Salzburg Seminar Opens Third Year

The Salzburg Seminar, after two years in the test tube, will work to establish itself on a permanent basis this summer.

Because of the success of the Seminar's first two seasons its administrators feel that, "future changes will be in procedure, not principle."

Work on the third Seminar this summer is already under way. Executives are now working on lists of faculty members, and of Harvard undergraduates to serve as administrative workers.

Professor John Finch of Dartmouth, executive director of the Seminar, will leave for Europe this week to supervise the choice of students for the six week project. This Saturday, Student Council and Seminar representatives will visit Briarcliff Junior College to publicize the Seminar at a "Student's World's Fair."

The Seminar itself is a summer session of lectures and discussions on American history, literature, government, art, economics, and sociology. The student body in wholly European, and the faculty is wholly American.

Students all study on the graduate level, and most of them are potential leaders in education and politics. They live and work in an eighteenth century chateau, Schloss Leopoldskron, set facing a small lake just outside the Austrian city of Salzburg.

Friendly contact between the East and West, virtually non-existent in diplomacy, is maintained in the Seminar, which has several students from Czechoslovakia and plans to invite Polish students for the 1949 session.

Among the students in the first two years were ex-prisoners of war in Germany and ex-prisoners of war in America, underground workers, a Messerschmidt fighter pilot, De Gaullists, and Communists. All studied and lived side by side.

Stanford, Yale, MIT, Stevens, Fiske, and Washington University of St. Louis have followed Harvard's lead by sponsoring international students' centers in the United States and abroad.

In its first two years the Seminar has received plaudits from participants and observers. Joseph Charles, Cultural Relations Officer of the American Embassy at London sent an enthusiastic report to the State Department after a brief stay at the Seminar.

He noted the superiority of a critical academic approach to American life, rather than the use of propaganda as a method to create understanding between European countries and the United States.

A French student of literature who spent a summer at the Seminar said, "with respect to American life of today I can say that the Seminar has been the best teacher I have ever had, and that it is the best way to make people of every nation understand each other."

F. O. Matthiessen, professor of English Literature, spent a summer at the Seminar, and published a description of it in his recent book. "From the Heart of Europe." He wrote, "It was the greatest teaching experience I have ever had and ever hope to have."