Harvard Ousters

Chief grievance of the American Federation of Teachers, a full-fledged labor union affiliated with the A. F. of L., is the fact that its President Jerome Davis will not be reappointed to Yale's Divinity School faculty when his contract expires in June. Last week the Federation received two more jolts, from Harvard. Its vice president, John Raymond Walsh, and the secretary of its Harvard unit, Alan Richardson Sweezy, were informed that when their contracts expire in June, both will receive "two-year concluding contracts" instead of three-year renewals. In union language there was no doubt that Unionists Walsh and Sweezy, like Unionist Davis, were being fired. Harvard hastened to issue a statement explaining that the "cases present no unusual features; decisions . . . have been made solely on grounds of teaching capacity and scholarly ability." Skeptical friends of Instructors Walsh and Sweezy thought differently. Walsh, a baldish, handsome nephew of Montana's late Senator Thomas J., has been a member of Harvard's economics department since 1929, when he graduated from Beloit College in Wisconsin. Gaunt young Instructor Sweezy, a Harvardman of the Class of 1929 and onetime president of the Daily Crimson, entered the economics department in 1934 after studying on Harvard fellowships in England and Austria. It was Instructor Walsh who, two years ago, organized the American Federation of Teachers' Harvard unit, under the name of the Cambridge Union of University Teachers, to which 130 faculty-men now belong.

Three undergraduate committees speedily organized in behalf of Walsh & Sweezy pointed out that of all the instructors in their department's introductory course, Economics A, popular Instructor Walsh was requested by most enrollees, popular Instructor Sweezy ranking second. Instructor Walsh's course on Labor Problems has jumped from 44 to 127 members in three years, and he is at the moment busy preparing for press a book on the labor policies of Standard Oil Co., which he investigated on a Wertheim Research Fellowship last summer. Confronted with these arguments, President Conant replied that the budget of the economics department was "clogged up," that so far as Harvard was concerned the matter was closed.

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