Associate Dean Robert B. Watson is expected to approve the charter of the Athenaeum today, in the first attempt in 26 years to establish a University counter-part of the Oxford Union.

Over 70 students have applied for membership in the Athenaeum, which is Latin for "a school for oratory." They will meet Thursday night in the Kirkland Junior Common Room for election of member and planning of the initial debate.

Spokesman for the Athenaeum organization committee Hugh J. Schwartzburg '53 said last night that Peter Viereck, Pulitzer prize winning poet and author of the controversial "Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals," will address the Sunday meeting. Entitled "Have the Intellectuals Sold Out America?" the meeting will debate the resolution "that this house feels intellectuals have not opposed Stalinism as ardently as other brands of totalitarianism and thus encouraged a double standard of morality."

The Present Hope of Poetry

College and grad school speakers will attack and defend Viereck's position, and the house will vote a decision.

Viereck has been called by Robert Frost "the present hope of poetry." His latest book, however, was criticized by critic Orville Prescott as "in many of its arguments . . . dogmatically and belligerently controversial."

Tentative plans call for the main speakers at the initial meeting to wear formal dress, as is done at Oxford. "But we will do this on only special occasions," Schwartzburg said.

Officers of the organizing committee include Schwartzburg, Roger A. Moore '53, Milton S. Gwirtzman '54, and Frank I. Goodman '54.