Another important center, started just as World War I was beginning, was at Columbia University. Although Dr. Judah A. Joffe had been appointed a lecturer in Russian for one year, in 1909, to prepare some articles and lectures on Russian literature for a volume on European literatures which the university was publishing, the serious work was begun only when John Dyneley Prince, then Professor of Semitic Languages and an authority on Assyrian and Sumerian, offered courses in Russian and Slavonic philology. Prince was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1868 and was an 1888 graduate of Columbia. He took his doctorate at Johns Hopkins in Semitic and conducted excavations in Mesopotamia. He was later Dean of the graduate school of New York University and then was brought to Columbia. In addition to his academic work, Prince was greatly interested in conservative New Jersey Republican politics. He served as both Speaker of the House and President of the New Jersey Senate when Woodrow Wilson was Governor. In 1921, President Harding appointed him United States Minister to Denmark and President Coolidge in 1926 transferred him to Yugoslavia. He was absent from the university therefore from 1921 to 1933, when as an ardent Republican he retired from the diplomatic service after the election of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Prince was an unusually talented linguist who fluently spoke nearly all European languages, including Hungarian and Turkish. He was also a master of several Algonquin Indian dialects and a masterly singer of folksongs. He had previously turned this unusual ability to good use in his political campaigns among the New Jersey voters of various foreign nationalities. When he turned to Slavic, he easily mastered nearly all the languages and soon was able to speak them readily. In addition, he was an excellent philologist and it was in this field that he most enjoyed himself. He published a _Russian Grammar_ in 1919 under great difficulties because of the general lack of proper type. Later he published grammars of both Latvian and Serbo-Croatian. He was also a great friend of Professor Michael I. Pupin, the distinguished Serb professor of electricity. All these abilities made him determined not to allow the department, at Columbia, to be limited only to Russian. He offered courses in 1914 on a graduate level with Ivan S. Andreyevsky as assistant. At the same time, through University Extension, he started credit courses in Polish with Dr. Albert Morawski-Nawench as instructor. Dr. Morawski-Nawench was a Polish journalist and editor who had received his doctorate at the University of Vienna. Czech was offered by Alois Koukol, a Presbyterian minister, born in Kutna Hora and educated in Prague.