The subcommittee met at 2 p. m., pursuant to recess, in room 318 of the Senate Office Building, Senator William E. Jenner (chairman of the subcommittee); presiding.
     Present : Senators Jenner, Watkins, Hendrickson, Welker, McCarran, Smith, and Johnston.
     Present also: Robert Morris, subcommittee counsel ; and Benjamin Mandel, director of research.

     The CHAIRMAN. The committee will come to order.
     Dr. Gideonse, will you stand up and be sworn to testify?
     Do you swear the testimony you will give in this hearing will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I do.
     The CHAIRMAN. You may be seated.   

TESTIMONY OF HARRY D. GIDEONSE, PRESIDENT OF BROOKLYN COLLEGE, NEW YORK CITY, N. Y.

     The CHAIRMAN. Will you state your full name to the committee?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Harry D. Gideonse.
     The CHAIRMAN. What is your profession?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. President of Brooklyn College of the city of New York.
     The CHAIRMAN. Where do you reside?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. In Great Neck, Long Island.
     The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Morris, you may proceed with your questions.
     Mr. MORRIS. Dr. Gideonse, what do you do at the present time?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I didn't get that question.
     Mr. MORRIS. What is your present occupation, Dr. Gideonse?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. President of Brooklyn College.
     Mr. MORRIS. For how long have you been president of Brooklyn College?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Almost 14 years.
     Mr. MORRIS. Could you give us a short sketch of your educational background? In other words, let us know what degrees you have, from what universities you obtained those degrees, and generally qualify yourself as an authority in the field of education.

     Dr. GIDEONSE. I did my undergraduate work at Columbia, an my graduate work there as well as at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.
     I taught in Barnard College, Columbia College, and then after my, graduate work was finished, at Rutgers University, the University of Chicago, and I was a professor of economics and chairman of the department of economics and sociology at Barnard College when I was appointed, in 1939, president of Brooklyn College.
     Mr. MORRIS. I see. What degrees do you hold, Dr. Gideonse?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. B. S. and M. A. from Columbia ; a degree known as Diplome des Hautes Etudes Internationales, from the University of Geneva. That was the thesis degree, and a number of honorary degrees if you are interested in them.
     Mr. MORRIS. I see.
     Have you been engaged in generalized educational activities outside your position as president of Brooklyn College in the last 14, years? Will you give us a brief sketch of what you have done?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I have been very much concerned about civil rights; and I am chairman of the board of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, or have. been. I have in a civil rights capacity been chairman of the board of the Willkie Memorial Building, which is the headquarters, of course, of a large number of those agencies. In that capacity', I suppose I am something like the landlord.
     I have been an officer and a founder of Freedom House. I have been chairman of a number of committees, one on liberal education of the Association of American Colleges.
     I suppose that answers your question.
     Mr. MORRIS. Yes. You also are the president of Brooklyn College, from which university seven members of the faculty have been called to appear before this Internal Security Subcommittee, is that right, Doctor?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes, sir.   
     Mr. MORRIS. Will you tell us in general about the work of the seven professors who have been brought down here to appear before the Internal Security Subcommittee? Did you know, for instance, that they were coming down, that they had been subpenaed?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes, I think I knew it of all, because the staff of this Senate committee has been very careful in preparing and checking with regard to cases of that sort, in part with me and my office.   
     Mr. MORRIS. Have you followed the proceedings here? Have you followed the work of the subcommittee?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes, I have followed it quite closely.
     Mr. MORRIS. When you knew that a particular professor or member of the faculty from your university appeared, did you send for a transcript of the hearings?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. That is right.
     Mr. MORRIS. I wonder if you would tell the committee what steps you have taken when you have come to know that a particular member of your faculty has invoked his privilege against incrimination before this Internal Security Subcommittee?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. The question is a very broad one. I would like to go into the background a little.  

     In general, of course, the suspending of a teacher under the State tenure law in New York State requires all the provisions of the State tenure law and of the bylaws of the board of higher education. That means that there have to be specific charges, trial committees, and so on. But these particular cases are special because they fall under the charter of the city of New York, article 903, which for a long time now—I think the first case of that sort goes back to 1941, as far as the board of higher education is concerned—has been held to mean in court interpretation that a witness who, as an officer of the city of New York, pleads self-incrimination as an excuse for not answering questions about what he does in his official capacity, has automatically by that very plea, as he spoke those words, discharged himself. In other words, that clause has been held to be self-executing. So all that happens under that particular provision is that after a survey of the transcript has made it clear that that is the kind of testimony that really was given, that testimony is recognized as a fact that took place in the light of the prevailing law.
     In other words, the dismissal is really recognized as having taken place when the testimony was offered; and all these men knew that, because they had all been warned of that before they went down.
     Mr. MORRIS. Dr. Gideonse, how have Communists attempted to infiltrate your faculty during the time that you have been president of Brooklyn College?
     Senator SMITH. Before we proceed with that, Mr. Chairman, should you not inquire if this witness objects to having this proceeding televised? I do not believe you did.
     The CHAIRMAN. I did not inquire in this public hearing, but, Dr. Gideonse, you have no objection to this proceeding being televised or your picture being taken?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. No. It is all right.
     Mr. MORRIS. Before I repeat that question, Dr. Gideonse, this is not the first legislative inquiry into subversion among your faculty that you have experienced; is that right?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. No, sir. Right after my appointment, things broke loose in New York State and City, and I therefore am in some ways an experienced veteran in these matters.
     Mr. MORRIS. I see. Will you tell us what happened on this other occasion that you alluded to in your answer?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. May I go into the history of it just a little bit?
     Mr. MORRIS. I wish you would, very fully, Dr. Gideonse.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Brooklyn College, of course, is a very young college and a huge college. It has grown, I think, more rapidly in a short period of time than any other comparable institution in the United States. It was founded in 1930. That, of course, is the first year of the depression, and I think it is an important thing to keep in mind. It was founded without a campus and without buildings, and as the enrollment grew by leaps and bounds, overflowing the river from City College and Hunter College, the sister colleges also operated by the city of New York, the college was housed in office buildings, in lofts, here and there in downtown Brooklyn.
     Since the budget was very bad in those days, all this rapid growth, the homogeneity of a campus, was also accompanied by the hiring of a very large number of teachers at extraordinary low salaries, many



of them tutors, at $1,200 a year. All of this, of course, has a bearing upon the situation that I found when I was appointed.
     We had then just moved into a beautiful new campus, new grounds, but we had a situation on our hands that was clearly one of sharp infiltration by various camouflaged units of the Communist Party.
     The moment I arrived at the campus, it was clear that a problem was in my hands. The reception by that particular group had been unfriendly before I had accepted the offer. As a matter of fact, I knew that the Teachers' Union, which was then quite a force, and had, I believe, something like 130 members on the Brooklyn College faculty, had protested to the board of higher education the report of my appointment. Since the board had made friendly assurances to them, or so I was told, I wanted to make it very plain indeed, so there would, be no misunderstanding, that those friendly assurances were misplaced ; and, therefore, before the appointment was approved by,.. the board, I made it very clear to the members of the board with
whom I negotiated that if they had the understanding that I was going to live in peace with the Teachers' Union, they were quite mistaken; that I knew their record, was very familiar with their background, to be in more or less continuous war with them, and if that displeased the board we had better not go through with the appointment...
     I was told by both Dr. Carman and Dr. Tead on behalf of the board that they were not. concerned with that at all; that they were convinced that would handle those things in an appropriate professional manner, and that they would back whatever I encountered and found necessary to do.
     Mr. MORRIS. Dr. Gideonse, may I break in there? You said you were acquainted with the record of the Teachers' Union at that time.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes.
     Mr. MORRIS. I wonder if you would explain. Had any. public action been taken against the Teachers' Union by any organization?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I don't recall any public investigations, but I am reasonably alert to what goes on in my own profession, and I remembered John Dewey's activities in connection with the Teachers' Union, and the remarkable leadership and the courage with which he persisted in that leadership in exposing the Communist infiltration. That must have been at least 2 years before I went to the Brooklyn College.
     Mr. MORRIS. You went there in 1938; is that right?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. 1939. And then there was another big scrap in New York City in which Dr. Lefkowitz was one of the leaders, and that certainly made the newspapers with plenty of detail for anyone who really wanted to inform himself.
     In these matters, it is my experience that reiteration to the point of nausea is required until the people wake up to the fact of what is going on. I might therefore have had the background, but I am sure that in 1939 when I came to Brooklyn, a very large number of perfectly honorable teachers who had no ideological affiliations with the Communist Party at all, were members of the Teachers' Union. One of the very great benefits of the Rapp-Coudert investigation was that that particular committee came equipped with legal talents, with a budget that made it possible to hire investigators, so it could dig

