Dynamite at Harvard

Radio is dynamite. That is a word with a Greek derivation and an alarming connotation. The Greek word means power, and it is the explosive power, the dynamite of radio, that has at once stirred such extravagant hopes and bred such caution over its use.

So says Charles Arthur Siepmann, veteran British educator and BBC director, who last week began a course on radio at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. It will be no ordinary course because Teacher Siepmann has his own ideas. One of six children of a German emigre to England, Siepmann attended Oxford, won the Military Cross in World War I as a British artilleryman in Italy. Pioneer headmaster of one of the Borstal schools for delinquents, where he introduced radio into the curriculum, he joined BBC in 1927, organized radio discussion groups until 1932 when he was made director of talks. Four years later he became program chief.

Scholar Siepmann is convinced that radio permits the concentration of power in the hands of a few--power to blast social concepts, to construct or destroy. He is appalled by the fact that of the 500 U.S. universities offering radio courses, only four (Harvard, Princeton, U. of Southern California, Lancaster, Pa.'s Franklin and Marshall College) touch on its social implications.

In pessimistic moments, Siepmann is convinced that the misuse of radio contributes mightily to driving the public toward fascism. Two of the most terrifying phrases in all human language, he thinks, are Hitler's avowed objectives, for which radio is a chief tool: "psychological decomposition of the masses" and "mental confusion, contradiction of feeling, indecision, panic [among Nazi enemies]."

He is also somewhat critical of U.S. radio, for being complacent under "advertiser domination." To advertisers' claim that they give the public what it wants, he retorts with a crack from George Bernard Shaw: "Get what you want or you will soon get to like what you are given."

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