Noble Inspiration

No small portion of New York University's fame derives from the quasi-official Hall of Fame which was founded within its precincts and entrusted to its care in 1900 by Mrs. Finley J. Shepard at the suggestion of the late Henry Mitchell MacCracken, Chancellor (1891-1911) of N. Y. U. There, august in bronze and marble, stand the busts of 49 famed Americans, including Robert Fulton, Horace Mann, Maria Mitchell, Edgar Allen Poe, Ulysses Simpson Grant, George Washington, Mark Hopkins, Gilbert Charles Stuart. There, too, shall stand John Quincy Adams, George Bancroft James Fenimore Cooper, Patrick Henry, James Russell Lowell, John Lothrop Motley, Joseph Story, Elias Howe, whenever their admirers get around to having busts executed.

President Hoover, in a telegram which he sent last week regretting that he could not be present to unveil a bust of President James Madison, called the Hall of Fame and its periodic unveiling ceremonies, "a noble inspiration to the young." Eight-year-old Betty Glenn Walker, a descendant of Madison's brother, substituted for President Hoover.

Other busts unveiled last week were those of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, Emma Willard, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Clay, Francis Parkman.

The public may nominate for the Hall of Fame any of its heroes, provided they have been dead 25 years. The names are considered by a New York University Senate. If two Senators approve of a name it goes to a nation-wide committee of electors, which includes no N. Y. U. officials. The names which receive at least three-fifths of the votes are thereupon inscribed in the Hall.

In Tokyo lately, 400 university students were asked by the house committee of an English-speaking society to decide by ballot which were the Ten Greatest Englishmen. The plan: to hang portraits of the Big Ten in the society's clubhouse. The students elected the following Big Ten: Robert Louis Stevenson, Admiral Nelson, Ramsay MacDonald, George Bernard Shaw, Edward I., David Lloyd George, Shakespeare, Darwin, Adam Smith, Pitt the Younger.

The clubmen, bewildered, decided to hang ten British landscapes. U. S. and British professors, amused, wondered if there were 400 students in the U. S. or England who could so much as name ten famed Japanese.

Pittsburgh's Pother

The University of Pittsburgh no longer has a Liberal Club. Two of its student leaders have been expelled. Pittsburgh's Professor of Philosophy Frederick E. Woltman has also been expelled. A visiting celebrity lectured, not in Pittsburgh's Alumni Hall, as he had been invited to do, but in a vacant lot. Thus stood matters last week at the University of Pittsburgh and thus they seemed likely to stand.

The Liberal Club, a recognized student activity, intended to hold a forum on the Mooney-Billings case in California,* received University permission to hold it in Alumni Hall. Then Pittsburgh's Chancellor John G. Bowman decided and declared that the Club was using the University's name to propagandize. He revoked the permission. Sociologist Harry Elmer Barnes of Smith College, who was to have spoken in the hall, agreed to speak anyway, anywhere. The Liberal Club found a vacant lot for its meeting. For holding the meeting at all, the club was abolished.

Philosophy Professor Woltman, no Liberal Club member, was expelled because he, blond, vivacious, bright-eyed like those who battle for "causes," had been protesting against the existence and power of the private police' forces employed by Pennsylvania coal and iron industrialists to protect their property. He had been arrested once for rioting, once for speaking at a police-prohibited meeting. University officials had frowned often on the earnest young philosopher, had feared that because of him Pennsylvania's Governor John S. Fisher might cut down on the University's appropriations. Last week, after the Woltman expulsion, came a $1,200,000 state appropriation for the University. Many a Woltman supporter averred that had the philosopher not been expelled the appropriation would have been only $1,000,000.

Although the Woltman expulsion coin cided with the Liberal Club expulsions, it seemed, last week, that their specific causes were separate.

To followers of the career of Harry Elmer Barnes, the Pittsburgh expulsions came as no surprise. Wherever Professor Barnes goes something is likely to happen.

In his lecture room at Smith College, toying with a large Phi Beta Kappa key at his midriff, Professor Barnes lectures daily to about 30 eager students on Sociology ("Sosh"). He speaks in monotones. His delight is to say things which sound shocking. Smith students often take their mothers to his lectures, sometimes their gentleman friends. Professor Barnes will suggest, say, for example: "If I should put a spinning wheel on this platform you would laugh because it is so oldfashioned. You should laugh too if I mentioned the Virgin Birth." You may be sure there is a breathless hush after that.

Because of his jubilant championship of science, his claim that it calls for a new conception of God, Professor Barnes has lately been much in the public press. Up-and-doing magazines have paralleled his articles with articles by Harry Emerson Fosdick et al. Gleefully, last week, America ("Catholic Review of the Week") took a fling at him, charged that he had carbon-copied his articles, quoted identical Barnes-storming passages from Current History, Forum, Scientific Monthly.

At Des Moines

Dr. T. T. Shields, president of the board of trustees of Fundamentalist Baptist Des Moines University, was speaking last week to the board's secretary-treasurer, Miss Edith Rebman. He had just done a remarkable thing. He had expelled the university's president, Dr. Harry Clifford Wayman. He had also expelled the entire faculty (38 members). He had even expelled the janitors.

He was speaking of these things to approving Miss Rebman, of having turpitudinous relations with whom the trustees had just cleared him, when whizz came an egg through the open window, splashed against a portrait of the University Founder. A rock followed. Dr. Shields and Secretary-Treasurer Rebman plunged beneath a desk. There they thought of what had happened, wondered what was going to happen.

What had happened was that Dr. Shields, believing he had seen the gleam of Modernism in the eyes of a Des Moines University professor, had asked President Wayman to expel him and six others who seemed to have similar gleams. President Wayman had refused. A meeting of the board of trustees upheld Dr. Shields and his loyal secretary-treasurer. Thereupon Dr. Shields exuberantly expelled everybody.

What happened after Dr. Shields ducked under the desk was a shower of eggs, rocks, fruit, skins, fish. Then came the students, 400 strong, irate, crying, "Lets get Shields! Hurray for Wayman!"

The Des Moines police appeared after a while, dispersed the riotous students. Guarded in a police wagon. Dr. Shields and Secretary-Treasurer Rebman were carried to the safety of a precinct police station. There Dr. Shields admitted he knew not what he would do next.

To the University of Des Moines came sudden stillness, peace. There were no classes for a while. But then six studious students got a court injunction restraining the trustees. Classes resumed uncertainly.

*In 1916, Thomas J. Mooncy and Warren K. Billings, trade-unionists, were accused and convicted of murder after a bomb which killed ten, had been thrown into a San Francisco "Preparedness" parade. Later evidence seemed to prove them not guilty. Their judge and nine of their ten living jurors have since declared them guiltless. California has not reconsidered their case, which is now before Governor C. C. Young for a pardon. To propagandize in their favor a national "Mooney-Billings Committee" has been formed. Among its members are: Harry Elmer Barnes, Clarence Darrow, John Dewey, Glenn Frank, Alexander Meiklejohn, H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise.