Shuster Threatens

For months President George Nauman Shuster of Manhattan's public Hunter College got complaints. Some of his widely assorted faculty of over 500 seemed likely to tell their widely assorted girl students almost anything. Finally President Shuster sent everybody on the staff a letter which approved "scholarly or scientific enquiry" but threatened to prefer charges against teachers who expounded views abhorred by most Americans./- Published last week, the letter showed these to be the views to which President Shuster objected:

>That this war ought not to be supported.

>That Jews and Negroes are inferior races.

> That the Russian system and ideology surpass the American. > That the Papacy and all Catholics are at heart advocates of Naziism and Fascism and therefore anti-American.

Some old Shuster friends were unhappy about his letter. They felt as if he were threatening just about everybody in sight. The pinko-red tabloid PM first saluted Shuster as "realistic, contemporary and liberal," but two days later attacked him for "applying the method of command and authoritarianism. . . ."

Hunter's Aim. Yet few could doubt that Dr. Shuster's aim was what he said it was: to protect everybody's feelings in a college community of 10,000 hard-working girls. Wisconsin-born President Shuster is no doctrinaire scholar, but a lively example of fair-mindedness. He is a Notre Dame graduate who publicly protested when Notre Dame's 'president tried to clamp university censorship on the off-campus liberal speeches of Associate Professor Francis Elmer McMahon (TIME, Dec. 20). President Shuster wrote his forthcoming book on Germany with Dr. Arnold Bergstraesser, who at California's Scripps College and the University of Chicago has had to contend with extramural attacks due to his activities in Nazi Germany a decade ago. President Shuster is also a watchdog for the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes all restrictions on academic freedom.

For years George Nauman Shuster taught English, edited the liberal Catholic

Commonweal. Later he specialized in German affairs, wrote the footnotes to Reynal & Hitchcock's edition of Mein Kampf. In World War I he was a sergeant; now he serves on the State Department's Advisory Committee on Cultural Relations. Another great current interest of President Shuster is the college community center, near Hunter's superb, modernistic building on Manhattan's swank Park Avenue. It is the Sara Delano Roosevelt Memorial, the united former town houses of President Roosevelt and his mother. Attractively refurnished in what Dr. Shuster calls "B. Altman Empire" style, the center is used by Hunter's social, hobby and religious groups.

/- Last week the International Latex Corp., whose Playtex girdle "controls but does not constrict or bind," enthusiastically reprinted the letter in newspaper ads.

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