THE PRINCETON ENQUIRY

The meeting enthusiastically carried a motion for an investigation into the work of the Philadelphian Society, the New York press took it up, and President Hibben agreed. A high level committee was set up, * and Hibben gave a number of press interviews, one of which quoted him as saying that 'there is no place for Buchmanism in Princeton'.6

(* This committee was chaired by a senior member of the university's Board of Trustees, Edward D. Duffield, the President of Prudential Life Insurance, who was later to step in as acting President of Princeton when Hibben was killed in a motor accident. It consisted of two other trustees, four members of the faculty and several student representatives.)

When the committee started work they found very little evidence to justify the hullabaloo at the forum. They began, according to the Committee's minutes, by asking undergraduates to come forward and express their grievances. Not one appeared. They then approached Neilson Abeel and the group whose campaign had instigated the inquiry, and asked them to produce evidence. Abeel and his friends refused to appear, but they provided a list of twenty names, to whom the committee wrote letters. None came forward. Undergraduate members of the committee were then sent to interview the twenty young men individually. Eighteen said that they had no grievance, so why should they appear? Two did voice grievances but one later decided that he had misunderstood the situation and withdrew. The second made a complaint which the committee dismissed as being too vague to have any validity.

By contrast, the evidence given in support of the Philadelphian Society was impressive. The undergraduate 'Cabinet' of the Society gave its officers unanimous and unqualified endorsement, and their evidence was backed up by what the committee described in their report as 'a considerable number of undergraduates'. A young man called Dean Clark was typical. What he had learnt through contacts with people like Purdy, he said, had been 'the greatest help in life I have ever known'. 'There is nothing I can say which will fully express the debt of gratitude I feel I owe these men,' he went on. 'The talks I have had with them have done more for me than any other single thing in college. The claims of Christ upon a man's whole life and activity have been put by them in the most sincere and convincing way - no doctrines ... or dogmas were expressed - nothing but the simple and heart-searching challenge of Christ himself.'7

Buchman also began to get a modest amount of support in the press. Life magazine (the predecessor of the Time-Life publication) commented editorially on what it called 'the inquisition at Princeton University into the qualifications of Frank Buchman as a religious influence'. 'What Mr Buchman seems to do', wrote the editor, E. S. Martin, 'is to give men new motives and driving power. The means which he seems to have at his disposal sometimes upset persons exposed to them, and none the less because they are spiritual means. That may be why he is scrutinised at Princeton. Or it may be that Princeton likes its students the way they are, and does not want new men made of them ... what this world needs the most of anything is that a lot of people in it should be changed in many of their vital particulars. Our world needs to be born again, needs it badly, and is at least as reluctant to face that process as Princeton seems to be to have "F.B." transmogrify any of her children.'8

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