Harvard University was modeled on Cambridge University in England, where John Harvard, the founder of the college and its first president, studied. At first, he instructed only teachers, professors, and priests, granting them degrees. In time, Harvard College added a law school and a medical school, turning into a university which also granted PhDs. It was the first college and university in the United States, celebrating three hundred years of existence in 1936.

Yale College was established four years later, in 1640, as the second institution of higher education in the United States. It was modeled after Oxford in England.

The new university models in New England were based not only on the old universities in England but also on their emulation of each other, embodied in their brilliance in academic studies and athletics. In time, however, Cambridge started emphasizing the development of science as opposed to theology, and so it ended up generating the highest number of Nobel Prizes in physics. Oxford held on to its emphasis on theology and linguistic studies, becoming the nurturer of the English language, whose dictionaries it publishes. It is nevertheless true that some of the greatest English poets, such as Byron and Wordsworth, studied at Cambridge, not Oxford. The latter produced Shelley and Wilde, but without treasuring them as students because of their reservations against theology. Which means that the realist and liberal spirit of science is more favorable not only for freedom but also for poetry.

A similar opposition existed at first between Harvard and Yale, too, the first taking its realistic spirit of science from Cambridge, the second adopting the classical spirit of Oxford. In this century, however, Yale parted with the classical spirit of its old model and integrated itself into the realistic and scientific spirit of our century promoted by Harvard.

To the exact sciences, the new president at Yale added humanities, due to the following favorable circumstances. A former Harvard alumnus became very rich and wanted to leave his entire estate to his alma mater, on the condition that the old building of the college be replaced with a new one, with new desks.

I was in my study at eleven o’clock in the morning on April 14, 1948, when a Securitate inspector rang the door bell and “invited” me to General Inspector Patriciu's office to provide him with some information on the Romanian-American Association. He spoke broken Romanian.

I turned to my wife and asked her to prepare my hunting bag with the necessary clothing.

“But, professor and dear madam, I give you my word, this is not an arrest, otherwise we’d have come at night, and there would be more of us. As you see, I came alone, because this is only about some information requested by the Ministry of the Interior.”

I got my heavy hunting coat, attaching its fur lining, even though it was warm outside.

At Securitate headquarters on Republic Street I was taken to the waiting room, not to the holding cells in the basement.

“Please have a seat until I tell comrade General Inspector,” the officer who had brought me said.

“Is it true, what he told me at home?” I asked myself.

In a few minutes, another officer came out of the general inspector's office, Breiner, whom I knew.

“Take the professor to the holding cells, like any other detainee,” he told the duty sergeant.

The building housing the Securitate Inspectorate had belonged to the Cluj Army Corps, and had moved to this new home only two or three months before. In its cellar they had built around twenty to thirty cells, one meter wide and two meters long, and the concrete walls were still wet. Inside each was a long wooden bunk one and a half meters long and twenty-five to thirty centimeters wide. An unpainted wooden door opened into the narrow corridor between the cells. The air came in under the door. In the first few instants the darkness was pitch-black. I sat down on the bunk to compose myself. I was remembering the moment I had taken leave of my wife. The children were fortunately in school, so the pain of separation was less. I also saw the school in Obreja once again, where I studied when I was as little as they were. However, desperation did not grip me, the proof of that being that after half an hour I stretched out on the bunk and went to sleep.

A few days after the formation of the new government, a new organization was formed, the Romanian Association for Closer Ties of Friendship with the Soviet Union, or, in its Romanian acronym, ARLUS. It was formed at the initiative of the Communist Party, and its chairman was Professor Constantin Parhon, a new member of the party. During Antonescu's governance he had been chairman of the board for the German drug giant Merck. The Sibiu branch of ARLUS was set up at the initiative of Professor Petrovici, who, as a new member of the Communist Party, invited to the opening meeting all the heads of the government parties, but only a small portion of the local professors, in order to secure his election as president. As rector and longtime member of the National Peasants’ Party, Professor Borza was appointed member of the governing committee, like all the other heads of the political organizations. The Association leadership remained firmly in Communist hands. Professors Lupaş, Dragomir, Candea, Blaga, D. D. Roşca, and I were not invited to join.

