A Bill of Goods

A bill to "safeguard the Christian ideals of American education" will be taken up by the Education Committee of the Massachusetts State Legislature within two weks. Behind its pious title, it contains threats against the tax-exempt status and the charter of any educational institution which "knowingly employs in its faculty one who advocates the overthrow of the United States government by force or violence." Representative Ralph Sullivan of Boston, author of the measure, claims that charters and tax exemptions are given to colleges by the state in return for such services as "improving standards of education" and "taching respect for authority." He contends that when a college employs a teacher who believes in violent overthrow of the government, that college is no longer fulfilling its responsibilities and should receive no privileges from the state.

The new bill would empower the State Commissioner of Education to investigate all colleges and schools to discover whether any members of their faculties were subversive. The State Board of Education would have the power to cancel the tax exemption of a school that did not dismiss a suspected faculty member. If a teacher were actually indicted by the district attorney and convicted by the courts for advocating violent overthrow of the government, the institution which employed him would lose its charter. New York State's Lusk Laws, passed in 1921, are the only precedent for this sort of legislation. Characterized by Governor Al Smith as "vicious" and intolerant," they were repealed two years after their passage.

Although Representative Sullivan considers his measure necessary, there is no concrete evidence of sedition in the educational institutions of Massachusetts. The Teachers' Oath Law of 1935 requires all teachers in the state to swear that they will uphold the United States Constitution. Is only function has been to "expose" three instructors who refused to sign as a matter of principals. The Smith Act, making it a crime to advocate forcible overthrow of the U.S. government, has not brought a single conviction in this state since its passage by Congress in 1940. Only one man has ever been convicted under the Massachusetts Criminal Anti-Anarchy Act, and that conviction was quashed over 20 years ago. If there are "revolutionaries" among Massachusetts teachers, it is strange that none of them have been brought to trial under these existing laws.

It appears that the chief motive of the new bill is to increase the state's influence on private education. Small colleges and schools could easily be intimidated into dropping faculty members who held leftist views-Representative Sullivan asserts that several colleges have already "drawn in their horns" because of his proposed legislation. A wholesale dismissal of instructors with leftist or "radical" opinions would prevent colleges from giving fair and impartial treatment to many of today's most important problems in the natural and social sciences. Students would no longer be the sole judges of a teacher's lectures; instructors would also have to satisfy the Commissioner of Education. The Sullivan Bill would endanger the academic freedom of every educational institution in the state of Massachusetts.