Birthday Bids

Heidelberg University was erected on a foundation of race persecution when, in 1386, Elector Rupert I of the Palatine seized from Heidelberg's Jews a group of dwellings to house his new Collegium Artistarum. Reversing its position three centuries later, Heidelberg offered sanctuary to a hounded Jew, celebrated Philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Last week Heidelberg's plans for its 550th birthday celebration in June went notably awry because sister institutions throughout the world believed that Heidelberg had taken up Jew-baiting once again, lost caste as a centre of intellectual liberality.

Indispensable to any high academic ceremony are the red doctoral hoods of Oxford. To Oxford, therefore, Heidelberg's Rector Magnificus Wilhelm Groh last month sent an invitation for the June birthday festival. Immediately a storm burst in the British Press. Indignantly the Manchester Guardian pointed to a list of 44 potent professors who had been cast out by Heidelberg for racial and political causes. To the London Times the philosophical Bishop of Durham gravely wrote: "It cannot be right that the universities of Great Britain, which we treasure as the very citadels of sound learning ... the vigilant guardians of intellectual freedom, should openly fraternize with the avowed and shameless enemies of both."

Oxford was well able to speak for itself. Famed Classicist Gilbert Murray summed up the opinion of many a don: "Perfectly monstrous!" Last week Oxford with graceful malice planned to send to Germany not a delegate but an address "extolling the greatness of German learning in the past." Hopping mad when only Cambridge accepted, Rector Magnificus Groh belatedly withdrew the rest of his British invitations.

Last week Rector Groh's invitations had reached the U. S. Officially Cornell, Columbia, Harvard accepted without controversy. But the Heidelberg invitations soon raised a full-sized rumpus among undergraduates, alumni, faculty members. President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, cruising in the Caribbean, heard that liberal students were up in arms against Columbia's acceptance. In the Cornell Sim Historian Hendrik Willem Van Loon, "a 101% Aryan," looked into his Alma Mater's past, doubted "that Hitler's bright boys would care to associate with representatives of a university founded by that eminently broad-minded Quaker, Ezra Cornell."

Harvard's President James Bryant Conant has twice refused to accept scholarships from Alumnus Ernst Franz Sedgwick ("Putzy") Hanfstaengl, Dictator Hitler's pressagent and musical solace. But last week President Conant wrote to Rector Groh: "The President and Fellows, in accepting the invitation of the University of Heidelberg, recognize the ancient ties by which the universities of the world are united and which are independent of the political conditions existing in any country at any particular time."

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