Ober Attacked Faculty For 'Subversive' Action

Frank E. Ober, whose name is attacked is Maryland's subversives act, was turned down by the University in 1949 when be demanded the disciplining of two faculty members.

The prominent Maryland lawyers, chairman of the State Senate committee that drew up the Ober law that name year, asked President Conant to crack down on John Clardi, assistant professor of English, and Harlow Shapley, director of the University Observatory, for "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." Ober wrote refusing to contribute to a Law School fund drive. He graduated from the Law School in 1913.

He charged that Clardi had backed Progressive Party money campaigns, thus helping the party fight the very laws Ober was helping write. And, he stated, Shapley had aided "in a propaganda effort with a foreign hostile power . . ." by chairing the 1949 Cultural and scientific Conference for World Peace in New York.

Conant turned Ober's letters over to Grenville Clark '03, since retired, but then senior member of the Corporation. Clark replied: "Let me say at once that your proposals--apparently to dismiss or censure two professors, and certainly to impose drastic controls on the activities as citizens of all professors cannot and will not be adopted at Harvard, so long as Harvard remains true to her principles . . ."

N.E.A. Report

He continued: "The fundamental reason is that for Harvard to take the course you recommend would be to repudiate the very essence of what Harvard stands for--the search for truth by a free and uncoarced body of students and teachers . . ."

Ober had insisted that Conant implement a policy the President had backed earlier in 1949 as a members of the National Education Association Committee: that communists should not teach. But, Clark said, the University did not intend to allow a witch hunt. Conant had already allowed the University News Office to state" . . . the report of the N.E.A. Committee dealt with judgments . . . and did not attempt to discuss legal or procedural aspects of the appointment and possible dismissal of teachers . . ."

The Ober law won a victory in elections last fall when a large majority of Maryland voters backed it on a referendum. It is now before the Supreme Court on a test case.