Refugee Scholars

Last week earnest, spectacled Dr. Alvin Johnson, director of Manhattan's New School for Social Research, was trying to save some of Europe's un-blown-out brains. He had already succeeded in evacuating many of Germany's best scholars. Last week he and the U. S. Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars were after those trapped in France. Not since the fall of Constantinople in 1453 drove eastern scholars into western Europe has there been such a wholesale migration of culture.

The U. S. public is well aware that ex-German Albert Einstein is now a U. S. citizen, ex-German Thomas Mann is a citizen-to-be. Since Adolf Hitler began to liquidate German scholarship in 1933, every ship from Europe has borne eminent scholars to the U. S. Today many of them teach in U. S. colleges and universities. At Harvard are ex-Chancellor Heinrich Bruening; famed Architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer; renowned City Planner Martin Wagner; Werner Jaeger, one of the world's most eminent classical scholars.

University of Chicago has Nobel-prize-winning Physicist James Franck; Eduard Benes; Italy's famed Physicist Bruno Rossi and Novelist Giuseppe Borgese; distinguished Art Teacher Ulrich A. Middeldorf. At California Institute of Technology, German-born Dr. Spiro Kyropoulos is doing important research on oil; at University of California at Los Angeles is famed Composer Arnold Schoenberg. At Columbia University is renowned Viennese Neurologist Otto Marburg. Alvin Johnson's own Institute has on its graduate faculty ("University in Exile") Fernando de los Rios, onetime Spanish Ambassador; Erwin Piscator, onetime director of Berlin's People's Theatre; Economist Fritz Lehmann, many another scholar from Germany, Austria, Italy.

Refugees not from their own government but from the unscholarly din of European war are Britain's world-famed Bertrand Russell (soon to become a U. S. citizen); Ivor Armstrong Richards, now working on Basic English at Harvard; Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski at Yale. Last fortnight famed Finnish Architect Alvar Aalto, who was to direct Finland's reconstruction, changed his mind, decided to stay in the U. S. and teach at M. I. T. Latest scholarly arrivals in the U. S are University of Aberdeen's Lancelot Hog ben (Mathematics for the Million, Science for the Citizen) and his equally eminent wife, Dr. Enid Charles, Britain's No. 1 population expert. A semi-refugee, Lancelot Hogben was caught on a lecture tour in Norway by the German invasion, escaped through Russia to the U. S., last week appeared ready to stay if he could get a job.

By last week, the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars had brought almost 200 eminent men to the U. S. On its waiting list were 3,800 more. To its dismay, many a U. S. pedagogue grumbled that the U. S. had reached the saturation point for foreign scholars. Hit by declining incomes, colleges said that they faced a choice of hiring foreigners or native U. S. scholars.

Observing that U. S. colleges suffered not from competition but from fuddy-duddyism, Dr. Johnson and a committee colleague, Dr. Frank Aydelotte, assured them that U. S. scholars would not be displaced, asked that special professorships be created for eminent refugees. Said Dr. Johnson: "For the next generation the natural home of scholarship and science must be America."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.