Trials of a President

One evening three weeks ago, guests arrived at a "charter day dinner" held in the gymnasium of Washington's Howard University, largest Negro university in the U. S. As they arrived they were handed copies of the Alumni Journal, published by the university's General Alumni Association. Three hundred copies were distributed before police routed the distributors. On the Journal's cover was a large portrait of bald, pince-nezzed, light-skinned Dr. Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, first Negro president of the 71-year-old institution, now serving his twelfth year, and beneath it in large letters: "The Case Against President Mordecai W. Johnson."

Inside the Journal, readers found sensational matter. The gist of three main charges:

The case oj Lucy D. Slowe: While Miss Slowe, dean of women for 15 years, lay on her deathbed, President Johnson sent a message announcing his intention to appoint her successor within 24 hours.

The case of the misused PWA money: Because of irregularities in the expenditure of PWA money for college buildings, the university had to return $32,000 to the U. S. Government. Particularly pointed were alumni references to the mystery of the "missing" lumber, $545 worth of PWA wood which President Johnson was accused of having spirited away at dead of night.

The case of the seduced wife: For refusing to withdraw charges that a Howard University professor had seduced his young wife, a laboratory assistant, Robert Thompson, was fired.

Last week, while the university's trustees investigated the charges, President Johnson sniffed. He declared that the General Alumni Association includes only 253 of the 8,000 living Howard alumni, that it employs tactics "almost equivalent to gangsterism." His answer to the charges: 1) He had asked Dean Slowe to suggest an acting dean, sent her a note hoping she would soon be back; 2) Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes had found "no implication of dishonesty" in the handling of PWA money or PWA lumber; 3) Laboratory Assistant Thompson had failed to produce evidence of a seduction.

A onetime Baptist minister, Mordecai Johnson has degrees from Harvard and University of Chicago. He has raised $5,000,000 for expansion of Howard, which today has 2,108 men and women students in nine graduate and undergraduate branches, gets most of its money for operating expenses from the U. S. Government. Abuse from disgruntled alumni has been the hairshirt of Howard University presidents, even of its first president, O. O. Howard, who was investigated by a Congressional committee and exonerated. All of it is due, President Johnson insists, to the hope of Negro intellectuals close to the Government that they may get jobs if there is a shakeup in the university.

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