A few days after ARLUS was formed, the Friends of America Association reopened in Bucharest with Professor D. Gusti as president. The vice presidents were C. Parhon, Tr. Săvulescu, Max Auşnit, and—to my surprise—me. After a few days, Professor Borza—who honored me with the affection of an older colleague— called me to the rectorate and told me that in his modest opinion—as well as that of Ionel Pop, the new minister of Transylvania—it would be useful if we set up Romanian-American associations in Transylvania, with offices in Sibiu, Braşov, Arad, and Timişoara, in order to sustain our efforts for the complete return of territories ceded through the Vienna Award.

“Great minds think alike, rector,” I said, freshly arrived from Bucharest. The previous day I had visited Minister Ionel Pop together with engineer Alex Popp, the general manager of Reşita Company, who was also Transylvanian, and offered our services to speak on behalf of Transylvanian rights at the British and American missions. To this end we were ready to use our connections in those countries, where we had studied, Popp in Britain, I in the United States. Popp added to that the material support of the Reşita Company.

Sentencing took place in the afternoon on November 2, 1948. We weren't taken to the court; the junior prosecutor came to each of us in his room to tell us the sentence. First two soldiers with shouldered rifles came in; they stood at attention, grabbed their weapons, pointed them at me, and simulated putting a round in the chamber. I didn't understand what was happening, because there was no death penalty at that time. Next, Prosecutor Călin came in, somber and full of himself, and read the seven or eight guilty charges to me. He then handed me the paper to sign stating I had been informed, and another for the appeal.

“What does this mean, prosecutor, since there is no death penalty? And I haven't received a maximum penalty. Is that in the law too?”

He shrugged, puzzled.

More unpleasant was the fact that we got no dinner. The panel of judges had left, and no one was interested in us admitting our guilt any more. The comedy was over. Shortly after, the duty officer came in, and told me to prepare for departure.

“I’m ready at any time, I am dressed, and my spare linens are in my sack.”

“You’d better get some rest, professor,” the two workers guarding me said, “departure is in a few hours.” They didn't get any dinner either.

“We’ll get dinner at home,” they said. “If we knew we wouldn't get any dinner, we’d have brought some food to give you too, God knows when you’ll get to eat next.”

They hadn't liked the circus with the soldiers pointing guns at me.

Toward ten, Colonel Dulgheru came in, who found me sleeping. He didn't like my calm demeanor.

“Even now you sleep? Didn't I tell you to be ready to go?”

“It's been five hours since then, colonel, and since you didn't bother us with dinner, what was I supposed to do?” I answered.

Shortly after, the two agents who had taken me from the ministry to the tribunal and from the tribunal to the School of War came in. This time they didn't take me to a car, they took me to a van, where I was happy to find some of my brothers in suffering. We weren't allowed to talk. Meanwhile, the other brothers showed up, and four gendarmes got in too. Two of them were the ones who had accompanied Prosecutor Calin when he told us the sentence.

A Sunday, that's what my entire first day in Blaj was like. That is why I put on my good clothes, bought by mother for school at the summer fair in Teiuş, my village's homestead. I can still see them right now: a vest in blue fabric, a “gentleman’s” hat, as the peasants in Teiuş wore, and a navy blue belt made of elastic fabric with little buckles and a yellow leather fastener to hold the beautiful shirt sewn by mother's hands. She had also sewn the white trousers, cotton as well. They had been tailored by a haberdasher in Teiuş, though.

“Now that's a gentleman,” laughed my godmother, when she called me down to have the milk and coffee which we took before we went to church. The previous day I had been wearing my work clothes from the village in order not to crumple the “gentlemanly” clothes.

When Father Blăjanu was home, my godmother accompanied him to the parish church where mass was held by his former archpriest, Father Bărbat, who uttered his name proudly, because he was handsome and exceedingly rugged. He emptied the glass properly and read the psalm book beautifully, as the cantor in Goga's poem said, which I knew by heart, even though it was not in the Alphabetarium. Our teacher had read it to us, though, from Transilvania, the ASTRA Association magazine.

My godmother, however, preferred mass at the cathedral, where the other more distinguished ladies went, and she felt she was one of them. Here the liturgical ceremony was more imposing, as it was led by an older canon, surrounded by two to four younger priests, plus the two theologians who served as deacons. The responses of the choir were even more impressive.

