Soundoffs

Born last week on U. S. campuses, amid the crash of arriving trunks and the scratching of multitudinous pens on official blanks, was an entity known as the Class of 1940. Its 300,000 members, according to a survey made at University of Illinois, are better nourished and better developed than their predecessors, 87% of them being in "good-to-excellent physical shape." Its New England members, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, are the tallest group of human beings in the world, 178.03 centimeters (circa 5 ft. 10 in.). First official act of the Class of 1940 as it gathered in its new colleges was to hear addresses of welcome and counsel from its new presidents. Newsworthy presidential soundoffs.

P: At Columbia, as President Nicholas Murray Butler's academic procession made its solemn way across the Morningside campus, a dozen striking members of the Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers, armed with placards shrieking that COLUMBIA IS UNFAIR TO THE PAINTERS' UNION, wheeled impudently into the rear of the procession, followed it to McMillin Academic Theatre where they stayed outside to picket. Meanwhile in another corner of the campus the radical American Student Union planned to hold a mass meeting, incite Columbia students to strike from their classes unless Dr. Butler and Dean Herbert Hawkes reinstated Junior Robert Burke. The University's 160-pound boxing champion and president-elect of the Junior class, Ohioan Burke was expelled last spring for picketing a dinner party at Dr. Butler's house after Columbia accepted an invitation to attend Nazi Heidelberg's Jubilee (TIME, March 16).

Cried orderly Nicholas Murray Butler: "The world of today . . . is not happy. It is not contented. It is not prosperous. . . . In Seattle some 650 working people, who are under contract to carry on their daily employment [at Publisher William Randolph Hearst's Post-Intelligencer] and who are anxious to do so, are kept in idleness for days by the disorderly and lawless force of a group of disturbers of the peace of whom the city, the county and the State authorities are in such terror that nothing whatever is done by any one of these to restore and to preserve order. . . ." Next midnight unknown vandals stained the white base of John Jay Hall with gallons & gallons of red paint.

P: At Wesleyan University (Middletown, Conn.) President James Lukens McConaughy took a less friendly view of Publisher Hearst. Declared he: "Leaders like Governor Curley [of Massachusetts] and publicists like Mr. Hearst are today the greatest menaces to freedom in the academic world. . . . The biggest threat to such freedom is bigotry, unfairly endeavoring to impose our own views on others and denying", to those who differ from us, honesty and sincerity."

P: At New York University, the nation's biggest (enrollment: 42,850), Chancellor Harry Woodburn Chase assured freshmen that "in America youth is still reasonably free and can look forward to some measure of opportunity."

P: In darker mood, at University of Chicago youthful President Robert Maynard Hutchins gloomed: "The world seems to be rushing toward the destruction of liberty of conscience, of worship, of speech, and of thought. . . . This tendency . . . will not be without its effects in our own country. Already we see signs of the growth of bigotry and repression. . . . We see battle lines drawn that may determine the fate of our form of government, and of our generation."

P: At Colgate University (Hamilton, N. Y.), irritated President George Barton Cutten barked at his incoming freshmen: "We have heard a lot and read reams about the predatory rich, but is it not time that someone said something about the parasitic pauper? . . . A parasite thinks the world owes him a living. . . . During nine months of prenatal life, and years of infancy, a person acquires parasitic habits. . . . The parasite has never been properly weaned psychologically and he is always hunting around for a nipple. . . ."

P: At St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.), President Amos Walter Wright Woodcock, onetime (1930-33) U. S. Bureau of Prohibition Director, exhorted: "You are urged to study hard, be gentlemen, not to use liquor in any form."

P: At Harvard, a Tercentenary freshman class of 1,050, each of whom had to average a new high of 75% in his College Board examinations, missed hearing President James Bryant Conant last week because he had sailed on the Queen Mary, tourist class, for a European vacation.

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