Temple Dismisses Professor For Fifth Amendment Usage

A Temple University philosophy professor was investigated last year by the Velde Committee and his university officials on charges of subversive activity, but was dismissed from his post on an entirely different count for which he was not tried: "misuse of the Fifth Amendment."

In the meantime, the Civil Liberties Union has taken up his case, Temple University has threatened to release further "withheld information" on the professor if the ACLU releases its report, and his lawyer has admitted to the CRIMSON that he was formerly a member of the Communist party.

Barrows Dunham, Princeton graduate and chairman of Temple's Philosophy Department, was called before the Velde Committee on February 28, 1953, on suspicion of subversive activity. Dunham gave his name to the committee, but refused to reveal any other information--not even his occupation or educational background--under the terms of the Fifth Amendment.

"Never before," veteran sides commented, "had the House committee been stopped so short in an inquiry." Velde's committee immediately voted unanimously to recommend him for contempt and later secured the citation from Congress. The citation is at present at the Attorney General's office, waiting for a decision on presenting it to a Grand Jury.

Johnson Heads Committee

In rapid subsequent action, Temple officials, suspended Dunham, called him before their loyalty committee, and finally dismissed him from the faculty, on a Pennsylvania law providing for a loyalty oath.

The Philadelphia branch of the ACLU immediately took up Dunham's defense, charging that Temple had violated due process of law and academic freedom in its action against him. An ACLU committee, consisting of A. H. Frey and Clark Byse, Law professors at the University of Pennsylvania and Henry Sawyer, 3d., Philadelphia attorney, submitted a report--not yet made public--to Temple officials.

In essence, according to Sawyer, the report charges that proper procedural safeguards were not followed in the Temple dismissal of Dunham. The Civil Liberties Union found, said Sawyer, that "Dunham had been dismissed on one charge in fact, but nominally on another."

More Information

In reply to the report, Temple tersely threatened to "release more information on Professor Dunham"--which they had discovered in private closed hearing with him, following his suspension and prior to his final dismissal if the ACLU were to make public this report.

But Sawyer revealed to the CRIMSON for the first time that Temple's threat obviously referred to the fact that Dunham had actually been a member of the Communist party until "around 1945 or 1946." Sawyer said Dunham is no longer a member.

Dunham himself added later that he has decided to ask the Civil Liberties Union to publish their report, which is to be put out later this month together with reports on other Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania cases, since he had "no reason to fear criminal action from anything in the transcripts of the University hearings."

The trustees of Temple had formerly told newspapers that Dunham had explained his conduct on the ground that "he disapproved of the committee and that he intended to avoid acting as an informer."

Sawyer told the CRIMSON that there "definitely were legal questions involved about Dunham's use of the Fifth Amendment." Dismissing him on these without a hearing about them was, however, according to Sawyer, "unfair," since he was investigated both by Velde and Temple on the grounds of subversions, which has never been substantiated. The main questions, which might, according to the Civil Liberties Union, be the basis of action against Dunham, if he were to be tried on them, would be 1: Was this a case of illegal use of the protective guarantees of the Fifth Amendment? and 2: Were the questions that Dunham refused to answer of the type that could possibly lead to self-incrimination and thus give him the privilege to invoke Constitutional protection?

Although Dunham, according to Sawyer, "quit the Communist around 1946," in 1947 he wrote a book, "Man Against Myth--an analysis of social superstitions," which the New York Times Book Review called a distortion of "history to fit the Procrustean bed of his Marxist convictions."