USE OF KU KLUX KLAN TACTICS IN FACULTY SEEN BY WALDROP

Entitled "Harvard's Ku Klux," a feature by Franck C. Waldrop which appeared recently in the Washington "Star-Times," accuses the Harvard faculty of taking advantage of its position in order to force interventionist ideas upon young instructors and students.

"Of course the professors don't call themselves Ku Klux Klanners. They call themselves patriots who are acting in their country's best interests when they gang up on some disagreeable neighbor and run him out of town before daybreak," Waldrop writes.

Waldrop says that he received his information from a group of students in Cambridge, "not one of whom is a Red, a Nazi, or a Republican." He claims that his informants said that they were disgusted with getting propaganda instead of facts in their courses.

"Instead of teaching facts, these professors are following the party line laid down by Harvard's president, James Bryant Conant, who feels the United States should long since have declared war on Germany.

"To encircle all of Harvard's faculty and student body with this party line, they hold an endless series of teas, benefits and other seances; circulate petitions and strike attitudes.

"The young assistant professor, instructor, or graduate student trying to get on Harvard's permanent faculty must attend these doings or get a black mark," the article states.

Waldrop names Roger Bigelow Merriman '96, Gurney Professor of History, and William Y. Elliott, professor of Government, as the worst offenders. "These two are typical of the organized minority determined to stamp out of Harvard's faculty and student body any question of the rightness of an all-out war on Germany.

He accuses Sidney B. Fay '96, professor of History and author of the "Origins of the World War," of back tracking and being insincere in supporting an interventionist stand today. Waldrop says he was cowered into changing his mind about the war by "intellectual terrorism" at Harvard.

"One or two men of note, such as philosopher William Ernest Hocking '01 have even stood up to President Conant, let alone cussed the Kluxers. . . . And the boys are taking bets on what will happen to him."