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           "City College Ousts 21 Student Rioters" said the headline in Wednesday's New York Times.

           "Faculty overrides Dean's Report as being too lenient!"

           "Taking the most drastic disciplinary action of the college, City College faculty expelled twenty-one students and disciplined sixteen others in various degrees for the student riot in the Great Hall on October 9.

           In 1934, the "liberal" dean of a liberal college is accused of being too lenient with his charges. Dean Gottschall advised expulsion of five students, but his superiors would only be satisfied with the scalps of twenty-one. In addition the administration represented by President Robinson recommends stringent rebukes of the rest of the anti-fascist students.

           One thousand city college students voted yesterday to go on strike, Tuesday from eleven to one to demand the reinstatement of the chastised ones. They are resolved that student opinion shall not be rammed down their throats, and that academic freedom shall not die ignominiously.

           Will Alma Mater again be blindfolded? We hope not.

           The City College "guttersnipes" are evidently determined not to be "tricked and enslaved–."

           According to the resolutions the Mexican government's interference with "freedom of speech, of assemblage and of press" This in direct opposition to American ideals and practices."

           American bankers control the economic, political and social life of Mexico in the best American fashion–by suppression and interference with all those civil liberties which we praise so highly.

           And if we examine our American practices–without the idealsù–a work in our own educational system will the picture be any rosier? Is the suspension of five students who tried to form an Open Forum from the University of California at Los Angeles, a shining example of American tolerance? Here were students, in the words of Celeste Strack, women's debate champion and suspended student, "fighting for the inalienable rights of free speech, free assemblage and free political activities." Their simple American request for a student controlled club was refused and the leaders were suspended.

           At Harvard University, Joseph Mollner has just been sentenced to six months in jail at hard labor along with several workers who were arrested at the anti-Hanfstaengel demonstration on the Harvard campus.

           Young Mollner believing that Hitlerism is opposed to all American ideals and that a protest against Fascism and Nazism is allowed by American tolerance, learned these fine ideals are not always put into practice "Putzy" Hanfstaengel was given an official welcome by the administration and Joseph Mollner was given one by the police Is that Americanism? If we are inviting fascists, we might make a pretense at freedom of expression and allow the anti-fascists, students of the University and native-born Americans to say what they wish.

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May 20, 2004