“Peace be unto you,” said the canon with his feeble and worn voice.

“And unto your spirit,” the choir thundered.

“Nice!” I said to myself.

The church, however, was rather empty.

“Well, yes, because the diac went to take a dip in the Târnava and to take some of the students for a walk in the woods at Veza,” my godmother clarified. “But next Sunday, you’ll be among them.”

From Geoagiu-Băi, Nicolae Tămaş came with me to Obreja, where he spent two weeks trying to convince me to go with him to Bucharest University, and even to study law on top of sociology, as Blaga had recommended.

“Cluj University cannot be better than the one in the capital,” he claimed. “And besides, Bucharest has the Romanian Social Institute with its conferences.”

Ioan Breazu and Petru Munteanu spoke to me very enthusiastically about Virgil Bărbat's lectures, as well those by Vasile Bogrea, Sextil Puşcariu, and Bogdan Duică. My choice was thus made. I entertained the hope that my friends from Mihalţ—two kilometers away from my own village—would be able to convince Tămaş to come to Cluj. He knew them from previous summers, when he had come to Obreja.

Our talks together had taken place on the bank of the Mureş, with its deep water that was great for swimming, and on the fine sand on the Târnava, after which we feasted on mother's chicken soup, which Breazu would not stop praising, calling it unsurpassed. The noodles were finely cut by Măriuca, my brother's wife and Petru Munteanu's sister. Mother prepared the clear soup and the tomato sauce for the plain boiled meat; she had her secret recipe, which she later on passed to my wife, who told me: fat chicken, lots of vegetables, and tomatoes straight off the vine.

Breazu was impressed not only by the way in which Tămaş had summarized John Maynard Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace, recently translated by Constantin Stere, but also by the smart interpretation he had given, which included some opinions of his own.

The brilliance of the courses taught by Bogrea, Bărbat, Puşcariu, and Bogdan Duică, according to Breazu, managed to fascinate Tămaş. Bogrea's Latin language, literature, and civilization lessons could be useful for Roman law. He was also attracted by the Treatise on Roman Law by Professor Cătuneanu in Cluj, which he had borrowed from Romi, our friend with the theater girl. Also heavily weighing in the balance was the Avram Iancu Dormitory, whose recreation and reading room—and even a pool room!—was something the dorms in Bucharest did not have.

Nicolae Mărgineanu's autobiographical memoir is a unique and invaluable addition to the literature in English on the experience of political prisoners, not only in Communist Romania but in authoritarian states in general. It graphically uses the author's incarceration (1948–64) to underline the arbitrary abuse of authority in Communist Romania and his courage in maintaining his moral integrity and dignity in the face of iniquity. But its appeal goes beyond his postwar suffering, for it offers a wistful and sensitive account of episodes from the author's youth in Transylvania in the period 1916–18. He was born in the village of Obreja in central Transylvania on June 22, 1905. As the first member of his peasant family and the only one of his generation from his village to attend a Romanian-language school in Hungarian-ruled Transylvania, his achievement underscores the challenges faced by Romanians in the province before the proclamation of its unification with Romania in December 1918. Mărgineanu's subsequent professional success in academia in the interwar years and his distinction in his chosen field of psychology are engagingly described, while his description of the Soviet advance into Transylvania in fall 1944 and its impact upon the local population is a rare such testimony.

To explain the significance of these remarks, some historical background and context is necessary. The province of Transylvania was regarded by both Romanians and Hungarians as an integral part of their ancestral homeland, and in the minds of both peoples their own survival as a nation was linked to the fate of Transylvania. In this regard, the question of historical antecedence in Transylvania was invoked to buttress a political claim to control of the territory. Emphasis was—and is—placed on an uninterrupted Romanian presence in the territory of Romania, primarily in Transylvania. Most Romanian historians claim a continuous Romanian presence in Transylvania from the time of the Roman colonization of Dacia after its conquest by Trajan at the beginning of the second century AD. The Romans introduced into the province settlers from all parts of the Empire who intermarried with the local Dacian population and romanized it, thus producing the Daco-Roman people who were the forebears of the Romanians.

