Early in during his time as rector a senior party officer at the university included in his report to the Ministry of State Security (whose responsibilities included keeping track of such matters) the assessment that Stern, as University Rector, did not have good relations with university staff, which was reflected in an atmosphere of varying levels of general anxiety among the university personnel. Viewed from other angles, such anxiety was not without reason, since Stern saw it as his job to run the university in the spirit of the country's ruling political party. Several "purges" were carried out during his tenure, notably in 1958 when he moved against the so-called "Spirituskreis" ("loosely, "Spiritual circle""), a little group of unacceptably "bourgeois" professors. Earlier on, in 1952 and 1953 he several times used his influence with the university senate to stop protest actions by university deans in support of students arrested in the context of the growing discontent that preceded the brief but savagely suppressed (with the active participation of Soviet troops) uprising of June 1953. Also controversial among comrades at the university was the way in which Stern was content to appoint former Nazis to professorial chairs, and, where appropriate, reappoint them, provided they proved dutiful and compliant backers of the party under the new kind of one-party dictatorship that had been installed in the East German state, built according to Soviet-style Leninist-Socialist principles, on foundations that had, before 1949, been the Soviet occupation zone. From the point of view of sympathetic sources, Stern felt secure in the belief that he had come across plenty of committed left-winger activists who, having once acquired status and position, had been content to betray and abandon the labour movement. There was no monopoly of political betrayal for the political right.