Reducators

These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects: love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt sun and father. King Ledr, Act 1, scene Iv.

Like the Earl of Gloucester, the Cambridge City Council might have blamed the discord which besets the country on the late eclipse in the moon. For as the moon darkened in the earth's shadow Monday night, it took on a slightly reddish hue.

But Councillor Lynch suggested a more immediate cause of possible mutinies and discord. He brought forth the list of "Reducators at Harvard" which the National Council for American Education has been peddling for a couple of years now.

Anyone glancing down the list and finding there such names as "Roscoe Pound" and "James B. Conant" should chuckle amusedly. For Dean Pound recently voiced his approval of the University of California's loyalty oath, and President Conant, along with nineteen other leading educators, urged last year that Communists be banned from teaching.

But there are those whose minds work like Gloucester's. Just as he confused the eclipses and the discords with causes and their sequent effects, so those who publish and purchase the "Reducators" pamphlet confuse the holding of some opinion which Communists also happen to hold with being a dangerous subversive.

Edmund laughed at Gloucester, saying! "This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune-- often the surfeit of our own behavior--we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars." Those who subscribe to "Reducators" may be as confused in their thinking as Gloucester, but it's not so easy to laugh at their excellent foppery.