Foreign Students in Czecho-slovakia Go to Italy: Find Better Conditions There: Retaliation to Anti-a

Foreign students who have been studying at the Universities in Czecho-Slovakia, a large proportion of them Jewish students mostly from Poland, are answering the agitation against foreign students conducted in the press of the Right and in a section of the progressive press, and the increased fees demanded from foreign students, by leaving Czecho-Slovakia and going to study at Italian Universities. About 100 foreign students have already withdrawn their names from the lists of enrolments at the Czecho-Slovakian universities and have enrolled at the universities of Rome, Bologna, Pisa, and Florence.

The Italian Universities have given these students many facilities. They are required to pay only half the fees paid by native students. They are released from the payment of examination fee##; they are allowed reduced, travelling rates, they are given material assistance, and they are not asked for any undertaking that they will not settle down to practise their profession in Italy at the end of their studies.

The Czecho-Slovakian Government appears to be concerned at this retaliation by the foreign students to the anti-alien agitation, and the Minister of Education has told press representatives at a specially convoked press representatives’ meeting that the measures taken by the University authorities against foreign students were forced upon them by the technical conditions at the universities, and that the Czecho-Slovakian Universities still remain open as before to all students, irrespective of nationality or race.

The Dean of the Medical Faculty of the Czech University in Prague, Professor Weigner, has declared that he is in principle opposed to race distinctions, but the tragic fault of the aliens, he added, is that their race is regarded as if it was their fault.