underneath and bring out some of the facts with regard, first, to the Teachers' Union and its conduct and behavior, and also the kind of conspiratorial conduct that is characteristic of the Communist nucleus of that organization.
     Mr. MORRIS. In other words, Dr. Gideonse, your original assessment of the political nature of the Teachers Union was borne out by the subsequent events, particularly by the record of the Rapp-Coudert committee, whose activities you have just now mentioned; is that right?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes, sir. More than that, the benefit of pitiless publicity, to use Woodrow Wilson's phrase, was well illustrated, because I think in that period in Brooklyn, the enrollment of the Teachers Union dropped from something like 130-odd—of course, I am going now on what I hear; they don't give me their membership figures—to less than 30. Of course, the difference is the group that was naive and had been led by the nose and now saw in the testimony what kind of an organization this was.
     Mr. MORRIS. Dr. Gideonse, at that time the Rapp-Coudert committee testimony brought out that certain members of your faculty were in fact members of the Communist Party; is that right?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. That is right, in my administrative and private judgment, but was not right in the sense that they proved it with enough legal validity so that I could act on it.
     Mr. MORRIS. I see. In other words, at that time, as I recall, Dr. Gideonse, there was a member of your staff who admitted in sworn testimony that he had been a member of the Communist Party, and proceeded to relate the names of others who had been in the same unit of the Communist Party with him?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. That is right.
     Mr. MORRIS. That is Professor Grebanier, as I recall.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. That is right.
     Mr. MORRIS. Could you tell us what administrative difficulties you personally encountered in the face of that testimony ?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. That is a long story. You mean with regard to my discharge of my official responsibility?
     Mr. MORRIS. You have indicated that in your personal opinion you felt that the evidence was sufficiently probative, but legally you were not able to take any action. I thought that was your position.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. That is right. Now that I see what you mean by the question, let me again revert to the fact that I am, as a public administrator, not like a private-college president, who has much more discretion and leeway. I am under the bylaws of the board of higher education, and I am under the State-tenure law, the most rigorous protection of academic tenure anywhere in the United States, public and private colleges included. In order to act on a case of what, in this case, would really be perjury, and certainly therefore is conduct unbecoming a teacher—irrespective of whether party membership was legal or not, it was perjury, and that I don't think there will be any quarrel about at all—one would need, so my legal advisers told me, at least 2 witnesses, not 1—that the court procedure and precedent showed that these cases were otherwise thrown out, and then one had, of course, that whole situation to go through all over again; or 1 witness and significant corroborative evidence.
     With regard to three of these gentlemen, we had significant corroborative evidence. Charges were preferred. It is very interesting and significant that the kind of conspiratorial conduct that. we have in these cases, they all have the same lawyer. The lawyer presumably knows that these are the cases on which we had a little more than the others. Therefore, a marginal witness could perhaps stand up as a strong witness in a case where there was corroborative evidence, and then perhaps he could be used on the other cases. These three men, under the discipline that the party imposes, all resigned when the charges were published. They never used their legal rights to a trial, which was held out to them and in which they could have had their own lawyer. They just resigned when the charges were published. Therefore, we did not have the chance to go through the test of the witness, you see, under strong conditions; and that, of course, weakened the likelihood of using him under more marginal cases.
     Anyway, under legal advice, we did not go through with the others.
     There are additional problems, if you are interested in those. The moment you have in that set of circumstances, which is now history, a witness who does cooperate, you have on the part of the party and its machine an organized campaign to make life unpleasant for that witness, most extraordinary and to me very instructive. I had not imagined anything like that would be possible, but one actually had to protect the witness by the machinery of the college.
     Mr. MORRIS. Dr. Gideonse, some of those professors and members of your faculty who were involved in the investigation by New York State in 1941, have subsequently been brought before our committee, have they not?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. That is right.
     Mr. MORRIS. This time, rather than deny the charges—which I believe these people did at that time, did they not?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Right.
     Mr. MORRIS. Suppose you tell us what they did. I have here clip pings in front of me, one from the New York Times of January 4. 1941, headed, "Five Professors Deny Communist Links." Among the five are Dr. Harry Slochower, Murray Young, and Dr. Frederic Ewen. They are some of the people listed in this particular article Those professors and members of your faculty have been called before this committee and, instead of denying, they invoked their constitutional privilege against incrimination.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. That is right.
     Mr. MORRIS. So the situation here before our committee is a bit different from the one that New York State experienced in 1941. Do you have any reason why there was a different attitude taken by these different professors?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I faced that particular question finally, officially when the last two were suspended, because there began to be a feeling on the part of some of my associates that suspending them just under article 903 of the city charter had the appearance of acting on a men technicality.
     Mr. MORRIS. In other words, now in addition to having—previously I think you described it that you were satisfied in your own mind with the proof that had been adduced against these people, but still you had no effective legal remedy.

     Dr: GIDEONSE. That is right.
     Mr. MORRIS. Now you have an effective legal remedy, and you would like to do something more, all in the interest of safeguarding what may be someone's personal rights or liberties ?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. That is right. Also in the interests of making it plausible that the college administration, and behind it the Board, were acting on grounds that were not just superficial little technical pretenses. The difficulty with that, of course, is that one gets beyond the evidence known to the general public, although one may be within the evidence known to oneself. I therefore, in this last case, issued a statement of about a page and a half in which I wanted to give some background as the reasons that played a role in making use of the technicality.
     Mr. MORRIS. Will you read that into the record for us?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I would love to do so, but I want to tell you before I read it that I had the typical New York State difficulties with this statement. I was even told by one of the press services, after they had had it read to them, that in their judgment, under some legal decisions in New York, this was a statement that would expose the press service to financial damages, and so forth. That is why they didn't run it. That gives you a picture. You know, perhaps, of the feature of the food decision in New York State, and of the difficulties a public administrator is under when you are handling this kind of material.
     Mr. MORRIS. You realize, Dr. Gideonse, you will have no such difficulty here, because privilege adheres to your statements here.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. The statement was issued, anyway, and I told these gentlemen I would be very glad to have a legal test of the matter. I feel very sure that the evidence is available.
     I quote:

     These teachers were questioned by the Internal Security Subcommittee of the United States Senate on February 24, 1953, and I—that is, the president of the college—have examined the transcript of the hearings. There is nothing new about the operation of section 903 of the New York City Charter. As far back as May 12, 1941, it was established in a similar case that a teacher who, on grounds of self-incrimination, refuses to answer questions regarding his official conduct has himself terminated his employment by his refusal to testify. This provision of the charter, in other words, is self-executing. These are in my judgment clearly cases of the same type, in which the college administration—and ultimately the board of higher education—simply recognizes the facts of the case in the light of the governing law.
     These cases do not involve issues of academic freedom or freedom of thought. Twelve years ago both these men swore in the Rapp-Coudert hearings that they were not members of the  Communist Party. If they had now admitted that they were members of the party, they would have raised a basic issue about their testimony before the Rapp-Coudert committee. If they had repeated their previous testimony, they could foresee that testimony now available to the Senate subcommittee would make charges of perjury unavoidable. They therefore chose to appeal to the fifth amendment with a smokescreen of language designed to make their action appear as a defense of freedom and democracy rather than a carefully planned avoidance of perjury charges.
     These are not issues of freedom or of legal technicalities. Wholly apart from the provisions of the city charter and from the flagrant disregard of the Board's specific instructions to cooperate with the legislative committee, this is clearly a matter of unprofessional conduct or, in the language of the governing statute, of "conduct unbecoming a teacher." The basic issue in such cases is not even concerned with the question of the wisdom or the legality of retaining or appointing teachers who are members of the Communist Party. It can be stated in the simple language I used at the time of the Rapp-Coudert investi-



gation, that is to say : Can teachers be trusted in a public and professional capacity if they perjure themselves—irrespective of whether they are Republicans, Democrats, or Communists? The principle can be regarded as well established.  The only thing that is new at this time is the evidence that is becoming available as the result of the subcommittee's activities.
     Mr. MORRIS. Dr. Gideonse, therefore it has been apparent to you that Communists have attempted to infiltrate your faculty during the time that you have been president of Brooklyn College?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. A more correct statement would be that they certainly had infiltrated it before I was appointed, and that I had to deal with the problem that resulted. As far as I know, efforts to introduce new members of the party in the last few years have been very infrequent. I can think of only two, and they were stopped. It is possible there were some cases so well concealed that :I know nothing about them.
     Mr. MORRIS. So you took a very strong position back in 1941 against the activities of the Communists who were on your faculty and the Teachers' Union in general. The Teachers' Union, you said, at its peak amounted to about 130 members, which membership was reduced after that particular inquiry.
     Did the Communists do anything? Did they retaliate in any way against your deportment at that time?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Almost from the very beginning, and since they had very considerable influence in some of the key activities on the campus, including the student newspaper, which is one of their favorite sources of infiltration, a rather unpleasant atmosphere in that respect prevailed for quite a while. At the time of the Rapp-Coudert hearings, they picketed my home.
     Mr. MORRIS. Would you tell us about that picketing, please?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Oh, this was done at regular hours, several days, a typical picket line, wearing masks. I had the impression that these weren't students at all. It was supposed to be a student picket line. It looked more like regular party ringers they picked up somewhere in Manhattan.
     Mr. MORRIS. You mean the people in the picket line wore masks?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. That was to suggest, of course, as the Communist Party always does, that these issues were about something other than communism. I don't know of a single campaign out in the open for the Communist Party. They always tie in with some issue that happens to give some concern to other people, to see if they can't make something out of it in the way of recruiting activity.
     Mr. MORRIS. At that point, Dr. Gideonse, what issue did they use at that time?
     Dr. GIDEONE. The issue that they were using at that time was the argument that my speeches—I happened to be something of a specialist in international relations—were manifestly a support of Mr. Roosevelt's warlike policy, and that therefore I was a warmonger, and the whole Republican investigation of the colleges was concerned with warmongering, and therefore they wore gas masks, you see, to emphasize the fact that this was really a pacifist demonstration of peace-loving people. This, therefore, must have been before June 22, you see, because then, of course, the line changed and it would require something else.



     Mr. MORRIS. Did the gas masks serve a double purpose, do you think? Did it conceal the identity of the picketers as well as giving this extraneous element to the performance?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. It might certainly be read that way. On the other hand, anonymity is rather easy to achieve in our very large urban institutions. You must remember that right now, Brooklyn College has some 21,000 people who use the campus every day. So it is not necessary to wear a mask not to be recognized.
     Mr. MORRIS. Dr. Gideonse, there have been newspaper accounts of the fact that your home was bombarded with telephone calls, and your wife received phone calls, and you did. Are those news accounts generally true?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes. They definitely did to us what the party very often does when it has that kind of an issue on its hands. That is, they try to wear down the man or woman who is at the center of the resistance, and that consists, for instance, of making your telephone useless to you, or calling you up at all hours of the night so that the next morning you will be weary and perhaps will lose your temper on some occasion, and that, of course, would give them a new issue. It is a very well-known—they call it a "telephone picket."
     It included, incidentally, sending telegrams, one of which was rather shocking to my wife because it arrived when I was not at home, which announced a death in the family. All sorts of techniques with which to demoralize or undermine the resilience of the individual involved.
     Mr. MORRIS. Was the American Student Union active in this performance?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes; they were very active in it, and very much a part of the agitation, because one of the very first things that we had to cope with in those days was the close relationship between the Teachers' Union leadership and the American Student Union so-called leadership. Those organizations dovetailed, and they acted more or less on the same purposes.
That is part of the strategy of the party, of course. The party always, it seems to me, builds up a new agency when the old one has been completely exposed. Then no innocents joined it any longer, so it becomes useless, and a new innocent front, or transmission belt, whatever the language is, is set up whose purpose appears to be different from the old one, so that naive and innocent people can be induced to join it by the selection of some issue that they happen to be interested in. That might be an issue of some racial problem, or some war-and-peace problem, or a question of student fees, or what have you.
     Then, of course, you have gradually to expose that group again as really operated by the same inner circle. That is what makes it so difficult in the beginning to handle the new front, because the new front is deliberately set up to be enticing to innocent people, and in the early period, therefore, very many people are members of that new front who are completely innocent, because it would not serve their purpose if they weren't.
     The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Gideonse, do you consider that educators should consider themselves a self-sufficient community, or should they feel a deep sense of responsibility to the parents of the country in an hour of grave crisis ? I would like your opinion on that.



