Abstract
NEARLY one thousand outstanding scholars in leading universities in the United States have signed an open letter to their colleagues in some of the universities of Poland, where Jewish students are now segregated from their fellows, and repeated acts of violence are reported against them and Jewish professors. It is realized that the university authorities are faced with great difficulties on account of religious and racial differences, but to bring these conditions of strife into the classrooms and laboratories by adoption of a policy of segregation violates the principle of intellectual freedom upon which university life must be based. "Such discrimination", the signatories protest, "seems to us alien to the spirit of academic freedom and of the free co-operation in the pursuit of knowledge that is so essential to the world of scholarship". The distinguished members of the faculties of Polish institutions of higher learning who have raised their voices against this discrimination will, it is hoped, be encouraged by this support of their American colleagues to continue their efforts to maintain the high tradition of such institutions in the free republic of scholarship. Sympathy with suffering, and sensitiveness to injustice, are attributes which distinguish man from all his fellow creatures; and any deliberate action which evokes them cannot be other than a reversion to primitive instincts. In this twentieth century it is depressing to see the law of the jungle being accepted and applied to secure racial and national domination, when such great powers and opportunities exist for the progressive evolution of man's higher nature. Those of us who believe in a nobler destiny for the human race than has yet been reached find a certain amount of comfort in the dismay expressed by American scholars at the extension to Poland of a spirit of intolerance foreign to every principle for which a university should stand.
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Segregation in Polish Universities. Nature 141, 69 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/141069a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/141069a0