Education: Insult

University of Tampa is a small institution, eight years old. Recently its president, John Harvey Sherman, was surprised to receive a visit from Baron Edgar von Spiegel, a World War submarine commander, now German consul general at New Orleans. Their conversation had not gone far before it appeared to Mr. Sherman that the Baron had come to make a highly dishonorable proposal: that the university establish a German professorship with Nazi money, the professor and textbooks to be chosen by the Baron. Mr. Sherman ordered the Baron to get out of his office before he called a sheriff.

Believing the story too good to keep, Mr. Sherman told it to the Southern Association of Secondary Schools and Colleges, meeting in Memphis, and to the House Dies Committee. By last week, the affair had stirred up not only Tampa and Florida but the whole South, for Mr. Sherman was quoted as saying that Baron von Spiegel had boasted there were plenty of other universities (presumably in his jurisdiction—eight Southern States) who were not too proud to take German gold.

In New Orleans, Baron von Spiegel hastened to deny the whole story, admitted only that he had talked to a Tampa university "official" who "exceeded the bounds of courtesy," and that he might have suggested that the German Government would be willing to endow a German language scholarship. He said he knew of no Nazi-subsidized professorship in the U. S. but that he had sent German books as prizes to students of German in some 25 Southern universities. Tampa's President Sherman, standing by his story, snorted: "Why would I wish to insult him? He admits that I did insult him and I admit that I insulted him all I was able to."