Education: What Makes Them Run?

In Manhattan’s East Harlem, as Congressman Vito Marcantonio wound up his campaign just before Election Day, 62 Princeton undergraduates were pushing doorbells, making sound-truck speeches, and doing their level best (which wasn’t enough) to get Vito defeated. In Philadelphia, Princetonians worked with a non-partisan committee which uncovered an estimated 4,000 unqualified voters. In Trenton, 40 students were working with Negro political leaders to figure out what makes Negroes vote the way they do. On Election Day, 250 Princetonians in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey were watching polls, transporting voters, working at party headquarters. It was part of their homework.

A Class into Politics. Their professor, Kenneth W. Hechler (pronounced heckler), 34, has one pet hate: “The self-satisfied individual who looks down his nose at politics.” Since he joined the Princeton faculty a year ago to teach politics, he has been trying to give his students an idea of what makes political machines and candidates run. He couldn’t find the material he needed in books. The problem was to get politics into the classroom, and the class into politics.

He accomplished the first by taking his cue from Jim Farley. (During the 1932 Democratic Convention, Farley had stiffened wavering Roosevelt delegates by having F.D.R. give them a pep talk over the phone from Albany.) Hechler decided to bring this effective political instrument into the classroom. Now, when students come to Hechler’s class, they hear him saying into a telephone: “Hello? Mr. Paul Hoffman? Mr. Hoffman, I’d like you to explain . . .” The answers come to the whole class through a loudspeaker.

A Class in Pajamas. By telephone Hechler has brought men like Norman Thomas and George Gallup into his classroom. Judge Sam Rosenman sleepily answered the phone and said: “It’s certainly novel to be attending class in pajamas.” Hechler usually asks the first question, then students can grab the phone and ask a few themselves. Hechler has paid the long-distance charges himself. “If I can stir the students up, I can count the money well spent.”

In the year he has been at Princeton, Hechler’s classes have grown to about six times their original size. A left-of-center Republican himself, he doesn’t try to influence students’ beliefs, although, he says, “most of them are much too conservative for me.” He only tries to get them interested and active in politics.

The time has come, he thinks, to practice what he preaches. In February, he intends to quit teaching for a while to take a Government job. Says he: “I’d like to get a little closer to things. It adds to the value of a teacher if he gets out where the governing is done.”