Wisconsin's New Fight

In the seven years he has been president of the University of Wisconsin, urbane Glenn Frank has more than once been in danger of being caught in company with the wrong set of principles Elected as a progressive to revitalize a reactionary institution, he soon found himself at odds with other Wisconsin progressives. Soon after young Philip Fox La Follette was elected Governor in 1930 --and while he was still a member of the university's faculty--he accused President Frank of failure to eliminate "deadwood" from the faculty, of extravagance,-- of not paying enough attention in the agricultural school to the farmers' problem of marketing. Since then President Frank has been attacked bitterly and often for not being progressive enough by Progressive Editor null Theodore Evjue of the Capital Times, La Follette organ. But last week President Frank and Governor La Follette again found themselves progressive bedfellows, with President Frank springing nimbly to their common defense.

The man who put President Frank back in the progressive bed was a vocal young editor named John Bowman Chappie, whose Ashland Daily Press is one of the loudest denouncers of La Follettism. Young Mr. Chappie became Pink, not in the radical West, but at conservative Yale University. After being graduated from Yale in 1924, he went further East, to Russia, returned with his political complexion bright Red. But a few years' distance changed it back again. Now he mortally hates & fears anything touched with Red as a triple threat against morals, religion and the U. S. economic system. Last month Editor Chappie decided to run for the U. S. Senate as a Republican stalwart. He went to the White House and got Herbert Hoover's blessing. He stumped the State against what he calls "the La Follette racket," charging that the Governor and his brother Senator Robert ("Young Bob") were trying to establish state socialism. Soon he turned on the university, accused President Frank of "undermining the American home and moral code." He said faculty "pinks" were turning the campus into a hotbed of Communism, sowing seeds of atheism and free love. With the university issue threatening to become the basis of this year's political campaign and the La Follette press suddenly silent about the institution, President Frank refused "to dignify absurdity by a reply."

Last week he changed his mind. Calling faculty & students together for a special convocation, he sharply defended the American Civil Liberties Union (a focal point of the Chappie attack), called attention to the fact that 80% of Wisconsin's 8,000 students are members of some denomination or have expressed their preference for certain churches. Said he: "The University of Wisconsin is under constitutional mandate to observe a theological neutrality as it is under mandate to observe political neutrality. In the hands of cowards and weaklings this constitutional provision can become an alibi for an academic timidity that is reluctant to deal honestly with those issues of politics, economics and religion that are loaded with the dynamite of current interest.

"[The charges are an] insincere, unprincipled and dishonest campaign of deliberate slander ... by a little handful of ambitious men who seem quite willing to stab the State's greatest institution in the back if they think they might thereby advance their personal or political fortunes."

To President Frank's support against Chappie of Yale promptly went the University of Wisconsin's undergraduate Daily Cardinal. Stated the Cardinal: "We have absolute and definite proof that the university is being used as a political football by John B. Chappie and the Republican party officials."

But ambitious Editor Chappie declared that President Frank had been "smoked out."

Chicago's New Films

Since last autumn, when President Robert Maynard Hutchins effected sweeping changes in the University of Chicago's system (TIME, Jan. 4), some 2,200 educators have made inquiries about the experiment, asked for syllabuses on the new courses. But few of the other institutions had the laboratory equipment or the trained teachers that Chicago possessed and its courses required. Last week President Hutchins took steps to increase Chicago's usefulness.

Next October Erpi Picture Consultants, Inc. (subsidiary of American Telephone & Telegraph Co.) will offer for sale a set of 20 one-reel sound pictures produced in the Physical Sciences Department at Chicago. The pictures will show detailed scientific experiments, synchronized with lectures by Chicago professors. Subjects include: the flow of protoplasm in plant & animal life, the excavations of Nineveh and Megiddo, the heartbeat of a dog. Price for the set will be $1,400 including projector. The university will receive no profit beyond publicity. Not intended to take the place of professors or to reduce teaching time, the films are planned as addenda to regular instruction in institutions of limited facilities. Production of the first films will begin immediately. Later, other departments will be filmed.

Said President Hutchins: "Although there have been many educational films before, this is the first organized large-scale effort on the part of a single uni-versity to make them.-- And it fits very nicely into what you might call our 'experimental tradition.' But we aren't going into the entertainment business. We aren't trying to jazz up education."

--That year Wisconsin paid $1,641.30 for the upkeep of the Frank automobile (Lincoln). Governor La Follette drove a Ford.

--Erpi has been making educational pictures for two years, illustrating important lectures by university professors. Some of the subjects: Dr. Arnold Gesell of Yale on the study of infant behavior, Chicago's Professor Guy Thomas Buswell on individual differences in mathematical conception, Dr. Charlotte Biihler of the University of Vienna on child growth; fast-motion pictures of plant growth and fertilization; microphoto-graphs of blood circulation. Other makers of educational cinemas are Fox Film Corp. and the University Film Foundation of Harvard.

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