Education: Sugar Coated Study

Students at New York’s City College have become accustomed to discovering that their pompous college officials have feet of clay. Four years ago they tittered when their president, bland Dr. Frederick B. Robinson, wrote an article for Bernarr Macfadden’s sensational True Story Magazine. Last week City College’s students caught another member of the administration in an embarrassing position.

Students in the College’s School of Business and Civic Administration have no great love for its dictatorial dean, Dr. Justin H. Moore. In 1934 he suppressed an April Fool issue of The Ticker, student weekly, for “obscenity.” He once censored the Monthly, has suspended editors for sauciness. Last week student editors learned that in 1934 Dean Moore wrote a book called Mexican Love, hitherto unknown to U. S. readers because it was published in London by Herbert Jenkins, Ltd., publishers of popular fiction.

City College’s student publications thereupon published belated reviews of this book. Chapter titles: “A Platonic Kiss,” “A Siren’s Boudoir,” “A Mistress Dissatisfied.” Its big scene: a nude woman, lying on a couch of black velvet, seducing the hero: ” ‘You hold yourself in control like a bloodhound in leash,’ she said with a provocative movement of her lips. . . . Flushed, panting, in a frenzy of passion, she clung to him, kissing him with avid lips, aroused to wild lubricity. ‘Beat me if you like,’ she cried, ‘strike me, crush me. I crave violence.’ ”

Violent were the guffaws on City College’s campus when Dr. Moore’s work was reviewed last week. One student publication reported that U. S. Postal authorities had threatened to bar it from the mails if it printed a story containing excerpts from the book, and that John S. Sumner, head of the N. Y. Society for the Suppression of Vice, had denounced Mexican Love.

Meanwhile, successive editions of the Manhattan press printed fresh explanations by Dean Moore. Said he: “There’s nothing wrong with the book. Matter of fact, it’s on Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s preferred list. . . . It’s a sugar-coated study of a social scene. . . . When you write a book for young people, that is, for the general public, you like to make the titles rather interesting.”