Everyone was in mourning after the news of the horrid Vienna Diktat. I had the feeling that justice itself had been buried. We dreamed for a thousand years of the just Union of all Romanians in the natural borders of our country, and Michael the Brave proved it was possible, desired as it was by all who spoke the same language and who had the same customs and laws. After twenty years, though, the dream unraveled against everyone's will. And, of course, without consultation, because King Carol's government was anything but an expression of the country.

We remained brothers in pain for days following the Diktat, when we had to clear our heads in order to carry our meager possessions over to the free territories. The brotherhood in pain of the oppressed, left behind in the ceded territories, was matched by the mourning brotherhood of those in the parts of the country left unoccupied, who came to our aid. Their humanity was more vivid than ever. I can still see the trucks and buses that came to help, speeding around Cluj's streets, asking from house to house if they could lend a hand.

The streets on the outskirts were patrolled by three platoons of the regiment to which I belonged, to maintain order and peace. They were just as silent and hurting as were their brothers in arms, forced to retreat from ceded Transylvania without the possibility of firing a single shot in defense of our natural, just borders.

A few days after the Antonescu government formed with help from the legionnaires and imposed by Hitler, their supporters started moving. The odd column would march through the streets downtown, singing their song: “The Guard, the Captain, and the Archangel Michael.”

The apoplectic shouts were uttered with the zeal of neophytes. As it turns out, most of them had become legionnaires overnight, attracted less by the legionnaire creed as by their wish for wealth, and even plunder.

I didn't understand why they took us off the train at Teiuş and not Aiud. We discovered the secret at the penitentiary, a few weeks later. The authorities were afraid of a legionnaire attack on the station in Aiud. From Teiuş we were taken in a truck, face down and watched by four guards. In front of us and behind there were two other trucks full of gendarmes. The whole operation was supervised by Colonel Popescu, general director of State Security. All the stations we passed were full of gendarmes. The eleven of us, weakened and exhausted by the cheap theater, had never even imagined how dangerous we were.

The famous zarcă of the Aiud penitentiary—where hundreds of prisoners found their death—was the old prison building, where inmates from the new building were sent for supposed acts of indiscipline. It was built in the beginning of the century—1903, I think—by the Hungarian prefect of the time, Count Teleki, owner of the lands and castle in Uioara, around fifteen kilometers away from Aiud. A similarly grand jail was erected in Gherla, the second largest penitentiary in Transylvania, built, just like the one in Aiud, for the poor Romanian peasants who couldn't forget Horea, Cloşca, and Crişan's revolt, or Avram Iancu's revolution. After 1918, both jails were found to be too large, because the only prisoners were regular inmates with long sentences. However, under the Stalinist regime, the two jails proved to be too small, and that is why they were packed, just like the county jails attached to courts, with prisoners with short sentences or for those held during trial. The irony was that Aiud was also the place of detention for Count Adam Teleki, son of the former prefect, who had erected the newer part of the prison, which as a child I had thought of as a “frightening grave.” The younger Count Teleki earned our respect, on the one hand, for his fair behavior toward Romanians during the Hungarian occupation of 1940–45, and on the other, for his dignity in bearing the conditions in prison. Adam Teleki had displayed the kindest of sentiments, inspired—in his own words—by the kindness of our nation.

Configurational psychology, Gestaltpsychologie, at the University of Berlin, was familiar to me, because it had been debated at a seminar in Cluj. I thus went to the Institute of Psychology in Berlin to present the first paper on the school promoted by its members. Three decades later, similar papers appeared in German, French, and English. The chair at Cluj had the priority of initiative, which delighted not only Köhler, the head of the department and director of the institute, but also his colleagues, Wertheimer and Lewin. Metzger, Köhler's assistant, who went on to become professor at Münster University and chairman of the German Psychology Society, was tasked with sending all the papers published by the members of the institute to Cluj.

