Education: Student Conference

“You are beginning to see that the best thing you can do as the result of this conference is to utilize as you have not and do not utilize, your opportunities to learn in your colleges and schools; to learn how to think. You don’t know how.” Thus Dr. Albert Parker Fitch, educator and theologian, to several hundred young university men and women who assembled in Evanston, Ill., last week for an Interdenominational Student Conference. Dr. Fitch had been listening to a long abstract wrangle over the definition of “the Church” by undergraduate debaters.

The purpose of the Conference was to bring young minds together to diagnose and prescribe for the ills of the world. It was reported that, “carried on the wings of song and prayer and undimmed idealism, they sought to bring close the poet’s vision of the brotherhood of man, the federation of the world.”

Thus war was a subject on the program, and 181 delegates signified that they would utterly refuse to participate in “the next one”; but 65 felt that their duty to their country or their God might lie in fighting; and 215 “had not thought the thing through.”

The church was appraised. As is usual at such gatherings, an older man was first called upon to speak, in this case Dr. Hubert Herring, social secretary of a Boston, Mass., church. With a flair for pat and alliterative statements, he said: “The man in the street has come to regard the church purely as an agency for propaganda … as an organization that is trying to mesmerize him with soft music and big buildings. . . . The church has become too much institutionalized— something that may be summed up by using three B’s—bishops, buildings and budgets.”

Stanley Dowley, communist undergraduate of Ohio State University, raised in coal-mining southern Illinois, said: “The church has always been the weapon of the capitalist class against the working class.”

Mattie Julian, Negress, of De Paul University, said: “Too many of the churches have ministers who belong to the Ku Klux Klan. . . . Church people should support the anti-lynching law.”

The missionary movement became a storm centre when Dr. R. E. Diffendorfer, fatherly secretary of the Methodist Board of Foreign Missions, beamed down from the platform and addressed someone as “my boy.” Amid angry growls and mutterings from the audience, a loud voice vociferated, as reported in public prints: “Youth has been ‘my-boyed’ by a lot of old dunderheads until it’s fed up. That’s why this conference is here.” Y. T. Wu, a Chinese delegate, charged that the mission movement is a growth forced on China at the point of the sword; and a Commission on Foreign Missions brought in other indictments—exploitation of “the heathen,” Americanization of proselytes, military protection of missionaries and indemnities for those molested by “the heathen.”

In the galleries of the convention hall sat avid observers, some of whom were accused by the Executive Committee of asking delegates out to meals, to private discus sion groups, to private prayer meetings, and otherwise lobbying to direct the conference along arbitrary and denominational lines. Such persons were discountenanced and frustrated. Freedom of speech was maintained, though an instructor from the University of Michigan, one Francis Onderdonk, with a world peace plan “simple as a flivver” (cinema films showing war’s horrors) was thought to be an un necessary adjunct to the program and denied a hearing, even when he went on a hunger strike to get it.

Some delegates demonstrated their forceful tolerance by proposing to boycott a local cafeteria which had refused admittance to a Liberian colleague, C. G. Blooah. The proposal was voted down, but Mr. Blooah’s friends walked across town “to eat at a nice Negro restaurant.”

From a soapbox in front of the meeting hall, Thomas Q. (“Pat”) Harrison, U. S. Captain in the War, delivered to a raccoon-coated street crowd a harangue on “The Sin of War,” which he was barred from giving inside. Firebrand of Boston’s last Armistice Day celebration, Mr. Harrison is sponsoring a revolt against war. He cried : “We fellows are going to band ourselves together under a vow of poverty. We’ll not go hungry, but We’ll get along with as little as we can so we’ll know we’re not taking from the Poor We’ll work for small pay. We’ll have to get alone with few children. Our wives will have to work. But nobody will own us and we’ll keep our freedom to speak out for social justice!’ , Within as the sessions drew to a close Dr. Fitch characterized the assembly as “distinctly religious and conservative.”