     Dr.,GIDEONSE. I think, Senator, that the question answers itself, although I would like to make a distinction. Where you are dealing with graduate schools, professional schools, there the faculties have students who are adults, who are presumably able to take care of themselves, discriminating what kind of propaganda is thrown at them. But if we are talking about colleges, junior colleges, the overwhelming majority of the students are below 21. The faculty is obviously in the position that we technically describe as in loco parentis, that is, we take the place of parents while the students are entrusted to us. In a period in which it is unfortunately true that a very large number of families and a very large number of churches no longer have any hold on young people, it means that the college's responsibility is enlarged to the extent to which these other agencies no longer play that role, and the responsibility is to my mind today rather terrifying. It certainly is a very real responsibility. It is our job to see to it that these youngsters in our charge are safeguarded from spurious and scurrilous and camouflaged contact the way we would do in our own home. I can't see any argument about that at all.
     The CHAIRMAN. I take it, then, that it is your opinion that the schools and colleges of the United States play a vital part in the world-wide struggle against communism and totalitarianism?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes, sir.
     The CHAIRMAN. What part would you say they play?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I am a very enthusiastic member of my own profession, and I should say that I think their role is probably more important even in this cold war stage on the verge of hot war than the, Armed Forces themselves, because that kind of conflict is perhaps decided in a sense by armament, but, after all, armament doesn't mean very much if there is no purpose and will behind it. The colleges, concerned as they are with the top drawer of talent for the country—2,500,0000 in college right now in the United States—are obviously either consciously or unconsciously a very important part in clarifying national will and purpose. If this is a struggle, in the end, about ideas—I like to call it a struggle for the soul of men because that is what it seems to me to be—then clarifying national ideas of self and what our purpose is, is vital. Then the Communists are right in making so much of trying to confuse the colleges, too, because they know that, too, and they try to confuse the clarity of national thinking by their infiltration.
     The CHAIRMAN. Senator Smith, do you have any questions?
     Senator SMITH. Yes, I have 2 or 3.
     Doctor, I judge from what you said that you have followed fairly well the hearings of this subcommittee on the educational situation. I also judge that you are familiar, from what you said a moment ago, with the Rapp-Coudert committee in New York State. Is it your feeling that the work of that committee and the work of this committee has been such that you felt you could cooperate with those committees, and that the work was really worth while insofar as not only the welfare of the particular group of people in the country, but the country at large: that you felt it was really worth while and that you could cooperate with the endeavor of this Senate committee?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. As a matter of fact, Senator, when the Rapp-Coudert committee was set up, I was enthusiastic about having it set up, be-

cause it was perfectly clear to me that the nature of the kind of thing we were then coping with was then so badly understood by even the members of my own staff, not to speak of the general public, that one needed the kind of investigational talent, legal and other talent, in order to dig underneath and give evidence of the kind of concealed and camouflaged conduct that was involved. The average college teacher is inclined to think that the other fellow is just as honest and as simple as he is, and that he is going to be honorable. My experience has been that when you put this particular assignment in the hands of a faculty committee, where I think it belongs if you could assume that they were minded to dig in the way it requires, the faculty will ask some questions, and if they get answers they will assume that the man who answers is honest, and then if they have a little doubt, they do what they did in my case. They say, "Will you put those answers in writing?" Then a document is produced in which the answers are put in writing, and that is filed away. That is sup-posed to be the end of it.
     Of course, the Rapp-Coudert investigation, and now latterly some of the things that you have put on the books, have proved that those replies in writing were utterly and completely invalid, and therefore I welcomed having a body that would have the kind of talent at its disposal which the faculty committee does not, that would take this other-than-professional conduct—because that is what we are talking about—and expose it for what it is. I have the same feeling with regard to this committee. Your committee has been, as far as I am concerned, very helpful to us at Brooklyn College, because you have helped us to remove some of the lags of that residue of 1939-40 that we had with ourselves all that time, which we couldn't do anything about under the law. Now you have supplied the evidence that made it possible to do it.
     May I add something to that beyond that statement?
     Senator SMITH. Yes. Go ahead.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I think one of the reasons why there is such a flurry in some circles about the operation of this committee is that there is so little understanding of the nature of the job done. Senator Jenner made a statement sometime in February—I secured a copy of it just this afternoon, but I had read it—on February 24, a statement on the purpose of this committee. I had really to go to work to get the text of that, because the newspapers didn't carry very much of that. It was not flamboyant. It did not have anything to do with witnesses. It was a statement of purpose.
     I have watched your hearings, and I have read this statement of purpose. I find them completely in accord with one another, and I think if there were some varied reiteration of this statement of purpose so that it would be understood that your committee there said that you are not interested in anything that is negative to academic freedom—that, as a matter of fact, you are interested in protecting academic freedom; you are not interested in taking away the responsibility for the local policing of the institutions throughout the country–in fact, you are interested only in putting on the books here testimony, and I am using my language now, restating it, testimony about conspiratorial conduct, and you are then leaving it to the local institution—which the Senator even described as the first line of defense—


both in its faculty and in its board, to judge, to evaluate that testimony and to act on it. You. went out of your way. to say that you have no interest in doing anything about the content or the method of teaching in the local institutions. You are not interfering with that. You are concerned with this conspiratorial evidence and putting it on the books, and leaving it to the local authorities to judge.
     I know from my experience with our witnesses that you have made it a practice in every case to sift this evidence in private hearings before it comes to the public. You even warned me about the naming of people that might not have had that benefit before this public session started. I know from my own experience, too, that you have always allowed everyone who wanted it to have a lawyer in the private session as well as in the public one, if he wanted to have it.
     I think if all of that were clearly understood throughout the country, that the overwhelming majority of people interested in the schools and colleges would say there is absolutely no objection to that whatsoever. It is only because it is misunderstood.
     You have this lunatic fringe on the left, to use the Roosevelt term, and you have another one on the right. They are both thoroughly propagandized, and they don't see what is going on in the middle. This is something going down the main line right in the middle. It is just a matter of putting evidence of unprofessional conduct on the books for evaluation by the local authorities. I think it would help if this committee reiterated that on several occasions.
     Senator SMITH. Doctor, I judge from what you have said up to now that you do not see any reason why the really sane and level-headed members of the teaching profession should not cooperate with this committee, and that they need have no fear of encroachment upon academic freedom, so-called. Is that your feeling today, after what you have observed about the committee's activities?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes, sir.
     Senator SMITH. I suppose you have noticed, as I have, that there is a tendency on the part of some well-meaning teachers who do not know the background of some of the movements around them immediately to rush to the defense of any teacher who may be at all involved in one of these hearings. Do you know any reason why the teaching profession should not be willing to cooperate with us by the setting up of some body of their own, a committee, to work with us and help us to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, in order that we might present always fairly, suggestions that come to us with respect to deviation from loyalty of any member of the teaching profession?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. The only reason that I know for not doing that is an incomplete understanding, which is still very widespread, not only of the nature of what you are doing but of the nature of the problem itself. I think one has to keep in mind, Senator, that what we are talking about, this very real evidence of a measure of infiltration in some places, is something that is, after all, not characteristic of the overwhelming. majority of American colleges. We have a House committee report on the AYD, for instance, that would be good evidence,
     Senator SMITH. That is American Youth for Democracy.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. That is the Youth for Democracy report. That is as good evidence as I know of the extent to which that particular


Communist transmission belt has successfully penetrated. As I remember it, it enumerated at the time 60 chapters in 14 States, and 18,000 members. That, as far as I am concerned, is 60 chapters and 18,000 members too much, but that is what it was.
The number of colleges in the country is about 1,200. Sixty chapters is 5 percent. To be sure, they would be in the main, roughly speaking, larger and rather important colleges. That would be true. But 5 percent. Eighteen thousand is less than 1 percent of the total enrollment in the undergraduate colleges at the time.
     It pays to look at that, because we are dealing with something that 90 percent—in terms of my arithmetic a moment ago, 95 percent—of American colleges don't know much about. They therefore hear, "American Youth for Democracy." "American" is a good word, "youth" is, and "democracy" is. It takes them a long while to realize that all three of the words are lies: that it isn't American; that it isn't youth—they are graybeards of the ideological sort, Union Square; and that "democracy" means totalitarian. It takes a long time for it to percolate. The average professor has experience which makes him a little shy of controlling anybody's thinking. The academic profession, after all, has dealt with efforts to curb critical thought, to curb the unconventional and the unpopular. He knows that that very often is just an effort to repress freedom of thought. He easily confuses what is a deliberate effort to undercut freedom of thought with what looks like an effort to stop liberals from having their age-old right to think liberal thoughts.
     Senator SMITH. Did you read Dr. Jones' statement of policy, the president of Rutgers University?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I did, sir.   
     Senator SMITH. I thought he made it quite clear, and I wondered if you agreed with him, that there is a difference between an attempt to suppress freedom of thought and to hold a man responsible for his overt activities.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes, sir. I would say, sir, if I thought this committee was concerned with being critical of people who thought unpopular thoughts or concerned with the repression in general of the essential function of colleges and universities, and that is to maintain themselves as centers of independent thought, I would be the first to be very critical, indeed, of this committee; and if I had an idea that my board was trying to fire some teacher for that, it would have to accept my resignation before it could act on the dismissals.
     A college president does that, I would say, if he is worth his salt at all, pretty much the whole year around, defends teachers for saying and doing and thinking things that he would not say or do or think himself. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. That is the traditional formula. It also is the tolerance of the occasional jackass; and the jackass even has the privilege of thinking that you are one.
     If you do not do that, you will find that your own privileges will very soon be restricted.
     But that is not the case, and what we have to clarify in this particular issue is that here is a group that kidnaps our vocabulary, walks off with our sacred words, "freedom," "democracy," "rights," and so on, and then pours into that particular vocabulary totalitarianism, lying, untruth, perjury, whatever it is that you can get away with.


They are not a minority standing up for their rights. They never even pretend to have the courage to admit that they are what they are.
     Senator SMITH. Doctor, do you feel that the work of this committee has been helpful to you in eliminating communism from your faculty and from your campus?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I would say, unqualifiedly, "Yes."
     Senator SMITH. Have you suspended or did you suspend all the members of your faculty who refused to answer the questions of the committee?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I believe in every single case we did that, Senator.
     Mr. MORRIS. The seven faculty members who have appeared here are Harry Slochower, Sara Riedman, Melba Phillips, Frederick Ewen, Murray Young, Elton Gustafson, and Joseph Bressler. They are the seven members of your faculty who have appeared before this Internal Security Subcommittee.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes, sir. Each and every one of those is one of the oldtimers that goes back to the Rapp-Coudert days.
     Mr. MORRIS. Doctor, some of those have denied to you and to various authorities, have they not, that they have ever been members of the Communist Party? Are you acquainted with that?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes, sir.
     Mr. MORRIS. The newspaper clipping that I alluded to before makes mention of the fact that Dr. Ewen and other members of the faculty submitted affidavits. Part of the affidavit reads:

     I am not a Communist or member of the Communist Party, and I have never been engaged in any subversive activities at Brooklyn College or elsewhere.

