University students all over the world have just returned to the second half of the academic year. In the United States the occasion was marked with minor celebration, as though another birthday or obscure holiday had broken the comfortable routine. At the University of Athens the opening of the spring semester found another forty students missing from the rolls, apparently tubercular beyond the point of attempting work. At Vienna, University officials announced the end of UNNRA aid to its assembled undergraduate body, and watched the determination in bodies that must undergo a greater fight against winter and loss of health than they had sustained against the Nazis. In Cracow, men and women at the Academy gathered in the lone building that had escaped the Nazis and heard the same announcement. To them it meant a further cut in rations that stood, in midwinter of 1946-47, at 600 to 800 calories per day. American doctors claim adult humans cannot survive below 900 calories daily. At Peiping, in torn China, remnants of Harvard's Yenching University and other learned institutions ended their trek back from resistence headquarters to face ruined buildings and the task of rebuilding them with students who barely keep alive on the allotted diet.

To an American generation permanently committed to the future of these countries, what does this mean? What does disease and demoralization among the future leaders of a nation involve in a social sense? It means first the physical loss of the most dynamic minds in countries that need them most, for in many cases the resistance leaders of the war spring from the universities and have now returned there, weakened by two, three, or four years of resistance activities. These men were leaders during the times of greatest crisis. Weakened as they are, they must not be countries whose whole future is tragically linked to whether these men can survive the next five years. Even students in American colleges will remember the lost generation in British and French leadership after the last war; the generation that might have filled the moral breach at the time of the Rhineland, or Auschluss, or Munich. Enlarge that picture to the entire cordon of east-European states and project it fifteen or twenty years into the future. If tuberculosis and the vitality consuming hunt for food are allowed to divert the best minds of east-Europe and China away from their training, these countries must be prepared to surrender their greatest hopes for future stability to foreign leadership and dynamism, or, as the English and French did, to chance.

From a purely political view, what do these alternatives mean? The food that will be sent to Europe following the Student Council drive early in March cannot be termed simply as "Following the flag." It is cruel to starving humans to weigh them as pawns in the great gambit for ideological control of key areas. But this food remains American food, distributed to highly sensitive and alert students in areas where food means more than dialectics. If we are not concerned over what happens to the young men of east Europe and China, there are others who will thrive on this indifference. For lack of any other program, food has become the sole American pathway to prestige in cast Europe. If we must be hard-headed, let that prestige be security for our investment.

When the Student Council campaigns in March for money for food shipments it is recognizing that conditions in Europe have not improved, but there been aggravated since the drive last summer. There is a crisis this very month at such universities as those in China, Poland, Greece and Austria. American students who can look forward to graduation and opportunity are asked to aid students who look straight at hunger and tuberculosis. Who in conscience can refuse?