Poisoned Ivy

Colonel Robert R. McCormick, of Chicago, hates and mistrusts the U.S. "alien East." Disturbing tales about the Ivy League colleges have lately come to the Colonel's receptive ears. Said his Chicago Tribune last week: "Are these big eastern colleges teaching Americanism or internationalism?" To get the answers, the Tribune dispatched Eugene Griffin, a foreign (Ottawa-based) correspondent.

What Griffin found out filled 24 Vari-Typed columns as the Trib's first "expose" of the year. The Ivy League, wrote Griffin, was "infested with pedagogic termites. . . . Harvard makes almost a fetish of permitting radicalism to flourish, and a visitor is impressed by the prevailing spirit that 'revolution is wonderful!' "

A Harvard janitor told him that the students were no redder than 20 years ago, and that "of course, we've always had a few nuts on the faculty." But Griffin viewed with alarm the Nieman Foundation, the Crimson (which he thought aptly named), and Author Vera Micheles Dean, for "suppressing the uglier aspects" of Communism in her course on the U.S.S.R. (The Crimson tartly pointed out that Mrs. Dean was not even teaching at Harvard; she is due to begin next month.)

At Princeton, Reporter Griffin found that the dangerous "ism" was Anglicism. His proof: Princeton had sent more Rhodes scholars (72) to Oxford than either Harvard (51) or Yale (48).

Only Yale, from which Bertie McCormick had graduated in 1903, was still undefiled. Said the old school Trib: "The most striking trait of [Yale] university is 'democracy' ... a visitor may meet with rumors of propaganda . . . being preached in the classroom, but such practice would be difficult to prove."

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