American Funds Help Build Free University at Berlin

Next year some Harvard student will have the opportunity to study free of charge at one of the world's youngest universities located in one of the world's oldest cities. Thanks to the Student Council, the Free University of Berlin is offering an undergraduate a tuition and maintenance scholarship plus rooms in a German villa for '52-'53.

The Free University was founded in '48 during the Russian blockade of Western Berlin. Professors and students from the old university in the Soviet sector of the city had come to General Lucius D. Clay to protest the restrictions imposed on them by the occupying Army. Instructors and students had been expelled from the school, arrested by the Russians, and deported to Soviet concentration camps. The student body was required to study communist doctrine, and Russian had now become a compulsory subject. "Progressive opinion" and a worker or peasant ancestry were now prerequisites for a degree.

Supplying funds from the American Military Government, Clay then gave the go-ahead to form a new, free university. The school began with an enrolment of 2140, which has since risen to 6,000, 2 percent of whom are foreign students.

The current operating expenses are met by taxes from Western Berlin, but the school still must rely on outside aid to continue functioning. Some such aid came last summer from the Ford Foundation which donated over $1,000,000 to the University "in acknowledgement of the contributions it made towards democratic education for responsible leadership. The money is going towards the contruction of new buildings like the one pictured above.

Interested students should apply for the scholarship at the Student Council Office in Phillips Brooks House.