Journey for Margaret

For 26 years Margaret Schlauch (Barnard, '18) has been a member of the English faculty of New York University. Since she seldom discussed politics--never dragged them into her Chaucer classes--it never seemed to make any difference that she called herself a "Marxist." Last week Margaret Schlauch's friends remembered her quiet Marxism with a shock. Writing from Stockholm, she told N.Y.U. that instead of coming back she was taking a job at the Communist-dominated University of Warsaw.

America, Professor Schlauch feared, was no longer for her. "I am afraid that the economic and political future at home is not auspicious, not even for a Chaucer specialist, if such a person has been and still is a Marxist (no matter how undogmatic) and doesn't intend to deny it; and if she moreover condemns the foreign policy leading to war."

The letter had a more personal side. Last year Professor Schlauch's younger sister Helen and Helen's Polish-born husband, a mathematician at the University of Toronto, sold their house in Canada and moved to Warsaw. Her brother-in-law told Margaret last summer that she, too, could have "some kind of post."

In fact, "everything has been done to make the way smooth for me." In Stockholm, the wife of the Polish Minister helped her shop for heavy clothes she would need for the Polish winters. "They [the Polish Minister & wife] both keep telling me what a vast need there is for trained people in the educational system of their country . . . Once you're established, they say, the sky is the limit for talents."

Wrote Margaret Schlauch: "I'm sitting in a hotel room in Stockholm at this minute, looking out on a cold grey sky, trying to realize what all this means.

"I can't, really."

Said N.Y.U. Dean Thomas C. Pollock: "We will be interested in this 'Journey for Margaret,' and we will be interested to learn whether in years to come she will enjoy equal freedom at the University of Warsaw as a teacher there."

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