     Do you find it is the practice of these people to deny when they are talking to you in their conversations, when you question them about their activities, or even in this case in affidavits, their Communist Party affiliations?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I admit the theoretical possibility of meeting an honest Communist some day, but I have never met one yet. They are all, in my experience, invariably and on principle liars, willing to perjure themselves if they are in trouble.
     Mr. MORRIS. Doctor, what I was trying to bring out was, have they in fact denied to you being members of the Communist Party?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes, several of those people have.
     Mr. MORRIS. And yet when they appear before a properly constituted tribunal such as this Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, they have invoked their privilege under the fifth amendment rather than put a denial on the record.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I can tell you about one of these colleagues in some detail.
     Mr. MORRIS. Will you do that, please?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. He was a gentleman that I thought probably had an affiliation in terms of what we knew about him in the Rapp-Coudert days, and a faculty committee also had some suspicion about this. He was a good scholar, and with his students an effective teacher.
     The time came when he was ready for promotion in terms of a comparison with other colleagues. Of course, the issue arose, since you can't prove these doubts, should we not waive them? Which is truly a very effective argument, and certainly in line with the old American tradition that you must be proved innocent until--et cetera. So a


faculty committee was set up to look into the merits of the case, and in that case the faculty committee did a very thorough job for a faculty committee that cannot do an investigation of the FBI sort. They came to the conclusion, after much heart-searching, that this story about this man was probably untrue, but they had these doubts. So they made him write out, with his signature under it, very solemnly, all the things that he had told the committee about never having been and not now being a member of the party, and that was signed.
     Then he was called a couple of years later—and we promoted him, by the way.
     Mr. MORRIS. Are you going to name this man for us?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes. You have him.
     Mr. MORRIS. Which one is that?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. That is Professor Slochower.
     When this particular gentleman was called, he came in to get advice from me, and I told him, "I don't see that you have a problem. You have told the faculty committee and you have told me that you were not and never have been. We have that from you in writing. You assured all your colleagues. You have led them all to believe that. All you have to do is go and tell that committee just exactly what you have told us and what we have in writing from you."
     His reply to me was, "If I do that there, they will prove perjury on me."
     That gives you a picture of the kind of morale that we are dealing with. These are not issues that are worthy of being considered by anyone who is really professionally interested in academic freedom. This is the academic gutter.
     The CHAIRMAN. Senator Welker?
     Senator WELKER. Dr. Gideonse, based upon your experience as an educator, you know, as a matter of fact, that only a small percentage of the teaching profession are members now or have ever been members of the Communist Party ?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes, sir.
     Senator WELKER. So, based upon that assumption, Doctor, and based upon your experience as an educator, I want you to tell us why the Communists have made such an active move and active effort to get into the school system throughout our land ?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I would say there are two main reasons that I can see. One is that since the Communist Party is obviously an instrument of a foreign power, Soviet Russia—I don't think anyone has any illusions about that any more today—they are interested in demoralizing our youth, because it would presumably be, in terms of a conflict with Soviet Russia, of Russian interest to have a relatively demoralized American youth. Anything you could therefore do on the American campus to make American youngsters feel doubtful about the sincerity of our profession, our belief in freedom and democracy and equality, and so one, would help to demoralize American youngsters, and therefore America, in terms of world conflict.
     Secondly, the more obvious one, that I think it is pretty clear that by the time someone has become 30 years old, his sales resistance to the sort of thing the Communist Party has to peddle has considerably increased. It is the late teenager—the maximum recruiting period is probably around 19 or 20—who is at the peak of his idealistic orien-


tation. In other words, they get them when they are at their best You wouldn't want young people who didn't make mistakes of that sort, as a matter of fact. That is the time when they are gushing with enthusiastic devotion to something that is not immediately practical; not immediately vocational. That is the period when you have a maximum chance of inducing them to fall for the big, bold slogans that they always hold out as part of the merchandising.
     Not at that stage do they tell them what they are really interested in. That comes later if they last in the party.
     I think those are the 2 main reasons.
     Senator WELKER. I appreciate that very much, Doctor.
     Doctor, you realize that every member of this committee is a member of the bar in different jurisdictions in the United States, and as such they have taken oaths to champion the cause of the defenseless and the oppressed. I am particularly interested in your remarks which favored some of the activity, and I think most of the activity, of this committee.
     Doctor, may I ask you this, then: What program could you suggest to us as a committee that would help us as a congressional committee to counteract communism which is penetrating and influencing our young, faculty members in some instances, in our universities and schools throughout this land?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I appreciate your asking that question, and I would like to answer apart from some of the things that I have said already, Senator, with regard to repeating and reiterating and clarifying the purpose of the committee, because I think that is one of the important things to get across to the country.
     Senator WELKER. I am certain that that is right, Doctor, and I would like to hear your testimony again on that.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. The first part, then, would be to get that across: that you are not interested in any way diminishing the vital importance of the tradition of academic freedom. You are interested in making it clear that there is a certain kind of conspiratorial conduct which has nothing to do with freedom, which itself is subversive of freedom, and you are making evidence about that available here.
     Then the second thing, I should think—here I am venturing very much, but if I were sitting where you are sitting, doing what you are doing, I think I would take the statement of principles—and I brought it along, hoping that you might ask me a question of this sort—the statement of principles on academic freedom of 1940 of the American Association of University Professors. This is the statement that they print from time to time in their bulletin. This is the statement that has the agreement of the Association of American Colleges. That is the top 700 colleges of the country. It has the agreement of the Association of American Law Schools and, of course, some, I think, 40,000 members of the academic teaching profession in the American Association of University Professors. I reread it again the other day from the standpoint of your committee.. It seems to me there isn't a word in the statement that you are in conflict with.
     You could, I think—I don't want you to say "yes" to this now; you wouldn't, I think—but I think you might submit this to your counsel and deliberate on it, and I think you would find that it would be possible to say that this committee is based on those same



principles. We are interested in what the American colleges said they were interested in when they adopted this on behalf of all the boards of trustees and were interested in what these 40,000 members of the American Association of University Professors are interested in. But we would like to have you notice that the key things concerning the business we have before us here are not provided for in this document. That is to say, there is nothing in this document about restraints on freedom by organizations that teachers have joined themselves. All the things that are in the traditional statement of academic freedom are concerned with restraints imposed by college presidents, boards of trustees, wicked materialistic interests of one sort or another. Nothing is said about restraints of freedom imposed by organizations that members of the staff join on their own initiative. That is the problem you are concerned with. That is a problem that is not covered in this statement.
     The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Gideonse, how long is that statement?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. It is the 1940 statement of principles. It is about two pages of print, and then it is followed by the 1925 statement of principles which is incorporated, which is another page and a half.
     The CHAIRMAN. I would like at this time to make that a part of the record of this committee, and I am going to ask our counsel to examine it and report to the committee what his interpretation of it is, whether or not it fits in with our ideals and objectives.
     (The material referred to follows:)


     EDITORIAL NOTE—Statement of principles concerning academic freedom and tenure formulated by representatives of the Association of American Colleges and of the American Association of University Professors and agreed upon at a joint conference on November 8, 1940. This statement was endorsed by the Association of American Colleges at its Annual Meeting on January 9, 1941, and is to be presented for endorsement to the Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors in December 1941.
     The purpose of this statement is to promote public understanding and support of academic freedom and tenure and agreement upon procedures to assure them in colleges and universities. Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher² or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.
_____________________
     ¹  Since 1934 representatives of the American Association of University Professors and of the Association of American Colleges have met in joint conferences to discuss the problems and principles of academic freedom and tenure. At a joint conference in March 1936 it was agreed that the two Associations should undertake the task of formulating a new statement of principles on academic freedom and tenure which should ultimately replace the 1925 conference statement. Pursuant to this agreement three such joint conferences were held on October 4, 1937, January 22, 1938, and October 17-18, 1938. At the October 1938 conference a statement of principles was agreed upon. This statement was endorsed by the Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors on December 28, 1938, and has subsequently been known as the 1938 statement of principles. The statement with several amendments was endorsed by the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Colleges on January 11, 1940. These amendments by the Association of American colleges made another joint conference of representatives of the two Associations necessary. Such a conference was held in Washington, D. C., on November 8, 1940. At this conference a consensus was again reached and the 1940 statement agreed upon. The only real difference between the 1940 statement and the 1938 statement is in the length of the probationary periods. set forth as representing "acceptable academic practice." The probationary periods agreed upon in the 1940 statement are one year longer than in the 1938 statement. Please note the section of the 1940 statement under the heading "Academic Tenure (a) (2), and compare with same section in the 1938 statement (February 1940 Bulletin, pp. 49–51).
     ²  The word "teacher" as used in this document is understood to include the investigator who is attached to an academic institution without teaching duties.



     Academic freedom is essential to these purposes and applies to both teaching and research. Freedom in research is fundamental to the advancement of truth. Academic freedom in its teaching aspect is fundamental for the protection of the rights of the teacher 2 in teaching and of the student to freedom in learning. It carries with it duties correlative with rights.   
     Tenure is a means to certain ends; specifically; (1) :Freedom of teaching and research and of extra-mural activities, and (2) A sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability. Freedom and economic security, hence tenure, are indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to  society.

Academic Freedom
     (a) The teacher is entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of his other academic duties; but research for pecuniary return should be based upon an understanding with the authorities of the institution.
     (b) The teacher is entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing his subject, but he should be careful not to introduce into his teaching controversial matter which has no relation to his subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment.
     (c) The college or university teacher is a citizen, a member of a learned profession, and an officer of an educational institution. When he speaks or writes as a citizen, he should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but his special position in the community imposes special obligations. As a man of learning and an educational officer, he should remember that the public may judge his profession and his institution by his utterances. Hence he should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that he is not an institutional spokesman.

Academic Tenure
     (a) After the expiration of a probationary period teachers or investigators should have permanent or continuous tenure, and their services should be terminated only for adequate cause, except in the case of retirement for age or under extraordinary circumstances because of financial exigencies.
     In the interpretation of this principle it is understood that the following represents acceptable academic practice:
     (1) The precise terms and conditions of every appointment should be stated in writing and be in the possession of both institution and teacher before the appointment is consummated.
     (2) Beginning with appointment to the rank of full-time instructor or a higher rank, the probationary period should not exceed seven years, including within this period full-time service in all institutions of higher education ; but subject to the proviso that when, after a term of probationary service of more than three years in one or more institutions, a teacher is called to another institution it may be agreed in writing that his new appointment is for a probationary period of not more than four years, even though thereby the person's total probationary period in the academic profession is extended beyond the normal maximum of seven years. Notice should be given at least one year prior to the expiration of the probationary period, if the teacher is not to be continued in service after the expiration of that period.
     (3) During the probationary period a teacher should have the academic freedom that all other members of the faculty have.
     (4) Termination for cause of a continuous appointment, or the dismissal for cause of a teacher previous to the expiration of a term appointment, should, if possible, be considered by both a faculty committee and the governing board of the institution. In all cases where the facts are in dispute, the accused teacher should be informed before the hearing in writing of the charges against him and should have the opportunity to be heard in his own defense by all bodies that pass judgment upon his case. He should be permitted to have with him an adviser of his own choosing who may act as counsel. There should be a full stenographic record of the hearing available to the parties concerned. In the hearing of charges of incompetence the testimony should include that of teachers and other scholars, either from his own or from other institutions. Teachers on continuous appointment who are dismissed for reasons not involving moral turpitude should receive their salaries for at least a year from



the date of notification of dismissal whether or not they are continued in their duties at the institution.
     (5) Termination of a continuous appointment because of financial exigency should be demonstrably bona fied.


