Nanjing University a center of Confucian thought and humanistic scholarship. During this period, Nanjing University was known as the foremost "Oriental Education Centre" and recognized as an academic and cultural exchange centre for east and west. Many scholars visited and instructed there, including the American educationist Paul Monroe, W. H. Kilpatrick, E. L. Thorndike, philosopher John Dewey, British philosopher Bertrand Russell, German philosopher Hans Driesch and the Indian (also Bengali) poet Rabindranath Tagore. The university became the capital national university after Nanking was made the capital by Nationalist Government, initially renamed National Dyisyi Chungshan University (or called National Nanking Chungshan University) in
Bertrand Russell and with Germany "freed from all alien armed forces and pledged to neutrality in any conflict between East and West". US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles replied for Eisenhower. The exchange of letters was published as "The Vital Letters of Russell, Khrushchev, and Dulles". Russell was asked by "The New Republic", a liberal American magazine, to elaborate his views on world peace. He urged that all nuclear-weapons testing and constant flights by planes armed with nuclear weapons be halted immediately, and negotiations be opened for the destruction of all hydrogen bombs, with the number of conventional nuclear devices limited