The discovery of the configurational properties of perception was made by Wertheimer, assistant to Professor Stumpf of the University of Frankfurt. Köhler and Koffk a were his research subjects. Shortly after, Stumpf was called to Berlin, where he brought Wertheimer and Köhler, who in the meantime had gotten their degrees in psychology and physics. In Berlin, in fact, Köhler continued studying physics with Planck and Einstein, writing a groundbreaking paper, “Physical configurations.” He had long conversations with Einstein at the imposing mansion of Wertheimer's father-in-law Eppinger, a gynecology professor from the same university who had a very rich clientele. With a subsidy from Eppinger, Köhler went to Tenerife to study the intelligence of monkeys. World War I caught him on that island, which, to his great fortune, he could not leave until the war was over, and he continued his research, deepening and defining his ideas so that when he published them he not only got a PhD but also the chair that Stumpf had left two years previously, on the condition he be succeeded by his most gifted student, as he considered Köhler. Such a beautiful example! Wundt went about it differently, pushing Külpe aside, although he was no less gifted than Köhler. Meanwhile, Köhler continued to insist that the promoter and head of the configurational school was his good friend and older colleague, Wertheimer, of whom Einstein had an excellent opinion.

The day I withdrew from the high school in Blaj, I wrote to Ion Meteş to ask him to notify the high school in Orăştie that I was registering there, so I could take my room in the dormitory right away. I then went to Obreja to say goodbye to my mother, because in the future I was going to see her only on vacations, not every two or three weeks, as I had up to that point. I stayed in the village for three days to allow the letter to reach Orăştie. A week before had been grape picking time, and there were a whole lot of grapes and must left. I enjoyed them fully, and when I left I took only a roast duck and a kilogram of must and one of wine, to celebrate with Meteş the new turn in my education. At home, the celebrations had gone on for the entire duration of my stay.

I got to Orăştie past midnight. The city was far from the station, and I only knew Meteş, who lived in the dormitory, and I could not get in there at night, naturally. In the third class waiting room there were a lot of people, and the smells hung heavy. I stayed on the platform, and after I set my bags on a bench I started strolling around. It had been hot during the day, but now it was cool enough. As I walked, I warmed up. I don't know why, but I was so happy! Ioan Breazu and Ion Meteş had spoken to me fondly of Orăştie and even more so of the headmaster. Just as they did about the general atmosphere of the high school, where reading Vasile Conta was encouraged, not frowned upon.

Late, after two o’clock, I did get tired, though. I felt a chill too. I took my heavy coat out of my bags, I put it on, and, after I got warmer, I sat on a bench for a quarter of an hour to rest. I set the bags over my legs to keep me warm. How beautiful those bags were, handmade by mother in such harmonious colors, just like the cloth she tied at the front of her skirt on Sundays for church. Hanging symmetrically on my shoulders, they straightened my back. And now they kept me warm too.

At first I planned to do my experimental research in collaboration with Professor Allport, who wanted to continue the investigation of temperament he began in his work Studies in Expressive Movement, published in collaboration with Philip Vernon, another Rockefeller scholar, who went on to teach at Cambridge and then London. I was more interested in social research, however. I was also interested in his factor analysis of intelligence and skills, which occasioned round-table discussions about the theory and methodology of factor analysis. Those discussions were only open to his collaborators and a small number of professors from some other universities. Professor Thorndike had recommended that I continue to study factor analysis, since in his opinion it was the most exact methodology for revealing relationships between whole and parts—which is the crucial issue of science. Professor Goangă, on the other hand, believed that introducing the methodology of social attitude measurement to our country was more important and more useful.

In total, Thurstone and his collaborators designed and benchmarked thirtyone scales for examining social attitudes, measuring nationalism versus internationalism, liberalism versus socialism, tradition versus progress, alcohol prohibition versus liberalization, and theism versus atheism. Right after my arrival, I went to Thurstone's office to discuss the object of my research.

“We shouldn't bother finalizing the object, since Professor Ogburn, adviser to President Roosevelt and chairman of the committee for social change with the White House, told me about President Roosevelt's plan to conduct a discreet investigation at five or six universities on the attitudes of youth in academia toward his New Deal. If you agree, I would like to tap you as a collaborator on this research. You are the most appropriate choice, since you cannot be accused of being subjective toward one party or another. The research is funded through government grants to our university.”

As this research was quite urgent, the next day professors Thurstone, Gulliksen, and I put together a list of fifty possible opinions toward Roosevelt's new policies. Opinions ran from the most favorable to the most strongly opposed, with the majority in the middle range. I gave this list to the other collaborators in the factor analysis of intelligence and skills research, as well as to the young sociology professors— Blumer, Wirth, and Cottrell—whom I had befriended the previous summer.

