APPOINTMENT VOIDED

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24261, 1 April 1940, Page 7

APPOINTMENT VOIDED

MATHEMATICS PROFESSOR JUDGE’S INDICTMENT NEW YORK, Mar. 30. (Received Mar. 31, at 10 p.m.) Declaring that the College Board was attempting to establish a Chair of Indecency, Mr Justice McGeehan, in the Supreme Court, voided the appointment of Earl Bertrand Russell to the Chair of Mathematics at the City College of New York. “ The appointment is an insult to the people of this city,” he added, and upheld a woman taxpayer’s charge that Russell’s teachings tended to corrupt the students as “ his writings proved him salacious, immoral, aphrodisiac, libidinous, lecherous.” “ The defence pointed out that he was engaged to teach mathematics, not morals. On the grounds of academic freedom Harvard announced that the decision did not affect its appointment of Mr Russell to teach philosophy. Liberal academic and religious groups claimed that Mr Russell was the victim of an intensive campaign of the Hearst press, in which he was stigmatised as “A barnyard moralist, Communist, nudist and dabbler in salacious poetry.”