PRUNES AND PRISMS

Old maids of both sexes were taking extra looks under their beds last week, and the air smelt rank and musty, as a wrathy bishop thundered against the appointment of Bertrand Russell as a professor and department head at the College of the City of New York. Puffing out his decent cheeks in righteous indignation, the Right Reverend William Thomas Manning wheezed that the eminent Briton had a past. And a lurid list of exploits it is, one than should automatically disqualify him as an instructor of the pure and innocent American youth. For the Earl has been married three times, divorced on charges of adultery, and has specifically defended in his writings sexual relations "as a purely private matter which does not concern the state or the neighbors." What is to become of us, with this "propagandist against morality" on the loose, fumed the New York divine, lifting his hands in palsied dread.

But Mr. Russell has been invited to teach courses in mathematics and logic, and not to expound his own personal ethics. With Professor Whitehead, one of the greatest logicians of our day, he has pushed far forward into the tortuous ways of logical analysis. A colorful, ruggedly independent thinker, prevented by his government from accepting a post proferred by Harvard, he was thrown into an English jail in 1918 as a conscientious objector. There he wrote his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, cutting new paths into unexplored realms. Characteristically, he studied Russian Communism on the spot. For some time he lectured at Peking University. Best known to the public for his speaking, journalism, and provocative, popular books, his greatest work, done in collaboration with Whitehead, is Principia Mathematics. A mathematical milestone, this book will stand up under the criticism of even so broadminded a man as Bishop Manning.

The Bishop need not blush for youth's pained surprise when it hears this moral monster, or expect an era of free love to be ushered in. Students of college age no longer have to go back of the barn to whisper the facts of life. His is a naive, almost insulting, estimate of the moral fibre of youth. Extended the hospitality of C.C.N.Y., and due to give twelve guest lectures at Harvard next year, Mr. Russell will offer his many hearers a glimpse of a trenchant mind, and a taste of new knowledge. And medieval blasts of hot air won't scare them away.