"Murder!"

Within four blocks of each other on Manhattan's Morningside Heights are two of the most famed U. S. schools--Horace Mann and Lincoln. Run by Columbia University's Teachers College, they are laboratories of Progressive Education, have been models for public schools far & near. Lincoln School is "experimental," changes its curriculum whenever it has a new idea. Horace Mann is a "demonstration" school with a stable curriculum, made up in part of ideas tried at Lincoln.

Last year progressive educators heard with dismay that T. C.'s Dean William Fletcher Russell planned to merge Lincoln and Horace Mann* (TIME, June 5), because T. C. had an $844,000 deficit, and Horace Mann was not paying its way. Lincoln's parents and teachers protested that marriage between a "demonstration" and an "experimental" school was impossible. Said old Abraham Flexner, one of Lincoln's founders: "In that amalgamation no human ingenuity can prevent the practical extinction of the Lincoln School." Proclaiming that Progressive Education itself was at stake, Lincoln's parents set out to prevent the merger.

Leading the fight against Lincoln's extinction were Parents Nelson Rockefeller and Elmer Davis (radio commentator--TIME, Jan. 22). They had an ace in the hole: Lincoln School has a $3,000,000 endowment, given by the Rockefeller General Education Board, which T. C., as trustee, is supposed to use only for educational experimentation.

Last week, after long negotiation with Nelson Rockefeller, T. C.'s Provost Milton C. Del Manzo, Dean Russell's agent in the merger negotiations, called newsmen into his office, handed them his long-awaited report. It proposed a compromise: that the combined school should be experimental, have Lincoln's name, be housed in Lincoln's building, have a board of overseers controlled by Lincoln and Horace Mann parents. Lincolnians sniffed at two jokers: 1) the board of overseers would be merely advisory to Dean Russell; 2) there was no guarantee that income from its $3,000,000 endowment ($184,000 of which T. C. had already diverted to its own use) would be used exclusively for the school. Said Spokesman Davis: "Further negotiations, it seems to me, are necessary."

If Lincoln's parents were dissatisfied, Horace Mann's parents (among them: Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia) were flabbergasted. They accused Dr. Del Manzo of "complete reversal" of his promises to them, called it "not a merger but a murder." Soon they began to demand a financial accounting from Dean Russell, charging that the college had saddled their school with excessive "service" charges, had compelled it to provide free tuition for T. C. faculty members' children, had thus created an artificial deficit. Horace Mann, they reminded Dr. Russell, was a year older than T. C. itself, had in fact fathered the college. At an indignation meeting of 500 Horace Mann parents, up jumped Parent William A. Shimer, executive secretary of the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa.

"Let Teachers College balance its budget," he cried, "by dropping some of its useless courses. . . . Teachers College, for all its high-sounding name, is not yet out of the class of normal schools, for which the Carnegie Foundation's study of Pennsylvania institutions found a new definition: A normal school is a school where subnormal students are taught by abnormal teachers."

Looking very much like a man who had not one but two bears by the tail, Dean Russell tried in vain to mollify Horace Mann's parents by offering to establish part of his new merged school in Horace Mann's building, part in Lincoln's.

-- Horace Mann School for Boys, a separate college preparatory school, was not to be included in the merger.

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