Shuster to Hunter

New York City's Hunter College is the world's biggest college for women. Seldom mentioned in the same breath with Wellesley, Smith and Vassar, although it is older (70 years) than Wellesley or Smith, free, plebeian Hunter College boasts no distinguished line of presidents, no dormitories, no daisy chain. Its main "campus" has long been a group of ugly old buildings on Manhattan's East 68th Street. Its 10,000 students commute to classes by subway.

This month Hunter students get a new building and a new president. Their new building, a 16-story affair at 68th Street and Park Avenue, is as splendid as a cine-mansion, with thickly carpeted floors, teakwood walls. Among the first to move in (the building was not quite completed) was Hunter's new President George Nauman Shuster.

Wisconsin-born, a Notre Dame graduate, Mr. Shuster was head of his alma mater's English department for four years, from 1925 to 1939 was an editor of The Commonweal, Catholic magazine. He considers himself a liberal Catholic, has lectured and written extensively on Catholicism, English literature, modern German history, edited an edition of Mein Kampf.

Last week he had many plans for Hunter. What the college lacks in swank, it makes up in vigor. Hunter girls, mostly Jewesses who grew up on the sidewalks of New York, go to college to study. Smart (they must pass stiff entrance tests) and hardworking, they often help support their families while attending college. Many Hunter girls become public-school teachers; some, Macy's salesgirls. But most of them (relatively more than at such a college as Vassar) will be housewives.

To prepare them for that career, President Shuster plans to start an institute of child psychology, teach his girls homemaking, dietetics, self-grooming. His toughest problem: how to deal with patrioteers' attacks on Hunter girls for their "radicalism."* His policy: let the girls have their say. "New York students," said he, "are the most conservative group of young people in the U. S."

-- Already under way is a legislative investigation of alleged subversive influences in New York City schools.

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