Hibben became increasingly troubled by the situation. In December 1923, in an attempt to clear the air, he called a conference at his own home. To it he invited a number of his most trusted advisers, the campus doctor Donald Sinclair, some of the undergraduates who had criticised Buchman, Shoemaker, and Buchman himself. According to Shoemaker, Buchman was invited on the basis that his work was not going to be investigated, but that the university authorities would like to know more of the facts. Abeel turned up with a bottle of smelling salts which he periodically held to his nostrils, and he and his friends stated their case against Buchman.

Buchman then answered questions from some of the senior members of the university. 'The meeting', wrote Shoemaker to one of Buchman's critics later, 'brought out the complete lack of knowledge of the spiritual needs of the men in the university on the part of many of the faculty present; and to hear some of those dry old men correct Buchman, who knew and was doing more than they ever could concerning the realisation of religion in human lives, was infinitely pathetic. He quietly answered questions and the meeting broke up.'14

At some point in the evening Buchman seems to have spoken privately to Hibben about the needs of undergraduates as he saw them. Hibben evidently got the impression that Buchman asserted that 80 per cent of Princeton students were given to homosexual practices. This, Buchman declared, when he came to hear of it later, was entirely erroneous. What he had said was that 'from eighty to ninety per cent of all youths in the adolescent stage have sexual problems, and many of them are troubled by secret sins affecting their sex life. The term secret sins, which I used, does not connote homosexuality, but refers to the common variety of the problems of youth. They are in great need of sympathetic understanding and help from mature persons.'

'I believe we cannot help those youths to a victorious life with Christ in the centre unless we recognise this fact and enable them to face honestly and courageously these and other barriers that separate them from God and their fellow men,' Buchman added.15

In 1926 Hibben claimed that, on this occasion, he had forbidden Buchman to return to the campus. Neither Buchman nor any of his friends present were aware of this, and Sinclair denied it on several occasions.16 Certainly, the letters exchanged between Hibben and Buchman in the months immediately after the conference show no signs of such an injunction, or of any residual doubts or misunderstandings. Hibben wrote to Buchman in that same December that he hoped the visit had not been too much of a strain,17 and again in January expressed 'great confidence in Sam and the young men working with him' whom he knew to be products of Buchman's work, and trusted 'that the conference the other night will result in better understanding' all round.18

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