THE GOLDEN CHAIN

Nicholas Murray Butler, in his annual report as president of Columbia, touches on the problem of "Lehrfreiheit--freedom of university teaching." As he points out, the controversy on this subject has accompanied the universities in their rise from the earliest times. Connected at first, with questions of religion, it now embraces matters of philosophy, science, polities, or whatever else is to hand. "The University," says President Butler, "can only live in the atmosphere of Lehrfreiheit"; but to this he appends a limitation: the exercise of Lehrfreiheit can not include bitter ridicule or scorn for the opinions of others: It must be curtailed "cut of respect for the high place and dignity of an university."

The question of freedom of teaching is one rooted in every soil. Tennessee is concerned: so, recently, was New York. In Professor Irving Babbitt's essay on "Academic Leisure" still an other more indirect please of the subject is lighted up. In mentioning words of such universal importance. President Butler assumed a responsibility to contribute something to one side of the other. As he remarks. "Universities are from time to time denounced as nurseries of revolution by these who are quite unable to comprehend what freedom to seek the truth really means and involves." He proceeds to defend the implications of the statement but concludes with a warning against the fall from dignity caused by attacks on others.

These final remarks of President Butler's are too deftly conciliatory to escape the charge of sophism. In this, they illustrate a fundamental obstacle to academic freedom in this country. The entire educative mechanism is bound up in a complex of interdependencies which hamper free action. President Butler adroitly approves the theory and forbids the act, just as do so many other leaders of education; they are all accountable to some lone who would be injured by an undue enthusiasm over truth. It is certain that freedom in teaching is desirable. But it is a futile hope until the departmental and the endowment systems are so altered as to make of them aids' rather than chains.