The moment General Antonescu was brought by King Carol II from Bistriţa Monastery—where he was under house arrest and military guard—he had the sympathy and trust not only of the army but also that of public opinion, due to his civic courage and his unyielding attitude toward the king, to whom he told the truth openly, just as Iuliu Maniu had.

In the first world war he had been aide de camp to Marshal Prezan, supreme commander of the army, and as such he had designed the plan for the battle of Argeş, which was unanimously appreciated by all the generals—I had an opportunity to spend time with all of them in prison—even though they didn't like him much because of his arrogance. If General Socec hadn't had the bad luck of falling into German hands with the operational plans for the battle on the day before, in the generals’ opinion it was quite likely we would have won.

Later on, Antonescu was appointed military attaché to Britain, and he studied in France. He commanded the School of War, even though he only had the rank of colonel, and after that, also at a very young age, he was Army Chief of Staff. In the Goga government he was appointed minister of war.

He took a critical attitude toward King Carol's abuses, so the latter took away his command and put him under house arrest, but he was called back the day after the Vienna Award to save the country and the Crown. Especially the Crown, because no one else, given Maniu's opposition toward the king, could save it. After consulting with the latter and with the other party chairmen, he submitted a request for resignation to the king, offering him a guarantee for free passage out of the country with all assets untouched. The alternative would have been to bring down the monarchy itself, because Voivod Mihai—as the future king was called at that time—would have been in a moral quagmire with regard to accepting the Crown if his father had been prosecuted or assassinated.

At Malmaison they stripped me, and two agents searched my clothes in detail under the supervision of a third, who seemed to be the head of detention.

“Get down on all fours,” he said, after the search was over.

I didn't understand.

“Sit on your hands and knees so I can search your asshole, you sodding meathead,” said the head of detention. I must reproduce verbatim his words, for the sake of authenticity. At the end, the one doing the search kicked me in my behind for good measure, to please his boss.

They gave me back my clothes and I carried them to the cell. The cell was two by two meters, with two bunk beds, a little table, and a stool. The window was above the door to the hallway. I was troubled and dead tired. After a few minutes, though, the head of detention, a huge individual resembling an orangutan rather than a man, opened the door.

“Already tucked in, eh? Get dressed quickly, we didn't bring you here to sleep.”

In the interrogation room, four grim faces were waiting for me, seated at a long table. I told them good evening, but they didn't answer.

“Sit down,” said one in the middle, showing me the chair opposite them.

“When, where, and by whom were you recruited as an agent of American espionage services during your studies in America?”

“I don't understand the question,” I said. “In America I was a scientific researcher at university as a Rockefeller Foundation scholar. Just like Dr. Badgasar.”

“Don't mention Professor Bagdasar's name, you’re smearing it, and don't you lie to us, we know about the milk you’ve suckled from your momma. You think we don't know that the Rockefeller Foundation was a front for the intelligence services? Professor Bagdasar told us himself, but he was honest and when he came back he renounced those American gangsters, while you, you bastard, betrayed till the end, when we arrested you.”

At Harvard University, Professor Allport received me with the utmost affection. One, because that was his nature, and two, because he could find out news from me about German psychology, and about the work at the institute in Hamburg. He was only seven years my senior, so he was very young as well.

The four months I spent at that famous university—where William James's spirit still loomed over Emerson Hall—were a true delight. Mrs. Allport was an incredibly distinguished lady, also a psychology graduate, who made friends with my wife. By now my wife had also started to look into psychology but also into English language and literature, on top of her French. We then formed a warm friendship with the Cantrils. Our only regret was that months now passed faster than weeks. Looking back now, with today's eyes, my wife and I believe in our hearts that our best professors were the Allports, who enjoyed our good days and who were deeply pained by our harsh years of ordeal.

After a long discussion with Allport about my studies in Germany, where he had also studied with Stern, Köhler, and Spranger, I paid a visit to my colleagues to get to know them. In the evening I was introduced to Professor Boring, the head of the psychology department, who was also very well informed on German psychology, but only on the experimental kind, his specialty. He had come to Harvard from Cornell University, where he studied under Titchener, Wundt's student. This was how he went into experimental methodology. He had started by studying engineering, but he turned to psychology to clarify certain pathological states he suffered from. After he came to Harvard, he started psychotherapy with Hans Sacks, but with fairly unsatisfactory results.