     EDITORIAL NOTE.—Statement of principles concerning academic freedom and tenure agreed upon at a conference of representatives of the American Association of University Women, the American Association of University Professors, the Association of American Colleges, the Association of American Universities, the Association of Governing Boards, the Association of Land-Grant Colleges, the Association of Urban Universities, the National Association of State Universities, and the American Council on Education in 1925. This statement was endorsed by the Association of American Colleges in 1925, the American Association of University Professors in 1926, and reaffirmed by the Association of American Colleges in 1935.

Academic Freedom
     (a) A university or college may not place any restraint upon the teacher's freedom in investigation, unless restriction upon the amount of time devoted to it becomes necessary in order to prevent undue interference with teaching duties.
     (b) A university or college may not impose any limitation upon the teacher's freedom in the exposition of his own subject in the classroom or in addresses and publications outside the college, except insofar as the necessity of adapting instruction to the needs of immature students, or in the case of institutions of a denominational or partisan character, specific stipulations in advance, fully understood and accepted by both parties, limit the scope and character of instruction.
    (c) No teacher may claim as his right the privilege of discussing in his class-room controversial topics outside of his own field of study. The teacher is morally bound not to take advantage of his position by introducing into the class-room provocative discussions of irrelevant subjects not within the field of his study.
     (d) A university or college should recognize that the teacher in speaking and writing outside of the institution upon subjects beyond the scope of his own field of study is entitled to precisely the same freedom and is subject to the same responsibility as attach to all other citizens. If the extramural utterances of a teacher should be such as to raise grave doubts concerning his fitness for his position, the question should in all cases be submitted to an appropriate committee of the faculty of which he is a member. It should be clearly understood that an institution assumes no responsibility for views expressed by members of its staff; and teachers should, when necessary, take pains to make it clear that they are expressing only their personal opinions.

Academic Tenure
     (a) The precise terms and expectations of every appointment should be stated in writing and be in the possession of both college and teacher.
     (b) Termination of a temporary or a short-term appointment should always be possible at the expiration of the term by the mere act of giving timely notice of the desire to terminate. The decision to terminate should always be taken, however, in conference with the department concerned, and might well be subject to approval by a faculty or council committee or by the faculty or council. It is desirable that the question of appointments for the ensuing year be taken up as early as possible. Notice of the decision to terminate should be given in ample time to allow the teacher an opportunity to secure a new position. The extreme limit for such notice should not be less than three months before the expiration of the academic year. The teacher who proposes to withdraw should also give notice in ample time to enable the institution to make a new appointment.
     (c) It is desirable that termination of a permanent or long-term appointment for cause should regularly require action by both faculty committee and the governing board of the college. Exceptions to this rule may be necessary in cases of gross immorality or treason, when the facts are admitted. In such cases summary dismissal would naturally ensue. In eases where other offenses are charged, and in all cases where the facts are in dispute, the accused teacher should always have the opportunity to face his accusers and to be heard



in his own defense by all bodies that pass judgment upon the case. In the trial of charges of professional incompetence the testimony of scholars in the same field, either from his own or from other institutions, should always be taken. Dismissal for other reasons than immorality or treason should not ordinarily take effect in less than a year from the time the decision is reached.
     (d) Termination of permanent or long-term appointments because of financial exigencies should be sought only as a last resort, after every effort has been made to meet the need in other ways and to find for the teacher other employment in the institution. Situations which make drastic retrenchment of this sort necessary should preclude expansions of the staff at other points at the same time, except in extraordinary circumstances.


     The following statement was approved at the 1929 Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors :
     Any provision in regard to notification of resignation by a college teacher will naturally depend on the conditions of tenure in the institution. If a college asserts and exercises the right to dismiss, promote, or change salary at short notice, or exercises the discretion implied by annual contracts, it must expect that members of its staff will feel under no obligations beyond the legal requirements of their contracts. If, on the other hand, the institution undertakes to comply with the tenure specifications approved by the Association of American Colleges, it would seem appropriate for the members of the staff to act in accordance with the following provision :
     1. Notification of resignation by a college teacher ought, in general, to be
early enough to obviate serious embarrassment to the institution, the length of time necessarily varying with the circumstances of his particular case.
     2. Subject to this general principle it would seem appropriate that a professor or an associate professor should ordinarily give not less than four months' notice and an assistant professor or instructor not less than three months' notice.
     3. In regard to offering appointments to men in the service of other institutions, it is believed that an informal inquiry as to whether a teacher would be willing to consider transfer under specified conditions may be made at any time and without previous consultation with his superiors, with the understanding, however, that if a definite offer follows he will not accept it without giving such notice as is indicated in the preceding provisions. He is at liberty to ask his superior officers to reduce, or waive, the notification requirements there specified, but he should be expected to conform to their decision on these points:
     4. Violation of these provisions may be brought to the attention of the officers of the Association with the possibility of subsequent publication in particular cases after the facts are duly established.
     (Reprinted from the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors for February 1941.)

     Senator WELKER. One final question, Dr. Gideonse.
     You realize, then, that this committee is not interested in the thinking of liberals or the thinking of people who might disagree with the thinking of any member of this committee. We want them to have that freedom. In fact, our objective is to preserve that freedom of thought.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I fully appreciate that. As I said a little while earlier in the hearing, if I didn't have from your hearings the strong feeling that you not only say that that is what you believe, but that that is what you are doing, I would be myself concerned about the kind of flurry of excitement that exists in some quarters about this committee.. I see no such evidence at all, and I appreciate that you are not concerned with the liberal, with the right to be critical; with the right to hold unpopular views; that this is not your interest at all. That you are concerned, as a matter of fact, with protecting genuine freedom of thought against the temptation of some few who


 
have sold their birthright as Americans for a mess of intellectual pottage, to a foreign power.
     Mr. MORRIS. Dr. Gideonse, you have observed, then, that this committee is interested only in people who are actually formally connected with the American Communist Party and affiliated with the international Communist organization, is that right?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes, sir. That is all I have seen that you have been concerned with so far.
     The CHAIRMAN. Senator McCarran, do you have any questions at this time?
     Senator McCARRAN. I would like to have the doctor tell us the first-hand experience he has had, those on his faculty or those on his campus, that he had reason to believe were Communists or had had Communist leanings.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Senator, the answer to that must be very unexciting. If you have personal experience with someone who is an honest liberal, who stands up and is flamboyantly a defender of something that he believes in, knowing that a lot of other people don't, then you have that kind of personal experience with that kind of colleague. These people aren't that way. They are relatively—as you watch them from the administrative angle in an institution like mine, with a faculty of about 700, they are below the horizon of visibility. They operate like moles underneath. You don't see them much. You don't hear them much. It is rather rare that you encounter them directly out in the open. The nature of that business is that of a disciplined conspiracy underneath.
     I know 1 or 2 cases to the contrary. A gentleman that you had up here, and who now has been suspended, whose name is Gustafson, who actually supervised the picket line in front of my home that we were talking about a little while ago. When he was questioned about it, of course, it was just an accident. He happened to live in that part of the city. But he seemed to be living there all the time and was constantly there keeping the picket line going and marching, and things like that.
     I remember one of the others who rather amused me, because—his name was Ewen, also before your committee—in the days of the Rapp-Coudert investigation he made a big speech when the Rapp-Coudert investigation started, before a big audience in Brooklyn, in which he announced, among other things, his opposition to the Rapp-Coudert committee, of course, but he also announced that since the committee had started, I—that is, the president of the college—had clamped down the lid on the faculty and on the student body of Brooklyn College. That was quoted in the press. I had clamped down the lid.
     I wasn't aware of any lid or any clamping down of any sort, so I called him in. I asked him what evidence there was for the statement that I clamped down the lid.
     He equivocated a bit here and there. He had no evidence. There wasn't any. So he finally ended up by saying the evidence was that I had called him in. In other words, the fact that I asked him for evidence on a statement made the day before was evidence for the truth of the statement made 24 hours earlier.
     That kind of logic, of course, is rather interesting. But otherwise, there are no colorful experiences. You have to go at this sort of thing


by indirection, just as the argument, for instance, that they are flamboyant distorters in class is false. The average member of the Communist Party is altogether too careful to do that. No amount of checking, if that would be desirable—and I would think it would be very incompatible under the conditions of running a good college—you would have to be a very learned and informed man indeed to know about the twisting. Without any twisting of instruction, a disciplined crew of this sort can give you concern.
     To make it concrete, he may be teaching English composition. He may say nothing about Korea or about American foreign policy or Marxist ideology, but if he is teaching English composition he knows enough about that class to know that those four students there are the ones who are the most likely to be reachable by a Communist line. All he needs to do, then, in his recruiting capacity, is outside the class to give the names of those four to the student organizer, and the job has been done. That has nothing to do with what he did in his classroom as a teacher, you see.
     The CHAIRMAN. Any further questions?
     Senator McCARRAN. No further. questions.
     The CHAIRMAN. Senator Johnston, do you have any questions at this time?
     Senator JOHNSTON. Dr. Gideonse, you have impressed me here today by your remarks and your testimony. I think you realize fully the danger that we are facing here in the United States at the present time, the threat of communism in the schools and colleges. Do you. really believe that the professors in the colleges that are opposing, say, the activities of this committee at the present time, realize fully the danger that we are facing from communism in schools and colleges?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. No, Senator. I think the larger number of the people. who are critical or concerned do not themselves realize the nature of the problem. They confuse communism with liberalism. They do not believe some of these things that I have been discussing here as derived from a place that actually had rather a strong dose of infiltration at that time, but which I think is very well under control now. They don't believe those facts unless they are really brought to them and they are shown the evidence of the details, and then something breaks.
     Senator JOHNSTON. The reason for that is because, as you stated a few minutes ago, the Communists work in secret all the time?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. That is right.
     Senator JOHNSTON. I believe you compared them to a mole. Being from out in the country, I know a mole leaves a little sign, and you can run them down. But do you not believe they are more like termites than a mole?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. They leave a little sign, too, but I leave you the choice in biology that is appropriate. I have no quarrel with it. The difficulty comes back to the same point, Senator. If you could use the instrument of pitiless publicity by reiterating and making available sworn testimony that shows the nature of this conspiratorial conduct as distinct from the behavior of someone who thinks unpopular. thoughts, who is merely unorthodox, who has ideas of his own, then I think you will, as you clarify that, make it clear to the country as a whole that this is something other than what they thought it was.



