University of Chicago - Cap and Gown Yearbook (Chicago, IL)

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ERNEST B. PRICE, Director of International House; Lecturer on Political Science To people who conclude with Kipling that internationalism is impossible on the grounds of the trite jingle that East is East, XVest is VVCSt tand so fortln , the International Houses at New York, Berkeley tCaliforniay , Chicago, and Paris stand as rather solid contradictions. They are contradictions not only in concrete but in the persons of the thousands of students who yearly pass over their thresholds. Anyone who has lived in International House will agree that this mysterious and indefinable incompatibility, which good imperialists but bad anthr0poligists assert is inevitable between East and West, is not, as a matter of fact, character- istic of the relations between representatives of any two cultures, however mutually repugnant they are supposed to be according to the vague generalizations with which people sum up na- tional types. Harry VVatanaba from Japan and Jean Dubois from France, Tso Chien Shen from Peiping, China, and John Fuller from Pekin, Illinois, live together apparently unaware of the proper romantic racial hostility. Whoever has lingered at the table at Inter- national House and joined in the conversation there will know that young people today with a higher education are thinking about much the same things, wherever they come from. It INTERNATIONAL HOUSE may be true that the mass of people retain the racial prejudices so characteristic of the modern world. Possibly the majority of Americans still believe all Chinese have pigtails, all Frenchmen beards, and all Germans close-cropped polls. The unenlightened Chinese, for their part, may still regard Americans as so many bloreign devils? armed with machine guns. Yet it would none- theless be highly inaccurate to judge a people by the ignorance of the many, just as it would be palpably foolish to measure the amity of inter- national relations in terms of the good will felt towards each other by the forty odd nationalities living in International House. The point is that we can see in International House a definite trend away from ingrained hostilities towards a better understanding of what and who is strange. The principal cause of this change, as in the case of other traditional attitudes, is education, though not necessarily education in its more formal processes. Let us say, rather, in a manner of thinking. For the thinking of the Oriental, the Slav, the Latin, and the Anglo-Saxon alike is no longer restricted by purely nationalistic or parochial boundaries. The world itself, and not the local scene, is the purlieu of the modern scientist and scholar. Both must now measure their efforts by cosmic standards. This is mani- festly true of physics, astronomy, medicine. It is becoming true of music, art and literature. Even a political theory based on extreme nationalism, such as Fascism, is after all a kind of inverted internationalisin, in which national needs are defined in terms of world crisis. This is the basis on which the many nation- alities represented at International House must learn to live. But internationalism is ultimately promoted by custom. Quite unconsciously and undesignedly internationalism has once more been demonstrated as a possible condition of humanity. 3a

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hrec members air their views on HTlm Inlmrmlimml House Forum, a distussion scrics broadcast on a national network Bertrand Russell defends Chamberlain at one of the Sunday Suppers International House members on a week- end sailing trip Members enter- lain at a Ha- zuaiian Night 1 00 1 21111 D