Academic Freedom

This issue carries the CRIMSON's second annual report on academic freedom. That report is a case history of fear--fear of communism, fear of the strength of its adherents and their ability to win followers. Driven by this fear, colleges and universities have fired teachers and forced faculties to take loyalty oaths. Driven by this fear state legislatures have established these oaths in schools they control, and have set up committees to investigate teachers' loyalty. On private and state-run campuses the entire membership of certain organizations has been barred from teaching by blanket rulings.

Some of these cases involve action against individual college teachers, or the barring of single groups from college staffs. Administrators have pressured and investigated their personnel for being leftist, for belonging to organizations of a pinkish tinge. Yet, real subversives are not caught by such methods, while men with liberal tendencies are hurt and frightened. For the administrators have been unable, or unwilling to draw the line between traitors and loyal dissenters.

More and more, however, as the report shows, universities and legislatures are tending to act against whole faculties at once. Loyalty oaths and group-prohibitions have multiplied since last year. Again it is liberals rather than Communists who are most often injured by such processes. Oaths do not cramp real Communists, who would not be so foolish as to admit their party allegiances. Nor are oaths necessary as evidence later on against subversives, since there are already more than enough laws under which such people can be prosecuted. But loyalty tests do frighten men who might have belonged to some group classified as subversive, and even men who never considered such affiliation.

The mere fact of membership in an organization should bar no teacher from his job. Membership in leftist groups does not affect a man's competence as a teacher. In some cases even a card-carrying Communist might be perfectly competent to teach his subject, and so long as this possibility exists, general proscriptions are wrong. Professional competence and professional competence only should be the criterion for the hiring and firing of teachers.

Universities and legislatures that deviate from this rule do actual harm to their struggle against Communism: they prevent teachers from pointing out hitches in our way of life, and hinder, rather than help the discovery of solutions to national problems. Moreover, they diminish those very individual liberties that we are right now struggling to save.

Colleges and law-makers must resist alumui and citizen pressure to fire or silence those with diverse views. Otherwise this will become a nation peopled by dull men who dare not think a new thought-the students of frightened teachers.