Red Fellow

A year ago Harvard University was booed by liberals for firing two popular young economics instructors, John Raymond Walsh and Alan Richardson Sweezy. Messrs. Walsh & Sweezy were leaders of the Harvard branch of the American Federation of Teachers, an A. F. of L. union. Last week, with traditional indifference, Harvard braved a rightist storm by appointing to its staff a self-declared Communist.

Thin-faced, argumentative Communist Granville ("Granny") Hicks, 36, had been a storm centre before, for he had been fired from a teaching job. New Hampshire-born, a Yankee moralist, Granny Hicks was graduated with highest honors from Harvard ('23) and its Divinity School, taught Biblical literature and English at Smith College for three years, and assisted Harvard's famed Professor Bliss Perry before going to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as an associate professor of English in 1929. By 1935, with The Great Tradition, a Marxist survey of U. S. literature since the Civil War, and a stream of contributions to leftist journals, he had established himself as a partisan but respected critic of letters. He had also become an editor of the New Masses and a known Red. Rensselaer unceremoniously kicked him out on the pretext of "retrenchment,"' but the American Association of University Professors said he had been fired because he was a radical. Since then Hicks has written a biography of Radical John Reed, continued free-lance writing. He once wrote in the New Masses: "If a college professor . . . admits that he is a Communist, no college will take him. If there are any college presidents who really believe in academic freedom, they are too busy battling their trustees on behalf of the radicals they already have to take on any more. (I hope I am wrong. If I am, any college president who wants to prove it can have both my apologies and my services.)"

Last week Granville Hicks was busy apologizing to Harvard's President James Bryant Conant. Appointed one of six fellows in U. S. history, he was not hired as an actual instructor of classes. He will write a book, live in Adams House, counsel upperclassmen, organize discussions under the house plan. He said he would willingly sign the Massachusetts teachers' pledge of loyalty to the Constitution. He will also remain a literary editor of the New Masses, soon will have published a Modern Age book called I Like America.

As the excitable Boston press announced the Hicks appointment with screaming headlines, horrified patriots saw Harvard's gleaming crimson turning dirty red. In annual session at the Bradford Hotel, 20 ancients of the Grand Army of the Republic rose to their shaking feet, quavered a unanimous protest. In the State Legislature, a committee investigating subversive activities was given another month's lease on life, and Representative Francis X. Coyne introduced a bill to remove the tax exemption of any educational institution employing a known Communist or Fascist.*

But in Harvard Yard a reporter for the Hearst Boston American found few undergraduates who would sign a petition protesting the Hicks appointment. The Harvard Crimson enthusiastically applauded it: "Harvard has determined to give substance to its oft-mentioned shadow of liberalism. The hiring of Hicks is perhaps the most positive academic step that the university has taken forward this year."

When newshawks took the matter to Charles A. Coolidge Jr., a member of the Harvard Corporation,he said coldly: "The university does not measure men by their politics or beliefs."

* Coincidentally, discovering a plot to solicit members for the Young Communist League in Cambridge high schools by means of ice-cream parties (in which Harvard undergraduates allegedly were active), Cambridge's Mayor John W. Lyons announced a counterstroke: The city will supply its children with ice cream.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.