When I left Emerson Hall I looked once again at the painting hung over the entrance, representing a discussion between James, Royce, and Parker. Charles Peirce, who had inspired James's pragmatism, was missing, even though he is one of the founders of mathematical logic. At that time, however, this discipline had few followers, even though Morgan was also American. However, the neopositivists from Vienna—after it was taken over by Hitler—brought it to new heights.

On the day of the historic act of August 23, 1944, I was busy with the entrance exam for the experimental technical school for the factories.

At around seven in the evening I was urgently called to the office of engineer C. Manciu, technical director of the factories, who told me of his conversation with engineer Alex Popp, director general of the company based in Bucharest. Our common friend told him the news of the arrests of Marshal Antonescu, Council of Ministers Vice President Mihai Antonescu, General Pantazi from the Ministry of War, and General Vasiliu from the interior minister, who were former classmates with the marshal and were considered his most devoted men. At ten that night I listened to the king's address on the radio, as well as to the lineup of the new ministry. I clinked a glass of wine with engineer Manciu to celebrate.

Three or four days later, Popp arrived in Reşita to take security measures for the factory against the retreating German armies, which had already occupied the Anina mines and threatened to destroy them on Hitler's orders. Fortunately, contact could be made with V. Poboran, mine director and professor at Timişoara Polytechnic, later dean of the School of Mining in Petroşani—thanks to a secret line which the Germans had not intercepted. Poboran was their prisoner, but he had enough tact to convince the Germans not to destroy his mines. Eng. Popp told us of the enthusiasm with which the population received the news that we were out of the war against the Soviet Union, as well as the German air attack on the capital, even though General Gerstenberg gave his word of honor to the king that he would order his troops to retreat as long as our army didn't attack them. However, they attacked anyway, in spite of the word given by the general. In fact, they attacked at Hitler's insane order. German soldiers, however, put up a lackluster fight, even though they were many and better armed. They were aware they were losing the war and that Hitler was insane. What worried us was that the Russian army in Moscow imprisoned fifty thousand Romanian officers and soldiers, even though they had turned against the Germans and forced them to retreat.

Education

University of Cluj psychology degree (1927), PhD Magna cum laude (1929).

Postdoctoral fellow of the School of Philosophy and Letters, University of Cluj (1931).

Specialty courses at the universities of Leipzig, Berlin, Hamburg (1929), Sorbonne (Paris) 1935, and London (1935).

Rockefeller Foundation scientific research scholar at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Chicago, and Duke universities (1932–34).

Professional Activity

Junior assistant (1926–28), assistant (1928–36), lecturer (1936–38), University of Cluj Psychology Institute.

Senior lecturer, applied psychology, Cluj University School of Philosophy and Letters (1938–47).

Psychology substitute and director of the Psychology Institute, Cluj University School of Philosophy and Letters (1938–42).

Director of the Psychotechnic Laboratories with the Ministry of Labor in Cluj and Sibiu (1941–43).

Senior scientific researcher, grade II, Pedagogical Sciences Institute, head of the Cluj branch (1969–71).

Substitute professor and researcher at the Psychology Department of the ‘Babes- Bolyai’ University School of History and Philosophy in Cluj (1971–80).

Guest professor at Bonn University (1971).

Guest professor at Hamburg University (1972).

Guest of the Rockefeller Foundation in the United States (1979–80). Returns to Romania when American doctors confirm his cancer diagnosis.

Passes away on June 13, 1980, in Cluj.

Published Works

Cluj University Psychology Institute Publishing House:

Psihologia exerciţiului, 1929, 158 pp.

Psihotehnica în Germania, 1929, 88 pp.

Psihologia germană contemporană, 1930, 350 pp.

Psihologia învăţării, 1931, 180 pp.

Psihologia franceză contemporană, 1932, 320 pp.

Psihologia configuraţiei (in collaboration with L. Rusu, A. Roşca, D. Todoran), 1929, 176 pp.

Elemente de psihometrie, 1938, 376 pp.

Analiza factorilor psihici, 1938, 216 pp.

Psihologia persoanei, Ediţia I: 1940, 570 pp.; Ediţia a II-a: 1941, 574 pp.

