How to Resist HUAC

The American Civil Liberties Union last week urged colleges and universities to resist further efforts by the House Committee on Un-American Activities to obtain membership lists of student anti-war groups. The ACLU rightly condemned HUAC's subpoenaing of membership lists from the University of Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley last August as "one of the most serious breaches of academic freedom of students in recent decades, not excluding the McCarthy era."

It is startling that Michigan and Berkeley complied with the subpoenas without lifting a legal finger. It is more frightening, because it hits closer to home, that Harvard doesn't know what it would do if subpoenaed for membership lists. The matter will be under discussion soon, Dean Monro said last week.

The reason Harvard has not taken a stand on this issue is that HUAC has never served it with a subpoena for membership lists, Monro said. Perhaps it never will. But there is always the possibility that HUAC will go searching once more for Communists on the campus, and that next time it will come here.

Harvard has a responsibility to protect its students from outside interference--or the threat of such interference -- when it strikes at their right of association. Many students will be inhibited from joining an organization if they think their names might some day find their way into HUAC's files. It is true that some students don't mind having their political associations made public property, and in the cases of some organizations -- Students for a Democratic Society, for example -- the University has only the names of the already publicity-soaked officers. But Harvard must keep even these lists to itself. The history of HUAC shows that bowing to any of its demands leads to increased pressure to bow to all of them.

The University should say openly that it finds HUAC's policy of subpoenaing for student membership lists pernicious. If HUAC does serve such a subpoena here, the University should go to court. The Supreme Court has ruled against attempts by Southern states to subpoena membership lists of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on the ground that they violated freedom of association. It is possible that a challenge to HUAC's subpoenas would would be supported by the courts for the same reason. In any event, the University should not give up the lists without a fight.