Investigators of the American Association of University Professors last week reported on President Hamilton Holt’s summary dismissal of Professor John Andrew Rice and others from Rollins College, Winter Park, Fla. (TIME, June 19, July 10, Sept. 4). President Holt was found to have made himself autocrat of Rollins. (“When you want to fire a cook, you don’t go out and get a committee of neighbors to tell you what to do, do you?”) Professor Rice, no ”yes-man,” had vexed President Holt and other Floridans by behaving much as satiric, cacographic Dean Swift, on whose writings he is an authority, might have behaved at Rollins. Professor Rice attacked Rollins’ debating and athletic systems, its fraternities and sororities, its chapel services, women teachers, in ”frequently vehement, sometimes intemperate, and in several instances discourteous language.” Nonetheless he was agreed the A. A. U. P., “an unusually stimulating and effective teacher.”

During the investigation President Holt, asserted the investigators, had equivocated, quibbled and lied. As long as he maintained his present attitude the investigators were obliged to damn Rollins College as an institution where no teacher could be sure of his job.

The Rollins board of trustees retorted that the A. A. U. P. investigators had befogged the sole important issue, the dismissal of Professor Rice, by bringing up tenure. The trustees accused one investigator of bias, of prying into other dismissals, of seeking to “coerce or bribe” Rollins into adopting A. A. U. P. tenure rules.

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