PRESS

Here is how we interpret Dr. Butler's replies to the Spectator and the American committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom:

The University is not a "foreign and remote thing" but consists primarily of the faculty and the students. "University freedom" means that the faculty as a group is not subject to any restrictions from higher up; "academic freedom" is the right of any individual member of the faculty freely to express his own views.

In the terms of its original definition the phrase academic freedom has "no meaning whatsoever" for those in statu pupillari, but is "restricted to the work of professors and scholars." The counterpart of academic freedom in the realm of the undergraduate is "student freedom," implying similar rights and responsibilities. Off the Campus, the faculty member as an individual has complete freedom of action--with the understanding that he will "do all in his power to avoid doing anything to injure his University's reputation." His right to hold isolationist views, say, or to criticise domestic policy and national defense, is guaranteed him "by our ordinary American doctrine of civil liberty." Professors "are certainly at full liberty to think and to talk as they please upon any subject which interests them, whether it be popular or unpopular."

We take the quotations included above at their face value. According to our interpretation they constitute a statment of principles with which we wholeheartedly agree. --The Columbia Spectator