President Lowell Counters Bertrand Russell's Charges

Replying to various charges made against Harvard by the Hon. Bertrand Russell and printed in the CRIMSON, President Lowell yesterday addressed the following letter to the English essayist:

"If correctly reported in your interview in the CRIMSON this morning, I think that you must be laboring under a misapprehension. You speak an if the Trustees--at Harvard we call them Governing Boards-- decided who should speak at the Harvard Union. The Harvard Union is an association of students and graduates, over which the Governing Boards exercise no more control than the authorities of Oxford and Cambridge do over the question of who shall speak, or what shall be said, in the Oxford and Cambridge Unions.

"You speak as if there were more academic freedom in English universities than here. That seems to me also a misapprehension. At Oxford not long ago, if I am right, a students' publication, "The New Oxford", was suppressed on account of remarks that it contained. Nothing of the kind has, I believe, occurred here within the memory of man. During the war you lost your fellowship at Cambridge on account of your opinions. No such thing happened at Harvard. Throughout the war we kept and protected a German subject in our instructing staff. In spite of outcries for their dismissal, from alumni and others. Professor Munsterberg and Mr. Lashi were unflinchingly maintained in their positions. Throughout all trials Harvard has stood, and will stand, for the fullest academic freedom. Since the outbreak of the war and the foment of opinions that it caused, few institutions of learning have had so clear a record in maintaining this principle, and none could have a clearer one for it has been without flaw."