Gannon Speaks Out

"Only a year ago, there were many loyal Americans--and I was one of them --who felt that this was not our war. We used to say that if the Soviets were wiped off the map it would be good riddance, and that the feeble, guilty old British Empire was not worth one American life. . . . Humiliating as it is, I am ready to confess that we were wrong and President Roosevelt was right. It was our war from the first."

With these vigorous words the president of America's biggest Roman Catholic university last week admitted publicly that he had been wrong--something that President Roosevelt himself has never done except about Thanksgiving. The author of this graceful admission is that urbanely dogmatic Jesuit, the very square-jawed Very Rev. Robert Ignatius Gannon S.J., who made it to his own students at the formal opening of Fordham's joist academic year.

Father Gannon is an educator who never lacks positive convictions. Among his pet bugaboos are:

> Letting students pick their own courses, which he blames on the late great Charles W. Eliot ("that Pied Piper of Harvard who 50 years ago had all the mice and men of American universities trailing behind him as he played the tune of electivism").

> Academic freedom, a "mumbo jumbo" that allows any educator "the privilege of uprooting all the true foundations of life." (Fordham follows Father Gannon's precept: "Students should be taught obedience to the constituted authority simply because it is the constituted authority. . . We do not expect to argue with a Fordham freshman. We expect them to do as they are told.")

> Progressive education ("a piece of rubber hose is at times worth ten years of the new psychology").

Father Gannon is noteworthy among Catholic college presidents for his outspokenness (most of his colleagues let the hierarchy do the talking), for publishing Fordham's annual accounts (unwritten Catholic law is to avoid public financial statements whenever possible), and for the fact that he is apparently scheduled to head his university for an indefinite period. Few presidents of Catholic colleges serve more than a set term, which in the 68 Jesuit-run schools (including Fordham) is six years. Father Gannon's term would normally have been up last June, but his superiors got round its regulation by appointing another Jesuit as rector of Fordham, continuing Father Gannon as president.

Last week, having recanted isolationism, he made clear what he now believes in. He wants the U.S. to plan for a perpetual draft after the war and to ignore "the usual long-haired men and short-haired women who will want at once to tear down our national defenses." He "will be surprised and very much dismayed if the U.S. ever disarms again." One benefit he foresees from compulsory peacetime military service is a permanent three-year college course to enable undergraduates to spend the fourth year in uniform: "Our young men will profit from a year's military training and will be saved a year of the wasted time that has always characterized American education."

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