This item is admittedly shoptalk as far as this reporter is concerned, but it seems justifiable to include mention of it on a program of this kind. A ferment is going on in the college world these days. Today there are between 2.5 and 3 million students going to college and university. The immediate future forebodes nothing but heavily increased enrollments, for the first of the war babies are now crowding the high schools and will be doing so to the colleges within a few years. Private colleges are having a struggle – even the oldest, largest, and strongest of them – to stay solvent, much less expand facilities and personnel to meet the increased student volume. Public colleges are in a sense in worse shape, because it is more difficult for them to turn away students who meet the (to most of us) few and minimum criteria for admission. Increased expenditures in all areas of state government make legislatures view with increasingly microscopic examination proposals for increased expenditures for higher educations.
Out of all this, the colleges are asking themselves, “What shall and can we do?” Unfortunately there is little if any consensus among them on many matters. Should they strive for quality of education, turning away those who do not meet higher standards? Should undergraduate work contain a considerable admixture of vocational training, or should it be for general academic excellence? And what about the students who have the ability but who do not have the money? Should scholarships be provided for them? If screening is done with a view to selecting only best? If so, how to screen fairly and be sure the wheat is separated from the tares? And in the heterogeneous college population of today, what about the gifted student? Are we training for mediocrity, since the majority of students are average, leaving the exceptional student to get some profit by it? During the past two or three decades many crocodile tears have been shed at all school levels about the slow learner, but this reporter has never heard any serious concern about the one who could be a fast learner. In fact an advanced student of his did some research on this subject in one of the better systems in this area a year or two ago and came out with the conclusion that that system was really doing nothing about such students. Can we afford to go on doing this?
Certainly I have no answer to these questions, though I have personal convictions about most of them. It would appear, however, that it is high time we began doing some concerted thinking and acting about such an important matter. Conferences alone will not settle the issues, but conferences, plus a continued effort to arrive at a consensus and then put the decisions into practice would do much to clear the confusion and uncertainty. Those of us who try to teach have a faith that man through education cannot only learn how to make a better living but also how to live a better life, than he would without an education. If this basic assumption is sound, then the nation that has an educational policy and program designed to give each of its citizens that education by which he can profit most is a nation that will be stronger mentally, and we hope, morally and physically.
_____
A 26-page pamphlet has just been issued by the American Institute of Management, a non-profit organization that evaluates efficiency of corporations or other agencies. This pamphlet is a summary report on the effectiveness of the Catholic Church, a study that required a year to do, with more than 200 research workers. Space and time do permit even a summary of this summary, but if you are interested in this unusual and unique venture, you will find an article on it in the current issue of Time magazine. With the sanction of the pope, the Institute examined the social function, the organizational structure, the growth of facilities, the fiscal policies, and other aspects of the church. The result: The church came out with an astonishingly good score of 88 percent. Do your church and mine need such and evaluation? In attempting to analyze the pros and cons of this question, I soon found myself developing an incipient split personality, so I stopped trying. What do you think about it?
_____
And speaking of what you think impels me at this time to do something that heretofore I have refrained from doing but which I have had an urge to do for some time: namely, ask for your comments and evaluation of this program. A considerable number of you do send me communications from time to time, but rarely on the program as a whole – usually on some particular aspect of a broadcast that you liked or did not like. I am as interested in getting one as the other, for only in so doing can I get an idea of your candid opinion, and that is what I should prefer having.
As your announcer informs you twice each Sunday, this program is sponsored by radio station WJHL. There is nothing to sell, except whatever may be of merit in the program itself. The only contribution this reporter makes is preparing the materials and doing the broadcast. Since this is well into the second year of the program, it is rather belated to express appreciation to the station for use of its facilities, but I wish to take this occasion to do so.
_____
Sometimes zealots for a particular cause, however sincere they may be, find themselves unintentionally and perhaps without knowing it, logically following the same course they are attacking in others. Last week I referred briefly to the Eastland Committee, especially to the chairman of that committee. Consider the following:
The Eastland Committee is attempting to punish that tiny portion of the press that does not approve of informers, and it seems to want a wholly one-party press. Russia and the communists have a one-party press. Therefore, Eastland and his committee are following the communist line and hence are subversive according to the very McCarthy philosophy of which they are the present instruments. And yet, it is communists and subversives that the committee seeks to ferret out. Pretty ridiculous, is it not?
_____
A mind-stretching quotation comes to me from Thomas Jefferson, which I should like to pass on to you, for, again, it is one of those things that remind us that while we have every right to belief in and loyalty to our religion, we have no right to force it on others or to disparage the religion of others. It goes like this, in describing how he developed the First Amendment:
“The Bill of Rights establishing religious freedom in the United States, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all latitude of reason and right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed: and a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the words, “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.” The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindu, and the infidel of every denomination.” We have every right to disagree with any or every one of them; we have the right to suppress none.
