19 Harvard Professors Sign Anti-HUAC Paper

Nineteen Harvard professors have signed an American Civil Liberties Union petition advocating the abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee. In all, 250 professors from colleges across the country signed the statement.

The educators were primarily concerned with the Committee's "abridgement" of academic freedom. "During its 24-year history," the petition says, "the House Committee has been unrelenting in its harassing of teachers."

As a result of the Committee's "exercising the powers of prosecutor and judge," the statement charges, ". . . educational abilities and skills developed through long years of training have been withheld from the community. And this at a time when qualified teachers are in tragically short supply."

The petition says, "The Committee has latterly improved its hearing manners. . . . Yet it continues to be carelees or unscrupulous in vilifying its critics." It continues, "Under these circumstances, we find it understandable, though deplorable, that many teachers, in the colleges and universities, as well as in the public schools, have grown timid about stating, even for classroom discussion, ideas which someone later might interpret as subversive."

"Exercise of the free intellect will in no way endanger the country's internal security," the statement says, and it asserts, "Not only teachers, but all Americans, we insist, must be free from trial by publicity--from what Mr. Justice Black has called 'exposure, obloquy, and public scorn.'"

Harvard Professors Sign

Harvard professors who signed the petition were Herschel C. Baker, J. N. Douglas Bush, Herbert Dieckmann, Wilbur M. Frohock, Albert J. Guerard, Howard Mumford Jones, Harry T. Levin, John M. Gaus, Oscar Handlin, David F. Cavers, Caleb Foote, Mark DeWolfe Howe, Kenneth V. Thimann, George Wald, Roderick Firth, John T. Edsall, Gordon W. Allport, Talcott Parsons, and Cedric H. Whitman.

Jones said yesterday that the work of the committee "can be done by the FBI in a more legal and orderly procedure." "The Committee spends time on its own particular definition of un-American," Jones said. He suggested that it should investigate the John Birch Society, in avid Communist-hunting group based in Belmont: "I can't imagine anything more thoroughly un-American."

The question of abolishing the Committee has now become "academic," since the House almost unanimously voted to renew the HUAC's appropriation, Howe said. Handlin, while noting that the Committee "has abused its privileges and hasn't served a useful function in 15 years", said that "it is not realistic to think that Congress will suddenly turn against it."

Howe said that the Supreme Court's recent decisions on the Braden and Wilkinson cases "were not meant to give the Court's blessing" to the HUAC. The decisions, he explained, "merely said Congress had the right to keep such an absurd body going." He remarked, "If the Supreme Court were the House, it would vote to abolish the Committee.