Education: Russell's Congress

One day three years ago a smart, dapper, young-looking man named Cortlandt Jackson Langley called on the dean of Columbia University's Teachers College, ambitious, 46-year-old William Fletcher Russell. He found Dean Russell brooding on the fact that his college, long the nation's No. 1 teacher-training institution, had in businessmen's eyes become "The Big Red University."

Mr. Langley introduced himself as a "retired businessman." He had long been interested in education and he had an idea:

Teachers College and Business should get together, do Education and the nation a service by helping businessmen and educators to understand each other. Dean Russell thought likewise. Last week the idea produced a spectacular meeting.

Dean Russell and Mr. Langley began by inviting businessmen to talk at T. C. Then they formed a Lay Council to advise the college, including Chase National Bank's Winthrop W. Aldrich (chairman), A. T. & T.'s Walter Gifford, New York Times's Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Last year, having found that educators and businessmen made uneasy companions, Dean Russell hit upon a cause that he thought would wed them: democracy v. totalitarianism. He decided to ho!d at T. C. a great Congress on Education for Democracy. He and Mr. Aldrich went to Europe to invite bigwigs to their Congress, hired John Price Jones to publicize it.

Last week, in hot and humid Manhattan, delegates and visitors to Dean Russell's Congress jampacked Columbia's biggest hall, its gymnasium and two overflow meeting rooms to hear democracy defended. Present were delegates from 26 noneducational organizations, and an equal number of educators, some 3,000 all told. National Association of Manufacturer's Lammot du Pont rubbed elbows with C. I. O.'s James B. Carey. Only urgent business in Atlantic City and Paris kept away A. F. of L.'s William Green, France's Edouard Herriot (they sent messages). Among the speakers were bigwigs from Poland, Sweden and no fewer than seven from Britain, headed by Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who had come to address a U. S. audience for the first time. Columbia's Anglophile Nicholas Murray Butler beamed on his visitors, bestowed honorary degrees on four of the Britons (and one on M. Herriot In absentia).

The three major U. S. broadcasting systems and several short-wave stations broadcast speeches to the four quarters of the earth. High point of the Congress came when Earl Baldwin (whom Dr. Butler in the excitement introduced as "Earl of Bewdsley") rose to speak. He began calmly:

"There is one thing our peoples—yours and mine—have in common: freedom is the air we breathe, freedom is in our blood and bones: the independence of the human spirit. But we are so used to it that if we ever think of it at all, we think it has dropped into our laps like manna from the skies, and unless we go a little beneath the surface in our questioning, we may feel that we enjoy this freedom because we are better than other people and therefore more worthy of it. Indeed we may give an impression to the world of that complacent self-righteousness which is said to be one of our most offensive and irritating characteristics.