Lectures on the Phone

A segregationist Mississippi law forbids Negro state colleges to hire white teachers. Last week Moses Hadas, the famed Columbia University classicist, slipped around the law without ever leaving Manhattan. Picking up the telephone, he lectured for an hour through his luxuriant white beard to 500 rapt students at four Negro colleges in Louisiana and Mississippi. His subject: the religious roots of Greek drama. The phone bill was $100, a pittance paid by the Fund for the Advancement of Education, which thus demonstrated one of education's cheapest, handiest new ideas.

"Telelectures" were pioneered at the University of Omaha, where Linguist Michel Beilis was saddled with the problem of luring big time lecturers to a distant and none-too-rich campus. Author Harry Golden, for example, set his price as "$1,500 just to lecture, $1,700 if I have to answer questions, $2,000 if I have to have cookies with the ladies." But by phone Beilis got the Golden word from North Carolina for a cutrate $214--$64 for the call and $150 for Harry. Omaha has since staged telelectures with eminences all over, from Anthropologist Margaret Mead in Manhattan to Psychologist B. F. Skinner at Harvard.

The technique is what telephone men call a "glorified conference call." From any phone, operators can arrange a call involving as many as five parties at station-to-station rates. For lectures, the phone company hooks an amplifier ($30 a month maximum) to the phone at the audience end. A microphone hooked to the same phone allows the audience to ask questions. Innovator Beilis, who now works for A.T.&T., is swamped with requests by colleges from Dartmouth to U.C.L.A. that want to swap star scholars by phone.

Classicist Hadas spoke to Negro high school teachers in the first of 18 telelectures on "Great Ideas in Antiquity," a credit course that uses a paperback library of classical drama (cost: $5.70). Mississippi's Jackson State College suggested the theme; the Fund for the Advancement of Education will spend $10,000 for the series. At Louisiana's Southern University, students prepped for a month and took a one-hour exam before Hadas even opened his mouth. Hadas considers the idea not as good as "a flesh-and-blood teacher, even a bad one." But since even a bad Hadas is unavailable to the Louisiana and Mississippi students, Hadas ended his first talk feeling "quite elated."

So did the Fund, which, to make an extra point, bounced part of the program off Telstar II and showed that telelectures could be transmitted to darkest Africa as well as the South.

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