Education: Precedent

University professors of all degrees and complexions of personal probity last week had the moral satisfaction of seeing a distinguished precedent established to separate their private conduct from their professorial status, in the eyes of the law.

In London an august glass door was smudged by curious noses (belonging to pressmen who had been barred along with all other observers from the courtroom). Above each nose a pair of eyes peered intently at five learned judges, at a culprit quite as learned as they. Eyebrows were lifted all round because the five judges were defying tradition and sitting without wigs or gowns—an event said to be without English legal precedent during the last century.

The half-bald and bushily mustached culprit thus honored by so informal a trial, was Dr. J. B. S. Haldane, a former reader in biochemistry at Cambridge University, a noted scientist recently much in the public eye*. His experiments and prophecies concerning ectogenesis (laboratory birth) long gave the impression that he believed birth by woman would eventually be done away with. It was therefore with consternation that his friends saw him named as corespondent in an uncontested divorce suit last December. At once the “Sex Viri” of Cambridge ousted him from his readership. His trial last week was an appeal from their ruling.

Among the noses without the glass door of the courtroom, “Sex Viri” was whispered often and with lewd import. To the prurient not even a Latin numeral is pure. The “Six Men” of Cambridge were wronged. Meanwhile the five judges at London decided that the “Sex Viri” had wronged Dr. Haldane. They sustained his appeal and rendered a verdict which is expected to create the legal precedent that the private life of a university man shall be considered as of no relation to his scholastic position.

Scandalized moralists cried: “Who were these unwigged, unrobed, tradition-mocking judges?” They were:

Justice Sir Horace E. Avory; John Withers, Member of Parliament for the university; Dr. Montague James, provost of Eton; Sir Walter M. Fletcher, secretary of the Medical Research Council, and Sir William Bragg, director of the Davy-Faraday research laboratory.

Simultaneously with Dr. Haldane’s exoneration by a benchful of distinguished gentlemen, the public-school teachers of Newport, Ky., were ordered by the local board of education to see that the lower hems of their skirts soared no higher than eleven inches (lower middle calf) from the ground, that their elbows were at all times covered decently. A mothers’ club had protested that shorter skirts and nude elbows distracted their progeny from salubrious concentration upon their studies.

*Nephew of encyclopedic-minded Viscount Haldane, lord chancellor of the Ramsay Macdonald (1924) Labor cabinet; author of Daedalus and Callinicus in the widely-read “Today and Tomorrow Series” of prophetic essays (E. P. Dutton & Co.); prophet of the extinction of agriculture (by synthetic foods); savior of child life by his discovery of ammonium chloride as a cure for convulsions.