_____
One of the anomalies of our way of so-called thinking seems to be that many people cannot conceive how one can defend the right of a person to be an atheist without he himself being one; one who speaks out in defense of radicals must himself be a radical; a person who has a good word to say for a political party must himself be a member of that party; and so it goes. Such an attitude fails to take into consideration both the kind of people we are here in this country and the social, religious, and political system we have developed throughout our history, and are still developing. America is a society made up of peoples from all over the earth, who came here at various times and for various purposes. Perhaps the most important simple purpose animating them was the desire to improve their condition. Hence, we must recognize that ours is a people consisting of Catholics and Protestants but also of every other kind of non-Christian faith. Some of our ancestors came early, while others came within the past few years, or even months. We are dark-skinned and light-skinned, and all shades in between. We came from totalitarian governments and from democratic ones. The leavening agent that runs through and cuts across all these national, racial, religious, and ethnic barriers is our constitutional system that guarantees to everyone of us the same rights before the law, even the right to seek actively to change that law, though there those in positions of special privilege whose position would be threatened by change. They insist that the status quo should be preserved intact, and that anyone who questions the perfection of the present is disloyal. If America ever reaches the point where dissent is suppressed, it will cease to be the kind of society that has made it great and strong.
_____
Church attendance hit an all time high in 1956. The National Council of Churches estimated that an average of 49.6 million persons attended church services in all denominations each week of the year. That is 49 percent of the nation’s adult population. The top Sunday of the entire year was Easter Sunday. A total of 60.4 million adults, nearly six out or every ten adult Americans, were in church that day. Women outnumbered men, but perhaps not by as much as you would think. For every 54 women who attended, there were 43 men.
_____
The Roman Catholic Church will build religious centers and a sports stadium in Rome as gifts for the 80th birthday of Pope Pius XII on March 2. Clementa Cardinal Micara, the papal vicar of Rome, announced details of the program in a message appealing to Romans for funds. Among the buildings planned are a parish center, an educational institute for children of poor families, completion of the Pope Pius XII Oratory and Recreation Center near St. Peter’s Basilica, and a Shrine of Mary the Queen. The stadium will be built on church-owned ground on the Appian Way. It might be used in Rome’s 1960 Olympics.
_____
The United States Embassy in Madrid, Spain, has made a full report to Washington on the closing of the Spanish Protestant Seminary and School by Spanish authorities. The Seminary was established 75 years ago.
_____
In New York the legislative committee of the Protestant Council of New York City has restated its denunciation of gambling as a social evil, and pledged to oppose the legalization of bingo-playing for religious and charitable organizations. The attack on gambling is one of six points in a statement of principles for 1956 issued by the Protestant Council in its publication Protestant Church Life. Among others are opposition to racial discrimination, and a declaration that juvenile delinquency is the product of total environment of children in the home, the church, the school, and society in general.
_____
The Methodist Church Board of Social and Economic Relations has urged parishioners to show brotherliness and patience in adjusting to racial integration of the nation’s schools. The board adopted a resolution saying that the Supreme Court decision on school segregation has an influence beyond the schools, calling for far-reaching community-wide adjustments.
_____
Keith Funston, President of the New York Stock Exchange, insists there is a place for the Bible in business. Funston told the congregation at Trinity Church, New York, that the decisions men of finance must make are not always just dollar decisions. He said, “Many of our acts involve judgments as to what is right and wrong.” He added, “An increasingly great change in American business is consciousness of seeing the business world in terms of human beings.”
_____
An Easter educator says the average protestant minister has a 10-hour workday. Dr. Samuel Blizzard of Pennsylvania State University adds that a survey has shown the average minister uses 13 percent of his work as preacher or officiate at church services. Then he spends 23 percent at administration, 15 percent as counselor, 7 percent as community and parish organizer, and 3 percent as teacher. The remaining 39 percent of the average protestant minister’s time goes to his family. Dr. Blizzard, an associate professor of sociology at Penn State, adds the figures are based on questionnaires sent to 1,500 ministers of 22 denominations in all parts of the U.S. He told of the survey at a meeting this week of the Ministers Week Program at the Chicago Theological Seminary.
_____
A special convention of a Lutheran Synod had unfrocked two ministers and declared a third innocent in heresy cases. The English Evangelical Lutheran Synod of the Northwest has voted out of the ministry the Rev. George Crist, Jr. and the Rev. Victor K. Wrigley. They had been found guilty by special committees last summer. The Rev. John Gerberding was acquitted. All had been charged with doctrinal deviation on such matters as the virgin birth of Christ and his resurrection. The 31-year-old Crist, former pastor at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Durham, Wisconsin, is now a student at the University of Iowa. Wrigley, 36 years old, has continued as pastor at Gethsemane Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin, at the request of his congregation. But the Rev. Mr. Gerberding, age 33, resigned his pastorate at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, in Menominee Falls, Wisconsin. He is now working on a weekly newspaper at Lancaster, Wisconsin. He is still eligible to receive a call.