PARTISAN REVIEW
,
,
and sociologists has intensified. At the University of Belgrade, an initial
effort to dismiss eight profess )rs failed when the party organization in
the Department of Philosophy and Sociology refused to assent to the
purge.
It
is now proposed to Jndermine university autonomy (greater in
Yugoslavia than in other Communist countries) by replacing half the
members of the Faculty Cou'1cil, hitherto elected, with state nominees.
And -- according to the pew university law - - not only scholarly but
also "moral and political criteria" are to be applied to professors. In the
meantime, Svetosar Stojanovic, well known in this country (and else–
where) as the author of
Between Ideals and Reality, A Critique of
Socialism and Its Future
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), has
had his freedom restricted, and has been unable to attend an inter–
national philosophical congress in Bulgaria or to accept an invitation to
teach at Berkeley this spring.
We ask the Yugoslav Federal Government and the League of Com–
munists, as well as state and party organizations in the Croation and
Serbian republics, to consider the grave damage done to Yugoslavia's
international position by these repeated attempts to infringe upon the
freedoms without which socialism is impossible.
The Editors
PHILIP RAHV
Philip Rahv, who died in Cambridge, Mass. on December 23
of last year, was with William Phillips a founder of
Partisan Review,
and
remained an editor until 1969, when he left, bringing out i1is own
magazine the next year. Other writers have served as editors at various
times, though in the earlier years it was mainly under Phillips's and
Rahv's direction that PR was able to survive the ordinary vicissitudes of a
serious journal of art and opinion, as well as the special pressures on
intellectuals in that period. One of the distinctions of the magazine was
its combination of literary and political sensibility, which Rahv's partic–
ular talents did much to create. But in time a number of editorial and
personal differences arose between Rahv and other members of the
magazine, as a result of which he became less and less active, and to
conceal such differeonces would simply falsify the history of PRo We
prefer to stress, however, his editorial contributions as well as his own
accomplishments not only as a critic but as an intellectual and political
force.
