Tower of Trouble

To the University of Pittsburgh one day last summer went three pedagogs, sent by the American Association of University Professors to investigate the dismissal from Pitt's faculty of Historian Ralph E. Turner (TIME, July 16). Pitt's Chancellor John Gabbert Bowman* said the dismissal was due to Dr. Turner's "sneering, sarcastic, flippant attitude toward religion." But all Pittsburgh believed it was because of Dr. Turner's loud liberalism.

Chancellor Bowman met the three pedagogs in the University Club. First thing he did was to take them outdoors and point to a beautiful Gothic skyscraper rising through the city's smoke from the University campus. That skyscraper is Pitt's Cathedral of Learning, whose exterior is done but whose interior awaits the raising of more millions. As the four men walked up the hill toward it, the pale, intense, esthetic Chancellor told his companions what the Cathedral means to him. It was his vision; it is his life work; it will be his monument. To build it, a "spiritual symbol" for the city and the University, he has spent 14 years wheedling money from charwomen and millionaires. For it he has sacrificed many things, among them the liberal principles he once held. His Board of Trustees is packed with the reactionary industrialists who gave him money. One liberal professor after another has walked Pitt's plank. Ralph E. Turner was the last.

On the three pedagogs Chancellor Bowman made an impression which stayed with them through weeks of investigating, months of writing their report. To the final draft of that report the three men last week signed their names: Professor Ralph E. Himstead of Syracuse; Professor James B. Bullitt of North Carolina; Professor Albert Benedict Wolfe of Ohio State. Then they sent a copy to Chancellor Bowman "for factual correction," and with it a letter asking him to keep the report confidential until they should publish it late in March.

Page upon page of the report was devoted to the Bowman personality. The professors found him "a man of extraordinary personal charm, unassuming in manner, always courteous but never offensively so . . . a man of culture sensitive to the esthetic side of life, a man whose true nature is that of the artist and the mystic."

But the authors did not forget that they represented the American Association of University Professors and that A. A. U. P. champions academic freedom with the same zeal which Chancellor Bowman reserves for his Cathedral of Learning. They found that the Chancellor is an autocrat who called for the resignations of 53 professors at the end of his first year and who warns his faculty in form letters that their contracts may not be renewed. They found that his purge of liberalism has left every faculty member fearing for his job. They found that the charge of irreligion against Professor Turner was in large part a cloak for objections to his social and economic views.

Chancellor Bowman expected all that. What he did not expect was a bitter analysis of his life work and the city which supported him. "In the world of the existing Pittsburgh," said the report, "with its extremes of riches and poverty, its unrelieved dirtiness and ugliness, its ruthless materialism and individualism, its irrepressible industrial conflicts, its lack of any integrating principle other than the sign of the dollar, the Chancellor moves with one immediate driving motive: to wring from the community the money essential to the development and support of the kind of university which his mind conceives as the ideal for this particular city. . . . The whole existence of the university as a significant educational institution seems in the Chancellor's mind to pivot on the apex of this skyscraping tower."

Ever since the Turner dismissal, Pittsburgh newsmen have found Chancellor Bowman a poor hand at public relations. But last week, from the depth of his feeling, he did an exceedingly shrewd thing. He ignored the admonition of the three professors to regard their report as confidential. He gave it to the Press, and with it a reply which would do him no harm locally. Excerpt: "I regret to note the unrestrained hostility of your report as extended to the City of Pittsburgh. In violent language you hold up to scorn a people, a community, which, as much as any other, has expressed for a century and a half the best in American progress. . . . "

* Kin to Johns Hopkins' Isaiah Bowman (see col. 2) but so distant he does not know what the relationship is.

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