Boycotting Washington

For almost five years scholars have been precariously straddling the proverbial frying pan's edge. From without, legislative committees and the public press have attacked members of university communities collectively as communists or "pinkos." Inside the academic fold, more subtle pressures from administrators and alumni boards have often forced teachers to restrain their feelings about academic freedom in order to retain their jobs. Tactically compelled to cooperate with legislative committees, the academic community has, nevertheless, found new strength within its own bailiwick. The recent action of prominent professors, three of them from Harvard, in professionally boycotting the University of Washington, is an example of the power self-respecting professors still have to protect their freedom from inner attacks, which are far more insidious than Congressional investigations.

attempts at inner control have multiplied in recent years, especially in state-controlled institutions. The University of California, for example, has a "contact man" between its administrators and the California Senate Committee on Un-American Activities. His job: to investigate the activities of faculty members. A state policeman in Michigan University regularly attends undergraduate political meetings and checks the authors of all controversial letters appearing in the Daily. In February, the University of Washington's President Schlitz turned down a request from its Department of Physics to invite J. Robert Oppenheimer for three months of lectures.

The repercussions of Schmitz' action have shown how the scholar can act to protect himself against such measures. On February 26, Victor Weisskopf, professor at MIT, became the first to boycott Washington for its ban on Oppenheimer. Two weeks later, Harvard professor Perry Miller, in turning down a similar invitation to speak at the University in Seattle, declared, "No self-respecting scholar could talk there now." Last week seven scholars, two of them members of Harvard's medical faculty, joined in refusing to appear at a symposium planned by Washington University's biology department, declaring that the ban on Oppenheimer had "clearly placed the University of Washington outside the community of scholars." The symposium was cancelled, over 1,000 Washington students and most of the faculty have protested the ban, and President Schmitz has been called before the faculty's governing board.

Unlike Fifth Amendment users, professors employing boycott measures to prevent inroads on academic freedom by other institutions avoid the leftist label, and embarrassment both to themselves and to their own universities. The actions of Miller and his colleagues--whose records have never been associated with the word "communism"--have had great force in showing the public, as well as University of Washington administrators, in what contempt the thoughtful academic community holds the Oppenheimer ban.

Relegation to an outpost "outside the community of scholars" by the rest of the academic world is a severe judgment on a University. The Seattle school's administrators should take the message to heart and return their university to "its rightful and respected position in the academic world."