     Senator JOHNSTON. Doctor, what is the purpose of the Communist Party, in your opinion, in infiltrating college faculties and college campuses?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Purely and simply to serve the ends of their political masters. They are an instrument of Russian foreign policy.
     Senator McCARRAN. Mr. Chairman, I would like to ask a question, if I mi ht.
     The CHAIRMAN. Yes.
     Senator McCARRAN. I do not want to interfere with the other Senators.    
     The CHAIRMAN. Senator Watkins, do you have any questions?
     Senator WATKINS. I have no questions.
     The CHAIRMAN. Senator McCarran.
     Senator McCARRAN. Doctor, I have been very much interested in our discussion here this afternoon. I wonder if it is true in your experience that the American people fail to realize that this Communist conspiracy does not work by and through the majority. The majority of the people of Russia today are not for the party. The minority, working continuously within the body politic, is the thing that has brought Russia to its present condition and will bring this country to that condition unless we are awakened to the situation.
     In other words, one Communist in a group, if he is in a key position—and they always work for the key position—can do more harm than the group can undo in a lifetime. Do you agree with our theory in that regard?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes. I think it is like a rotten apple in a barrel. We all know what happens to the barrel in no time.
     I don't quite agree with you, Senator, that we are in quite so great a danger now. I think this thing is on the run, and we are in various ways smoking it out so effectively that I think among young people it is losing its appeal with astounding rapidity. I certainly do not feel unhappy about the position of American young people today with regard to the temptations coming from that side. In fact, I feel just the opposite. I feel happier about the present condition than I have for a long time; and I am not just an administrator, I also teach classes still as president of the college.
     But you are quite right, they pretend to be democrats, with a small "d." They pretend to be in favor of freedom, and of course the literature of the party and its practice makes it perfectly plain, if you study it a bit, that that is not the fact.
     They talk about democratic centralism, by which they mean that you take orders from the guy in the center. That is what democratic centralism means.
     They talk a great deal about membership in the party, and that, I think, misleads a lot of American liberals who think, "If I am a member of the Democratic Party, I do not necessarily have to agree with Senator McCarran," which is true. "Therefore, if I am a member of the Communist Party, I do not necessarily have to agree with whatever the big Pooh-Bah says." That isn't so, because "member of the Communist Party" means—and they always use this word—you are an agent of the party, an "agent." In other words, you get orders and do what the principal tells you to do.


     That makes some liberals think that therefore, you can be a member of the Communist Party and not be committed to a lot of these bad things we have been talking about today, that you reject. You can't. As far as there is evidence available-and there is plenty of it on the books—a member of the party takes orders in whatever it is the party wants to give him orders in and he can't even get out without being punished.
     I suppose your committee knows that it is pretty well standard practice in the party—and this is one of the things that always gives me great concern when I am dealing with young people who have gotten involved in it—they make a special point of taking a young person who is becoming a member of the party in the sense of having been in for some months, who has gone through the. first trials.  Now they are perhaps going to charge him with something a little more important. In order to avoid that he should be shocked into dropping the party by the nature of the new assignment, they make a special point of getting that person involved in something nasty. That something nasty may have to do with taking moneys for something that he would gladly have done for nothing; it may have something to do with sex; with a large number of things. That is documented, not for the public. No one is told about that except the inner group. But the individual knows that somebody knows. So if the time comes when the individual wants to break with the party, the threat is held over his head, "This will be told on you."
     That wholly evil force holds them within the discipline. It is sometimes a thing that governs my behavior when I know of some particular individual cases of this sort, because you have an awareness of that particular hazard as one of the things that at the age of 19 or 20 might wreck young life. You therefore have to approach the matter with some delicacy, a delicacy which I wouldn't at all advocate with a 50-year-old who is an old warhorse in party discipline.
     Senator WATKINS. May I ask a question?
     The CHAIRMAN. Had you finished, Senator McCarran?
     Senator McCARRAN. Just one more question.
     Doctor, I am very much interested in your optimism. I hope to share it. My experience over the past several years does not give me quite as much optimism as you appear to have. The experience,'"It can't happen here," is a thing that I am very much concerned about.
     That same expression was made in countries today behind the iron curtain, and they were democracies, and their people were as loyal and as patriotic as any people could be. I would like to interest the American people in that expression, "It can't happen here." It can happen here. I think you would join with me in this thought; It could happen here. It can happen through a minority, if you please, if during times when we are off guard, when we let down our guard, when we lose the thought of the danger of this sinister thing, this conspiracy, we allow them to take over in groups, in colleges, in schools.
     I have today in mind the fact that there is in the schools of America in certain States of the Union, as disclosed before another committee of which I happen to be a member, the Appropriations Committee, a movement that is decidedly communistic in line, and that is the so-called One World movement. I draw your attention to that, Doctor, because you are in a position where you can well afford to give it careful thought.


     Dr. GIDEONSE. I personally, Senator, have always been a little leary of some aspects of the federalist movement business, which is one reason why, although I am very much interested in the foreign policy of the United States, you will not find Harry Gideonse's name away back in connection with that particular movement or some aspects of it.
     I would also say, however, that I am, from my personal experience with a large number of its leaders in and around New York City, convinced that that is not true of a very large group of the most interested personnel in the movement, and that it cannot be true that Communists have much to do with it today, because certainly the country that is the most firm in rejecting qualified national sovereignty in international relations is the Soviet Union. So while there may be some fuzzy thinking, and I am certain there is, in that movement, I can't believe, until I saw some evidence on it, that it is fuzzy thinking of the Communist-inspired sort, because the Communist Party must follow the Russian line, and the Russian line is very clearly against widened, broadened international authority over national governments.
     Senator McCARRAN. If you destroy patriotism, Doctor, if you destroy patriotism in the United States—and that is undoubtedly the teaching of this so-called One World movement—you will have gone a long ways toward weakening our resistance to the Communist conspiracy.
     The CHAIRMAN. Senator Watkins, do you have a series of questions?
     Senator WATKINS. I would like to inquire of the Doctor: Have you had any instances where faculty members who have been either members of the Communist, Party or going along that line, have repented and recanted from their positions?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Oh, yes.
     Senator WATKINS. What is your attitude with respect to those men when they have once done that?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. It is the attitude, Senator, that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner, et cetera, than over 99 of the righteous. Compassion, I think, is supposed to be a part of the American philosophy. For that matter, education is one of the purposes of the college. So nothing happens to such an individual. If he remains a live and resilient member of the faculty, he just moves right along with the others.
     You had one of those before you in this committee, Professor Albaum. Right after that testimony, I heard—you see, there is a lunatic fringe, Senator, on the right as well as on the left. The lunatic fringe on the left thinks every Communist is just a wee little liberal; and the lunatic fringe on the right thinks every liberal is a Communist.
     Senator WATKINS. I am speaking now of a genuine Communist who has apparently repented.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. They thought this man ought to be fired, and they thought, to make it more serious, that this man should not be promoted. He happened to be on my promotion list just at the time your committee called him in. I put him through for promotion on the stipulated time just about 6 weeks after he testified, and nothing has happened, and I think the record is clear.
     Senator WATKINS. Did you make any examination or investigation to find out whether he actually has repented, or has just appeared to?

     Dr. GIDEONSE. I have known for years that he was a trustworthy and reliable member of the staff.
     Mr. MORRIS. Dr. Gideonse knows that he appeared before this committee and gave full, frank, and candid testimony, and in executive session even gave additional testimony about his participation in the Communist organization, and therefore did considerable damage to the Communist organization.
     The CHAIRMAN. We need more of them.
     Senator WATKINS. In other words, what I am trying to find out is: The door is not closed to them if they do repent?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Not at all. I would say, Senator, really, in handling this problem you could do nothing more foolish than to punish people who now regret their former associations and cooperate with you. One of the first things that you must make crystal clear, if you want to find out about the content of a conspiracy, is that you are going to protect all of those who now regret their former conspiratorial conduct and cooperate with you.
     Senator WATKINS. I would like to ask you about publications on the campus of the Brooklyn College. Have you ever seen any publications there that the Communist Party used for propaganda purposes?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Senator, their chief method of indoctrinating the campus is an apparently unending flow of free leaflets that are distributed at the gate. Year after year and literally day after day, some 10,000 to 20,000 leaflets a day handed out at the gate to the youngsters as they come on the campus.
     Senator WATKINS. Can you name some of these publications?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Oh, no. They are just mimeographed literature or a printed folder about some specific issue. They are not published regularly. This is a leaflet on, let's say, the fees now charged, or it is a leaflet about Korea, or some speech that somebody has made that they don't like, or something about the President. Their campaign of misrepresentation, of course, is featured by always putting the responsibility for everything they don't like on one man, dramatize the President. In other words, every time the faculty committee does something they don't like, the administration of the college is blamed for it, and there is a leaflet at the gate.
     This takes place now—by the way, one of the things that made me more optimistic is that this particular flow of literature—I used to call it the geyser of gush—at the gate has now dried up. There doesn't seem to be the life in the show any longer. But in the days when they were working us, when they were trying very hard to retain hold on the campus and when they were losing it, this was the standard practice.
     Also, at times free Daily Workers would be handed out.
     Senator WATKINS. I was going to ask you about that, if you had received any of them. How were they distributed, ordinarily?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. The standard distribution is through the newsstands, of course, but there would be somebody standing there and just giving them free.
     Senator WATKINS. Would they be the same persons?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. No, I would think not.
     Senator WATKINS. Could you identify any of them with any of the subversive organizations?



     Dr. GIDEONSE. No, sir. This happens out of the jurisdiction of the college, outside the gate, and that is civil liberties and police-protected. There is nothing you can do about that.
     Senator WATKINS. Would there be any distribution on the campus itself ?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. No. That is contrary to all college regulations.
     Senator WATKINS. How did you enforce that regulation?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. The student would be sent to the dean's office, et cetera, but that is never necessary or rarely necessary.
     Senator WATKINS. You have never had any trouble in that respect?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I would say none to speak of, considering the size of the institution.
     The CHAIRMAN. Senator Hendrickson, do you have any questions?
     Senator HENDRICKSON. Yes, Mr. Chairman.
     Dr. Gideonse, this committee has heard a lot lately about the subject of academic freedom. You have mentioned the subject 2 or 3 times this afternoon.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes, sir.
     Senator HENDRICKSON. Would you care to give this committee a true definition of academic freedom as you understand it?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I have been a member of the American Association of University Professors for some more than 20 years, and I was president of the University of Chicago chapter when I was on the faculty there for two successive terms. I have served the association on one of its most important investigating committees, on the Yale University case. I think I know what the association means by it.
     The association means by it that a scholar who has acquired tenure, permanent appointment, has the right to freedom to teach in the sense that he owes an explanation of what he does in that capacity only to his peers, his colleagues in the profession. That if there are any issues about that, the issues should arise before a committee of professors who determine, in terms of their professional understanding of his subject matter, whether or not he has sinned against the professional rules.
     I think that is the heart of it, and it is as simple as that. In other words, it is an effort to protect the man who thinks a thought or writes a thought in his publications that may be provocative to the majority or dominant material or church groups in the community against that kind of influence.
     Senator HENDRICKSON. I yield to the Senator from Utah.
     The CHAIRMAN. You go ahead and finish your questions, Senator Hendrickson. We are trying to conclude here.
     Senator HENDRICKSON. Doctor, this question may have been asked during my absence from the committee room. I would like to ask if, in your opinion, an active Communist can be a good teacher at all?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I would say, Senator, that if an active Communist should ever come under my observation who openly admitted that he was, it would be possible, because I think if you know that the man has this loyalty, then you can allow for a lot of the bias, and then you can get an interesting contribution to the diversity of opinion that is partly the heart of good education. I have never met, in academic life, a man who admitted that he was.


