Tribune Renews Series On Harvard 'Radicals'

Chicago Tribune reporter Eugene Griffin has resumed his search for alleged Communist influences at Harvard in a new series of articles which began this week.

The issue of "radicalism" at the University has again been raised by the prominence of Harvard professors at the recent Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, Griffin explained.

In a Wednesday story headlined "Harvard; U. S. Bulwark and Red Target," Griffin first extolled the University's traditional "heavy contribution to patriotic Americanism," but then singled out "idealistic intellectuals" as the "prize prey of Communist front organizations."

Affiliations of Harvard professors with "Communist front" movements has caused serious concern in Washington, Griffin says. He claims that University teachers and graduates have "influenced high government policy since the beginning of the New Deal."

Alumni Alarmed

Many loyal alumni are also alarmed over the ties of Harvard professors, Griffin maintains, because of suspicious that undergraduates are being exposed to "too much liberalism."

Griffin numbered "about two dozen Harvard teachers or almost 5 percent of the permanent faculty" as being frequent supporters of Communist front movements. "Harvard regularly leads other universities in the number of professors endorsing petitions in sympathy with Communist party policy."

Support

He claimed that Communists are enlisting professors to the Red cause by having them back with their names and money leftist meetings and literature, and by having them protest, any restrictions of Communists or Communist groups.

The Harvard intellectuals who go along with the Communists have "one common altruistic dream," adds Griffin, namely that "they all share the vision of a one world utopia."

In the second of the series of articles which appeared in Thursday's Tribune, Griffin devotes himself entirely to a dis-

cussion of Harlow Shapley, director of the University Observatory, whom he describes as "one of the most distinguished (persons) ever enlisted in a Communist front cause." Griffin charged Shapley of having connections with over a dozen "front groups."

The only other professors specifically named were F. O. Matthiessen, professor of History and Literature; Allen M. Butlor, professor of Pediatrics at the Medical School; and Walter O. Roberts, "a Shapley protege" at the Observatory. All three participated in the Shapley backed world peace conference.

"Reducators"

Griffin attributes his claims of faculty leftist front affiliations to the National Council for American Education, a New York group which recently released a report intitled "Red-ucators at Harvard." The report asserted that 76 members of the faculty have or have had 366 affiliations with 124 Communist front groups.

The current series of articles marks the second time that the Tribune has "studied radical thoughts at Harvard." In January 1947 Griffin wrote a series on the same subject after spending several days in Cambridge. At that time he wrote that "Harvard makes almost a fetish of permitting radicalism to florish."

At that time Shapley, Kirtley F. Mathor, professor of Geology, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. '37, associate professor of History, were described as professors who frequently came "out from behind their books to toe the party line."

Griffin traveled to Boston twice this year to gain material for his latest articles