ROUNDSMEN OF THE HORD

For sheer bigotry recent repressive action against freedom of expression at the University of Washington deserves the prize. Simultaneous new dispatches from Seattle contain the information that H. J. Chambers, Instructor in English, has been placed on probation and refused reappointment for reading to his class the first chapter of Bertrand Russell's "What I Believe", and that editors of "Columns", the monthly literary magazine, have been barred from all campus activities for a year and their magazine suspended for publishing a burlesque life of Abraham Lincoln.

The narrow religeous and patriotic tenets which make possible such action are expressions of that reactionary and Czaristic spirit which is the worst enemy of modern American education. It regards the school and the college alike as primarily the strongholds of traditional opinion. He hides under the mask of 'good citizenship". He makes impossible any other educational system than that which trains the students in acceptance, a prettier way of saying that it straight-jackets the intelligence. What then becomes of the Tutorial System, of the Honors course, of Dr. Meiklejohn's college, all of which are in fundamental opposition to such a philosophy? There is no war here between political, or religious, or economic conservatism and radicalism. The dust raising activities of the Red Peril Chaser cannot obscure the issue. The choice is simple. Are the school and college to train educated men or obscurantists.