     In other words, that theoretical exemption I put it in because I can think of it as having some validity; but it doesn't occur in practice. In practice they are always underneath, and obviously a teacher who has underneath commitments of discipline to someone in scholarly matters is by definition unacceptable as a teacher. That is a kind of loyalty that is incompatible with a free mind and a free community of scholars.
     As I said, in my experience they are always that. way. I have never met one out in the open. Theoretically, I can think of that as. an exciting kind of intellectual experience if you knew this man is that, "Now let's have the argument out in the open." But you never get it.
     Senator HENDRICKSON. I was glad to hear you say, Doctor, that you agreed with Dr. Jones of Rutgers. I think he made one of the finest statements on this subject that I have seen anywhere.
     The CHAIRMAN. Senator Watkins?
     Senator WATKINS. I am. interested in the affirmative side. What, if anything, is done in your college to teach the dangers of communism, and to explain really what communism is?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I don't want any misunderstanding about Brooklyn College as it now stands. I think this situation, as things are now, is completely under control at Brooklyn College. As a matter of fact, I think we have rather a healthy reputation for being rather ruthless about things of. this sort. It is only 2 years ago that we got blasted as being. a police state in which fatal blows to freedom were struck, by the Civil Liberties Union, because of the manner in which we handled some Communist infiltration on our student paper. The situation as it stands is not a problem at Brooklyn College at all, facultywise or studentwise.
     Senator WATKINS. May I ask, do you think a college could. properly have as part of its course to explain what communism, is and what its dangers are?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I think any college worth its salt probably deals with communism in a large number of courses. We certainly do. We deal with it in Government courses, in economics courses, in philosophy courses, wherever it is relevant. If you want to understand the modern world—and that is presumably what a college is concerned with—you must give your students some understanding of what communism pretends to be and what it in fact is.
     Senator WATKINS. That is why I am asking the question. I am wondering what the college does to explain really what communism is and what its objectives are.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Big slices of our courses in Government and philosophy are concerned with Communist literature, the description of the Soviet Government, its influence in foreign affairs, and so on. I, in my own course, spend a quite considerable slice of time on communism, and I would say that that is what a college today should do.
     It would be very silly indeed to try to fight communism by keeping it out of the curriculum. You can't waterproof the young American mind against the things that the newspaper every day rains down on it all day long.
     Senator WATKINS. I commend you for that point of view, because I think there ought to be an objective approach to all of these very problems, including communism.   
     The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Morris, do you have any further questions?



     Mr. MORRIS. Dr. Gideonse, do faculty members participate in the election of department heads at your college?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. I think our bylaws, Mr. Morris, governing the faculty and student organization are probably the most democratic in the United States. Our faculty shares in administrative responsibilities in the widest possible sense, and one of the ways in which I have, I think, managed to overcome this difficulty in the history of Brooklyn College is by always insisting that the policies that were hammered out were the policies of the faculty committees. Their effort is always to stick the president with the administration of this. Invariably, decisions are faculty-committee decisions. That is the way to win this fight. Give everybody a share in the experience so they all see the facts.
     It is a little hard, because most people would like to be inert and do their own things and not be busy with it, but have opinions about it, anyway. But our system is one of sharing. Therefore, for instance, department chairmen are invariably based on recommendations of the department. It is true the president has the right to reject the nomination before it goes to the board, but I think it is true that, for instance, of the 23 or 24 chairmen now at the college, every single one was the choice of the department; not a single one of them was based on a veto by the president.
     Mr. MORRIS. Dr. Gideonse, at the peak of the Communist strength in your college some years back, was the election of chairmen of the different departments a political issue that Communists were in fact engaging in?
     Dr. GIDEONSE. At what time?
     Mr. MORRIS. At the peak of the Communist strength.
     Dr. GIDEONSE. Yes. They were very much interested in getting the bylaws revised in as extreme fashion as possible so the staff would have the exclusive say-so. One of their quarrels with me at the time I was being appointed—I was a professor at Columbia University at the time—was that they apparently had heard that I insisted unless I had, as president, some say over the matter, I was not interested in accepting the offer. The bylaws were changed at the time of my appointment so that this faculty participation became a matter of recommendation to the president, which he had the right to reject if he found reasons to state to the board for it, and, of course, they saw in that the beginning of some reorientation.
     The CHAIRMAN. Doctor, on behalf of the committee, I want to thank you for appearing before this committee. You have given us a great deal of information. I am sure it has been beneficial to the committee and, I hope, to the public at large. Thank you very much.
     (Whereupon, at 3: 30 p. m., the hearing was recessed, subject to call.)
     (The following material was ordered printed in the record by the chairman during a hearing on April 8, 1953.)


   

     The man with whom I had lunch recently was angry. It was about his daughter, who had just come home from college.



     "Education has turned her into a Red," he said. "She used to be a sensible kid, but now she's up in arms against everything I've ever stood for. I wouldn't mind if education had merely converted her to democratic socialism—or any American kind of ism—but when it switches a youngster's allegiance from the United States to Soviet Russia, something ought to be done about it."
     That parent's story was one I had heard before. Thousands of boys and girls are being exposed to Communism every year in our schools and colleges, and a good many of them are catching the virus. This is not because youth today is any more gullible or radical than in the past, but because the Communist leadership is shrewd enough to direct its best efforts toward our young people, and clever and unscrupulous Communists have infiltrated our educational system and are using every instrument at their command to win and convert the minds of students to the doctrines of Marx and Lenin.
     While we are spending billions to wage the cold war abroad and to help build a world in which there is a reasonable chance to live in peace as well as in self-respect, our young people are under remitting attack here at home. As my luncheon companion said, we must do something about it.
     The danger is a very real one. During the past few years the Communists have lost ground on several fronts in this country. Russia's international policy of ruthless aggression has alienated many former sympathizers and fellow travelers. The labor unions have shown an increasing tendency to expose Red conspirators and expel them from positions of power. But in spite of setbacks on these sectors, the directors of Communist strategy are still concentrating an enormous effort on the youth front. They are throwing everything they have into a drive to convert our young people to their doctrines because they know, as Hitler did, that if they can get our youth of today, they will have the nation tomorrow.
     Nobody can tell you exactly bow many Red teachers and students there are in our educational institutions. Because of their false fronts, their conspiratorial methods, and their invariable willingness to lie and commit perjury, it is often difficult to detect a Communist professor, student, or student organization.  It can be stated with assurance, however, that there are thousands of them in our educational system. In almost all colleges of any size, and in many secondary schools as well, Communists are working actively to undermine the students' faith in American foreign policy, to intensify racial and religious friction among Americans of diverse cultural backgrounds, and to promote the general attitude that "Moscow is always right."
     As president of Brooklyn College for the last 9 years, and before that as a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago and of Columbia University, I have had the opportunity to obtain a close-up view of Communist operations on the youth front. I have seen how they recruit new members, how they manipulate innocent organizations for their purposes, how they attempt to penetrate every field of student activity and student thought. But when I speak of their operations on a national scale I am not relying upon my own observations alone.
     Attorney General Tom C. Clark recently named a lengthy list of civic and educational organizations which he described as hotbeds of Communism, and reported that the Reds are not confining their efforts to college students. "The Federal Bureau of Investigation," he said, "has learned that the Communists have started a campaign to recruit our children to their ideology—the younger they are, the better."
     The United States Office of Education has also frankly acknowledged the growing menace. Admitting the grave challenge of Communism in our schools, this Federal agency recently announced plans to foster the teaching of democratic concepts and values on a nation-wide scale, and to inaugurate studies which will show how undemocratic forces are trying to infiltrate our institutions.
     At the same time, the House Un-American Activities Committee has issued a report describing the widespread activities of a Communist youth organization . which masquerades under the fine-sounding name of American Youth for Democracy. This organization, which was formed in 1943 as a direct successor to the former Young Communist League, now has chapters in 60 colleges in 14 states and a total membership of more than 16,000.
     The AYD is manipulated by shrewd and specially trained organizers operating behind the scenes, according to the House Committee's report, and behind a veil of high-sounding slogans it follows the Trojan Horse policy of the Communist International with all of its characteristic underhanded and devious ability to


exploit the idealism and inexperience of young people. While it insists that it is American and democratic, I do not know of a single occasion on which its policies were not in strict accord with the "party line" laid down by Moscow.
     But the AYD is only one of the national student organizations through which Communism is stalking the campuses. The Young Progressive Citizens of America, which is an offshoot of the Communist-dominated Progressive Citizens of America, claims members at 65 colleges scattered from Connecticut to California. During the past year we have witnessed the unfolding of a concerted international and national plan to capture control of the nation's largest student group, the National Student Association.
     The effort failed miserably. The spotlight was put on the comrades and on their false whiskers, everyone was alert and informed, and in the light of al really intelligent majority which did not allow itself to be shaken by disruptive tactics, the National Student Association was established as a genuinely national and representative group.
     In the high schools and elementary schools organized subversive activity is also widespread, although the intensity of the effort varies enormously from one area to another. In a number of states public investigations have revealed disturbing piecemeal evidence, but it is too frequently true that the methods of investigation are amateurish and un-American in the sense that the true evidence for the charges is not revealed, or that no opportunity is given for a reply by the teachers who are accused.
     It is too easy to accuse a teacher or a textbook of "Communism" because, say, a Federal control of money and banking is urged. By such a standard Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson were both Communists, and the preservation of the American system means the preservation of the opportunity for continuous public criticism and modification of our institutions. The difference between constitutional democracy and totalitarianism is precisely the provision in the former for orderly legal methods of criticism and change which are protected by the Government itself.
     Our objection to the Stalinists is not an objection to social change, but an objection to conspiratorial and camouflaged activity in which lies and perjured testimony are regarded as acceptable methods of achieving Moscow's purposes.
     The danger is real, but our methods should be in accordance with our own rules of the game. A good model was set by the New York State Legislative Investigation (the so-called Rapp-Coudert Committee), although it was active for only a limited period of time. Its reports are full of well-substantiated data and incidents. They tell—one example among many—of a woman teacher in one New York school who testified she was subjected to a virtual reign of terror by students and faculty members alike when she refused to subscribe to Communist views. Among other things, she found the Soviet emblem of hammer and sickle drawn on the blackboard in every classroom.
     At another high school where the former YCL had fomented riotous disorders, a teen-age Red told the principal he might find it necessary to kill him in the event violence was necessary to overthrow the Government. The statement was flamboyant and puerile, of course, but it illustrates the sort of ideas with which youngsters are being indoctrinated in some schools.
Now, the great question is: Why do so many American students fall for the Red line? They enjoy under our system greater advantages than were ever offered to any previous generation of youth. How can they swallow the totalitarian philosophy which would deprive them of most of these advantages?
     I have been asked that question many times, and there is no one simple answer. It lies partly in the nature of youth itself, which is eternally in revolt against adult authority, but mostly in the ingenious and often brilliant techniques which are employed by Red organizers and Red fronters. Communists have no ethics in our sense of the word ; they subordinate morality to the interests of what they call "the class struggle," and there is no device they will not use to take advantage of the idealism, inexperience, and desire-to-join which characterize most boys and girls during and immediately after adolescence. They have a thorough understanding of young people and know just how to go about winning their sympathies, and they know how to exploit the weaknesses of our educational organization.
     I have observed this often during the first days of a college term. Our high schools and colleges have grown with unprecedented speed in the last decades. The public complains about the cost, but the facts are that we are almost everywhere engaged in a diluted mass education in which principals and presidents


