Fascism at U. S. C.

Since 1870 many a U.S. campus has been afflicted with the approximate equivalent of a combined Ku Klux Klan and Tammany Hall. Its name: Theta Nu Epsilon. No innocent social fraternity. T.N.E. is an outlaw* interfraternity society whose anonymous and generally hard-drinking members often work in secret to control student governments, campus newspapers, fraternity memberships and prom lists, in flagrant defiance of faculty edicts.

At University of Southern California last year, T.N.E. members presumed to warn fraternity-shunning veterans of World War II not to seek campus office or promote their own social society, "Trovets." Promptly U.S.C.'s able President Rufus B. von KleinSmid began an enthusiastic campaign of extermination. Last week the battle reached a climax.

With an election coming up to choose new members of the T.N.E.-dominated Student Senate, President von KleinSmid demanded that the Senate make public a full list of T.N.E. members. When no list appeared, he disbanded the Senate, removed the student president and secretary from office, canceled the election. A faculty committee denounced T.N.E. as a promoter of "native fascism."

Led by the campus newspaper, Daily Trojan, fraternity men howled their indignation. But non-fraternity men, sick of T.N.E. domination, hailed the President's action. Said one: "They ought to suspend every member."

*A legitimate T.N.E., result of a national reorganization in 1925, enjoyed a brief span of respectability, had died quietly of inanition by 1942.

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