT DEMANDS TRUTH IN TEACHING Boston's Marsh
RADICALISM HELD A PATRIOTIC NEED Meantime in Chicago the year's best-publicized academic Red scare, having run up against a combination of scorn and spunk named Robert Maynard Hutchins, ignominiously collapsed. When Drugman Charles R. Walgreen withdrew his niece from University of Chicago, clamoring that the campus was rampant with Communism, President Hutchins angrily refused to dignify his vaporings with a public investigation (TIME, April 22). Only 75 of the University's 7,500 full-time students belonged to its two pinko student organizations.* But Drugman Walgreen got his hearing anyway, before the Illinois Senate and in the Press.
Last week the Senate Committee, after four weeks of chasing marsh lights, disgustedly called off its investigation for good. President Hutchins, who had sat through its hearings in blank boredom, calmly went off about his business. Next week the University will present a series of public lectures by Soviet Ambassador Alexander Troyanovsky and two of his countrymen on "The Soviet Union and World-Problems."
For the Defense. A lucid, original mind, engaging presence and quiet, incisive delivery make Bob Hutchins one of the ablest and most popular public speakers in the land. In University of Chicago's majestic cathedral-chapel last week he summed up for all liberal educators their case against the patrioteers. His rangy, athletic figure draped in silken gown and the purple hood of a Doctor of Laws, he leaned out from the pulpit to declare:
". . . Almost everybody now is afraid. This is reflected in the hysteria of certain organs of opinion, which insist on free speech for themselves, though nobody has thought of taking it away from them, and at the same time demand that it be denied everybody else. It is reflected in the re-turn of Billingsgate to politics. It is reflected in the general resistance to all uncomfortable truths. It is reflected in the decay of the national reason. Almost the last question you can ask about any proposal nowadays is whether it is wise, just, or reasonable. The question is how much pressure is there behind it or how strong are the vested interests against it.