Automatic Failure

The AAU presidents believe all CP members automatically flunk their tests because of the nature of the group to which they belong. While this is probably true in the great majority of cases, it is not necessarily so in all. Dropping the blanket over all CP professors without passing individual judgement is playing too carelessly with the rights of tenure.

It is not hard to build a hypothetical case of a CP professor who violates none of the AAU's standards. Rightfully or not, the Communist Party is a legal political group in the U.S. The Smith Act itself admits that a person can be a Communist without conspiring against the Government. And there may be tenured professors on faculties today who, for what lame reason we do not know, hold membership cards in the CP, yet neither lie nor follow the Party line in their teaching. The Communist Party in this country is not so perfectly organized that naive teachers cannot hold dormant membership without being read out. They are unfaithful Communists and politically stupid men. But only when their Communism affects their teaching should they exit. Communists can certainly teach math, physics, or languages so long as they can meet the AAU's other standards.

The Communist Party tics of other tenured professors may well lead them to slant their teaching to a party line, especially in the social sciences. Yet the AAU would not fire a dogmatic Marxist or Freudian, both of whom blind themselves to all but a single cause; or a Catholic, whose ideas on certain subjects must change at the order of the Pope. For these beliefs are not presently dangerous to the government. But if only the threat's the thing, it is dangerously illogical to fire a CP member who has never taught threatening ideas. Moreover, any avowed Communist will be closely enough watched by both his students and the FBI that his first violation of the Smith Act will be noticed.

Taking Harvard as an example, we do not feel that membership in the Communist party per se is either "grave misconduct" or "neglect of duty," even though these 17th century terms of the University statutes are eminently clastic. But recruiting for the CP and similar actions are, because they abuse a teacher's classroom prestige in order to train students for potentially illegal acts.