Talk and Action

Last week a crescendo of war talk swept over U. S. campuses. Commencement speakers dismissed their graduates with words of alarm, caution, doom.

At Princeton, President Harold W. Dodds broke a long-standing tradition against commencement speeches by mounting the platform to announce: "The University pledges its full cooperation with our Government in its program of national defense, and promises that its whole organization, men, facilities and equipment, are again at its disposal as it may require them."

Fordham's President, the Very Rev. Robert I. Gannon, declared that his university was ready if necessary to "turn our campus into an armed camp."

Vassar's Dean C. Mildred Thompson told graduates that real peace could be attained only if they responded to "decent emotions of righteous anger against brutal aggression and pity for the oppressed and the suffering."

North Carolina's President Frank P. Graham cautioned: "We should not let our fear of the fifth column cause us to surrender to the sixth column, who would mistakenly use the fears of the people and the confusion of the hour to cause Americans to strike down the Bill of Rights and to surrender the recent basic social advances."

At Chicago, President Robert Maynard Hutchins upbraided the U. S. people for "losing our moral principles." Said he: "We are like confused, divided, ineffective Hitlers. In a contest between Hitler and people who are wondering why they shouldn't be Hitlers, the finished product is bound to win. . . . Democracy is the best form of government. It is worth dying for. We can realize it in this country if we will grasp the principles on which it rests and recognize that unless we are devoted to them with our whole hearts, democracy cannot prevail at home or abroad."

Louder than campus words spoke campus actions. Throughout the land schools busied themselves with preparations for war. Incidents:

>Young alumni of eastern colleges started a drive for compulsory military training. Under auspices of the Military Training Camps Association (the "Plattsburg Group" of World War I fame) and the leadership of the New York Times's Julius Ochs Adler, they scheduled college mass meetings. First to go on record was a group of 250 Princeton alumni, who unanimously favored compulsory training, urged that the U. S. establish a string of training camps. Few days later 500 Williams men followed suit. Similar meetings were scheduled at Amherst, Yale, Harvard.

>Chicago's Armour Institute of Technology started a summer course for key industrialists on new developments in defense methods, imported sixteen of the nation's best engineers and scientists as instructors.

>U. S. Education Commissioner John W. Studebaker began to mobilize the nation's public schools to train workmen to man war industries, proposed to turn out 550,000 mechanics in short order. New York City's huge school system, already busy training 3,000 airplane mechanics, prepared to run its technical schools 24 hours a day.

>In New York, the State Department of Education began to organize a State-wide program of adult education, to get under way before fall, to "arm our people spiritually and intellectually against the deadly advance of totalitarian ideologies."

> At Harvard, reunioning alumni, by special request of President James Bryant Conant and in the interests of national unity, agreed to give up their annual gibes at Alumnus Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Class Day parade.

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