Faxon Case Goes Before Judiciary Here This Month

The Massachusetts Supreme Court will this month hand down the first state Judgical decision on the right of a school board to dismise one of its permanent teachers for refusal to answer the questions of a Congressional committee.

George, R. Faxon, a Mathematics teacher at the Boston Public Latin School, was called before the McCarthy Committee on March 25, 1953, and invoked the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer all questions concerning his associates and past or current membership in the Communist Party.

The following day Dennis C. Haley, Superintendent of Boston School suspended Faxon without pay. Faxon immediately pretested his suspension, and during June 1953, the five-member Boston School Committee pondered his case.

The principle charges filed against Faxon were that he was a person undesirable as a school teacher; that he had violated the teachers' oath he took on March 31, 1953; and that he had engaged in conduct unbecoming a school teacher by failing, without justification, to cooperate as required by law with a duly constituted sub-committee of Congress.

The School Committee quickly threw

out the charge that Faxon was "undesirable" as a school teacher. He had worked for the Boston Schools for nineteen years and in 1951 was transferred to the coveted post of master at the Public Latin School.

Faxon told the School Committee that he has not belonged to the Communist Party since 1951, when membership became illegal in the Commonwealth. He asserted that he had never violated the Constitutions of the United States or Massachusetts, which he swore to uphold when he took the teachers' oath in 1935.

But Faxon declined to answer all other questions posed by the School Committee, on the ground that such interrogation invaded his privacy of political belief.

The Committee could not find any affirmative evidence that Faxon had belonged to the Communist Party since 1951, and it dismissed the second charge against him.

But while the School Committee rejected the two principle charges levied against Faxon, it stuck to its assertion that he had somehow violated a "law" by claiming Constitutional privilege under the Fifth Amendment, and voted unanimously to dismiss him.

School Board members reasoned that truthful answers to Congressional questions could not possibly incriminate an innocent person and that if Faxon was not abusing the Fifth Amendment, he must be a Communist. Either way, they reasoned, Faxon would be culpable under one of the Board's charges