COMMUNISTS: School's Out

For twelve years, the Jefferson School of Social Science had sent its students forth from a nine-story building on Manhattan's Avenue of the Americas grounded thoroughly, if not in the tenets of Jeffersonian democracy, at least in the ABCs of Marxism. Founded in 1944, the school flourished in its early years, hit a peak enrollment of an astonishing 14,000 in 1946-47. Sample courses: "Principles of Marxism (which postulates are valid for the U.S.?)"; "Guitar Playing and Song Leading I and II (with emphasis on the use of the guitar as a social instrument)." For years the school's name has been bandied back and forth in congressional hearings. In 1947 the school was placed on the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations, and in 1955 the Jefferson School of Social Science was described by the careful U.S. Subversive Activities Control Board as "the Communist Party's principal training ground" for apprentice Marxists ambitious to move up to positions of leadership.

Despite a modest tuition of only $8, enrollment dwindled as the school's troubles piled up, was down to 400 this fall. Last week, with no perceptible whisper of protest from an estimated 120,000 alumni, Jefferson trustees plaintively announced that they would close up shop at the end of the current semester. "Unwarranted persecution by the Federal Government," they wailed, "has created a financial situation in which it is impossible for the school to continue."