Education: Late School

Infantile paralysis throughout the whole country was increasing slightly last week —a regular autumnal phenomena. However, in the eastern communities which endured epidemics during the past month, the disease was waning.

Nonetheless, most communities bothered by infantile paralysis have ordered the opening of schools delayed a week or longer. New York City’s schools were scheduled to open Sept. 14. They will open Sept. 22. (But Sept. 21 is the Jewish Day of Atonement.) Nearby cities in New York State and New Jersey will keep schools closed a week or two longer.

New Haven and about 29 other Connecticut communities have announced indefinite extension of the summer vacation.

Boston schools were to open Sept. 10. But fearful parents there may keep their children from attendance until Oct. 1 before truant officers will call.

Midwestern and western school openings will not be delayed.

The wisdom of keeping children out of school during an infectious epidemic, as of infantile paralysis, last week struck Dr. Thomas Parran, New York State Commissioner of Health, as poor. His advice: “In the school there is the opportunity for careful observation of the children to detect any signs of illness. Our observations have indicated, moreover, that a great majority of children are not being kept on their own premises or restricted as to attendance at other places of public assemblage. Next to their own home and yard, I believe the school is the safest place for children.”

L.A.C.M.

There is an aristocracy among U.S. private colleges and universities: a group of ten which owns 43% of all recorded endowment funds. Then comes a bourgeoisie of 90, which owns 38% of the total. Then a proletariat of 300. which has 19%. It is the proletariat which feels most badly treated, for it teaches 41% of all the students in the group,* while the aristocracy teaches but 17% and the bourgeoisie 42%.

To better the condition of their colleges, 45 presidents met in January 1930, and labeled themselves the Liberal Arts College Movement. Direction of the movement was later given to a committee of 15 under the chairmanship of President Albert Norman Ward of Western Maryland College. After compiling the above figures, he said: “There seems to be something unfair about the distribution of college opportunities. We need the great colleges and the great universities. . . . But at the same time ample provision should be made for all institutions which are called upon to bear their share in providing a liberal higher education for all who are worthy of it. … As things now stand, equal opportunities are shamefully lacking.”

To obtain these opportunities, the

L.A.C.M. will emit publicity, maintain a fact-finding bureau, enlist the aid of prominent persons, help its constituent colleges raise money. It now has 235 member-colleges, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish, with an average enrolment of 600, average assets of $1,500,000.

To seek aid from President Herbert Hoover last week went a committee which included President Rees Edgar Tulloss of Wittenberg College (Springfield. Ohio), President George Leslie Omwake of Ursinus College (Collegeville, Pa.), Dr. Norman Jay Gould Wickey, executive secretary of the Board of Education of the United Lutheran Church, and Senator Simeon D. Fess of Ohio, onetime (1907-17) president of Antioch College (Yellow Springs, Ohio). President Hoover agreed to serve as a member of the national sponsoring committee of the Movement, to make a speech for it over the radio in November.

Hard-hit by Depression, small colleges throughout the land are all economizing, according to members of the L.A.C.M. Many are threatened with extinction. Some recent evidences:

¶ From Abingdon, Va. to Bristol. Va. Tenn. this week goes Martha Washington College (female, Methodist Episcopal Church South) to merge with Sullins College (female Methodist). Most of Martha Washington’s teachers have lost their jobs. Abingdon now has no college: Stonewall Jackson College merged in 1929 with King College (male) at Bristol.

¶ In Barboursville, W. Va., President Leonard Riggleman of Morris Harvey College announced that farm produce would be accepted this year in lieu of cash for tuition.

¶ In Lubbock, Tex., Herbert D. Bell swapped a truckload of beans for three months room & board at Texas Technological College.

Youth v. Crisis

U. S. delegates to the tenth annual conference of the International Student Service, a goodwill organization which grew out of relief work done for students in Europe just after the War, were reticent for the first few days of the meetings last week at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Mass. Then, as often happens, they burst into hot excoriation of their own countrymen.

Lamented Alexander Duncan Langmuir, Harvard 1931, onetime president of the Harvard Liberal Club: “Nothing but pinching shoes and empty stomachs will ever make American students sit up and realize that they have a government. . . . They are not even well-informed. . .”

Lamented President Edward R. Murrow of the National Student Federation of America: “American students don’t even know a crisis exists. The only question that interests them … is Prohibition.”

European students consoled them: “You are too impatient . . . unduly pessimistic. Numbers of German students don’t even know what the Kellogg Pact is.”

* Which does not include State universities, or the nation’s 350 smallest institutions, for which complete figures are lacking.