Psihotehnica în marea industrie, 1942, 156 pp.

Psihotehnica, 1943, 504 pp.

Other publishing houses:

Problema evoluţiei, Ed. Societatea de Mâine, Cluj, 1931, 84 pp.

Natura ştiinţei, Ed. Ştiinţifică, Bucureşti, 1969, 504 pp.

Sub semnul omeniei, Ed. pt. Literatură, Bucureşti, 1970, 304 pp.

Psihologie şi literatură, Ed. Dacia, Cluj, 1971, 350 pp.

Orientare şcolară şi profesională—scientific coordinator and author of five chapters, around 100 pages, Ed. Didactică şi Pedagogică, Bucureşti, 1972, 350 pp.

Two reasons explain this remarkable activity at Cluj University. One was the selection of teaching staff for the university, made by the most brilliant teachers, N. Iorga, V. Pârvan, and Sextil Puşcariu from the School of Letters and Philosophy, Ţiţeica and Pompei from the School of Sciences, and Gheorghe Marinescu and Cantacuzino from the School of Medicine. The second cause was the enthusiasm generated by the Union of all Romanians in a single state. Animated by this, the new teachers made every effort to fulfill the dream of Transylvanian Romanians of having their own university. The dream started with the Latinist school in Blaj and continued with Avram Iancu, Simion Bărnuţiu, and the Memorandist fighters. Simion Bărnuţiu, Treboniu Laurian, Densuşianu, Tr. Lalescu, S. Mândrescu, I. Bianu and many others taught at the universities in Bucharest and Iaşi.

At the same time, a number of teachers from those two universities came to Cluj to honor their duty toward liberated Transylvania. In the first years, Iorga, Gheorghe Ţiţeica, D. Pompei, and others came to give lectures. The speech of the first rector, Sextil Puşcariu, and Vasile Pârvan's inaugural lesson, stand witness to this enthusiasm, which bore fruit in the efforts of this institution.

On the other hand, the country's democratic structure, with its climate of freedom, proved to be advantageous for didactic and scientific activity. Politics couldn't make its way into the university, no matter what the struggle was like between the democratic parties of the times, which succeeded each other in government. When he got elected the second time as rector of the university, Professor Goangă got most of of the votes from the National Peasants’ Party members, not just those of the members of the Liberal Party to which he belonged. And that in spite of the fact that his counter-candidate was Professor Racoviţă. His objective and just leadership in his first five-year term carried more weight than the incomparably greater scientific weight that Professor Racoviţă carried, who, during his own term as rector, had less organizational capacity, as well as, maybe, less understanding of the petty concerns of the various departments. Professor Goangă, on the other hand, erected the majestic building of the new clinics, the Botanical Institute, the History Institute, the new psychology institute building, the University House, and more.

Harvard and Yale were set up at a time when the American states were English colonies. As such, they were organized based on the model of English universities, where their founders studied. The same English models were used for organizing Princeton and Johns Hopkins. Columbia University of New York and the University of Chicago, however, were organized based on the hands-on, particular needs of the independent United States. As a consequence, both universities emphasized social sciences. Their model was followed by all subsequent American universities.

The University of Chicago was preceded by Harper College, named after its first president. Around the World Fair at the beginning of our century, the college's buildings burned down together with the exhibition buildings near them. John D. Rockefeller offered them the money needed for a new university on the condition it would not bear his name. His wife's name, however, Laura Spelman, appears as the name of the foundation in its initial stages, when it granted scholarships and subsidies only for social services and medicine. After Rockefeller made a billion dollars, he bequeathed two thirds of his wealth to the foundation. In the end, the foundation ended up representing three quarters of his estate. The rest he left to his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr.

When answering holiday cards from the president of the University of Chicago, old Rockefeller added a check for a million dollars for the needs of the university to his letter, which, as a cultural institution, could not cover its expenses from tuition, no matter how high that was. It covered its expenses from donations made by former students who went on to amass wealth.

It must be said here that poor students were given scholarships by the university. The scholarships were initially granted by exam, then in relation to a student's grades. The greatest percentage of donors came from among these poor students who later became rich.

Students with poorer grades could cover their expenses by working at the college, waiting tables or washing dishes.