preside over gigantic institutions, and classes are so large that individual contact becomes accidental and impersonal. The majority of new students feel a bit lonely and insecure after they matriculate. They want desperately to make friends and really "belong" in their new environment. Many older students ignore them in a somewhat superior manner, but not the Communists. Since they have a line of goods to sell, they are right on hand to extend their friendship.
     This is true not only in huge metropolitan institutions like Brooklyn College, but throughout the country. At dozens of colleges last year the Young Progressive Citizens of America set up reception desks at registration time where they warmly welcomed freshmen on their first day at school. They do not preach political propaganda in their first contacts, but they offer the new students advice on the best places to eat and to get their laundry done ; they invite them to meetings or social affairs, and make each newcomer feel that he has at last found a group which is warmly interested in his individual and social welfare.
     At some schools where Red groups are not chartered or where the school itself has little or no recreational space, the Red organizers rent halls or empty stores off the campus for meeting places or hangouts and invite prospective members there. In every case they flatter the new student's ego, make him feel that he is an intellectual among intellectuals, and that he ought to join their fine liberal group. When he does join he doesn't realize, in one case out of a hundred, that he is getting into an organization which is actually directed by the Kremlin. Indoctrination comes later, when personal contacts have been established and a relationship of confidence has been built up.
     As a part of the social approach, popular jazz bands and big-name speakers are often used by the Communists to attract students to their parties or mass meetings. In New York colleges, "name bands" and popular authors have been used several times as such bait.
     Nor do the Reds hesitate to use sex appeal to win recruits. If a boy is wavering about joining one of their groups and is worth some special effort because of qualities of leadership, a pretty girl member may be assigned to help him make up his mind. Or a handsome youth may suddenly take an emotional interest in a girl the Communists want to convince. This may sound a bit lurid to some people who are not familiar with the facts, but I have seen such tactics used many times in different places.
     For example, a Communist group at an Ohio college recently tried very hard to bring into its ranks a young liberal who was a Phi Beta Kappa and an officer of the student council. When ideological arguments failed, he was invited to a house off the campus where drinks were served lavishly. He was then told he could bring a girl to the house any time he wished to, provided he joined the group. If he didn't happen to know any girls without bourgeois notions of morality, he could be introduced to one. After the lad has yielded to the temptation, they have a scandal story to scare him into conformity if he should prove to be obstreperous on some subsequent occasion. I cite this case only because it indicates the lengths to which Communists will go to enlist the bright youngsters they want.
     Perhaps the most effective tactic they employ, however, is their practice of espousing popular campus causes and protesting militantly against anything which they can make appear as unfair practice, student exploitation, or discrimination. Since no school is perfect—and the morale of teaching staffs is not so high as it might be, because of inadequate salaries—they not infrequently hit upon conditions which really should be remedied and, when their cause has any merit, many high-minded students invariably join hands with them.
     This policy fits in perfectly, of course, with the general Communist strategy of creating discontent in the masses and fomenting constant revolt against the status quo. Revolution can only be accomplished through class struggle, they are taught, and if there is no class struggle on a campus they start one by finding some grievance, real or imagined, to agitate about.
I have seen them do this over and over again. If the sandwiches at a college cafeteria are a bit thinner than those sold elsewhere, if the price of milk includes a service charge, if the college bookstore seems to be making a profit, if a student, teacher, or janitor appears to be the victim of an unfair deal, the Reds can be counted on to stir up the whole school about it, call mass meetings, circulate pamphlets, and form picket lines.
     Another basic tactic which Red student organizers pursue everywhere is that of penetrating non-Communist campus organizations which they feel they can manipulate or use as a "front of innocents." These may include student councils,


Greek-letter societies, local Y. M. C. A. and Y. W. C. A. groups, and even church clubs. Communists scorn religion, of course, as "opium for the masses," but since deceit and subterfuge are their principal tools, they do not hesitate to profess belief in God if it will serve their ends.
     Sometimes special Red fronts are organized to attract a whole new group of innocent recruits for subsequent intensive cultivation. Within the last year I have personally observed a song-and-mandolin and a folk-and-square-dance group which were set up by ardent fellow travelers as devices with which to secure intimate contact with promising new human material.
     Right now, the AYD and other Red groups on the nation's campuses are using the "Students-for-Wallace" clubs as their main front of innocents. From coast to coast they are organizing or infiltrating these clubs, recruiting members for them, and working to control them. This has its amusing side, because the Young Communist League, which fathered AYD, denounced Henry Wallace bitterly only a few years ago as an imperialist and a warmonger. Few of today's crop of students know that, however, and there is no question that many of those who merely want to vote for Walace for President will be used or manipulated as Communist pawns.
     The great majority of young people who are drawn into Communist organizations or front groups by various subterfuges, never become actual members of the Communist Party. Most of them drop out eventually when they are required to study and embrace the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, but there is always a certain percentage who develop into dyed-in-the-wool Reds.
     I have noticed that most of these come from either underprivileged or over-privileged homes. It is easier to understand why a child of the slums might rebel against society than it is to understand why one from a wealthy family should turn to Communism. But many do, including boys and girls in exclusive private colleges, and I believe the answer lies in the fact that the rich student often suffers from a sense of guilt because he has everything, or seeks to attract attention to himself because he has been either neglected or overly dominated at home by his successful parents.
     Whatever the reason, the underprivileged and the wealthy produce most of the red-hot Reds on the campus, and while they comprise but a small minority at most colleges, they can create disturbances out of all proportion to their numbers. I have seen this demonstrated frequently.
     A few years ago, just before Hitler invaded Russia and broke his treaty with Stalin which brought on the second World War, the chapter at Brooklyn College of the American Student Union, like other Communist groups throughout America, conducted a militant campaign against military preparedness. A dozen or so ASU members distributed literature at the gates of the college to thousands of students, inciting them to "refuse to serve as cannon fodder for the capitalist bosses." Then, at an hour they had set for a mass demonstration, these conspirators ran through the college corridors blowing police whistles and flinging open classroom doors. Shouting like wild men, they ordered everybody to stop work at once and join in a peace strike. A mere handful of well-organized Reds succeeded in throwing the whole college into an uproar.
     When Brooklyn College's faculty suspended the ASU charter for its misbehavior, reprisals were taken against me. My home was picketed for days by a group of party stalwarts—as far as we could determine mostly from the city rather than from the college—who wore gas masks and frightened my small children, and who proudly wore "The Yanks are NOT coming" buttons. My home telephone rang all night, and bogus telegrams were delivered announcing that deaths had occurred in my family. I soon found ways of protecting myself from these nuisances, but leftist papers denounced me nationally as a Red-baiter.
     Even some faculty members seemed to regard me as a Fascist reactionary, although it helped some to observe that President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were simultaneously denounced as "imperialist warmongers." The party line changed, of course, as soon as Hitler decided to attack the Soviet Union.
     Communist professors and teachers play an important part, of course, in the broad-scale campaign to convert our youth to Stalinism. In some cases, they subtly disseminate propaganda in their classrooms. In others, they cooperate closely with student organizers. If a Red teacher discovers that one of his students has somewhat radical leanings, for example, he may suggest that he attend some meetings of the local AYD chapter. At the same time, he may quietly tip off the officers of the chapter that the boy appears to be ripe for serious Communist indoctrination.


     Soon after I took my present post at Brooklyn College, a legislative investigation was initiated to determine whether there were subversive activities in the public school system of New York City. Since there is always a fear that such an inquiry will curb or punish the legitimate desire of any teacher to exercise his normal political rights as a citizen of this country, I wanted to establish clearly for our own faculty that I would personally co-operate vigorously with the State's effort to curb genuinely subversive or unprofessional activities, but that I had no sympathy whatsoever with the view that a teacher is in some way deprived of some of the political and civil rights which every American enjoys as part of his birthright under our Constitution.
     I called a staff meeting to invite any teacher who was willing to admit open and aboveboard membership in the Communist Party to consult me, and I promised that I would use the full force of my position to protect his rights as a citizen to exercise any political option that was open to any other citizen. I made it very clear that I would not myself knowingly endorse the appointment of a Stalinist or a Bundist, but that the legitimate civil rights of any present member of the staff would be protected. No one spoke up, although three gentlemen later resigned under charges of conspiratorial and subversive conduct without even taking advantage of their legal right to a public trial in which they could have been represented by their own attorney.
     The reason is, of course, obvious. The Communists and their fellow travelers always discuss these cases as if they involved an infringement of civil or intellectual liberties. In fact, these folks are in trouble because they lie and perjure themselves, and they engage in underhanded methods which cannot be tolerated in any member of a professional group. To a good Stalinist, "truth" and "honor" are—as Marx taught—mere "bourgeois prejudices" or—as Lenin said—"morality is subordinated to the interests of the class struggle" but, to a good American, anyone who regards "truth" as dispensable in the pursuit of his political or professional purpose is unfit to teach,.
     Open Communist propaganda in the classroom is exceedingly rare. The real hazards are far more subtle and indirect. But in our large and impersonal modern schools and colleges possibilities exist, and until we have more liberal budgets to staff our educational institutions more adequately the comrades will seek to exploit them. The New York State Legislative Investigation reports a book called, Education and the Social Conflict, in which its author, Howard David Langford, Ph. D., tells English teachers how to use students' book reviews "as vehicles for clarifying the issues between the workers and the ruling classes as reflected in the books reviewed." He slyly advises science teachers not to put as much emphasis on the design and operation of the dynamo, telephone, airplane, and radio as he does on the "roles these instruments have played in uniting workers within each country and throughout the world."
     Even geography can be given a Red slant. When discussing the products of various countries, the teacher is counseled to talk about "the grinding poverty of millions—the peasants planting rice in China, Cubans living on next to nothing amid endless fields of sugarcane, Alabama sharecroppers, Pennsylvania coal miners, makers of cheap garments in New York sweatshops."
     Nobody known how many teachers in the nation's little red schoolhouses are following Dr. Langford's handy manual, or others similar to it. * * *
     What can we do about this clever, versatile, and well-organized Communist program which is threatening youth on so many fronts? Well, there is one thing we must not do : We must not give way to the hysteria which characterizes those conservative and reactionary elements who would combat the totalitarian left by suspending civil rights or curtailing liberal thought in this country. The essential characteristic of the free institutions which we must defend is that they protect the right to differ from the majority, if the minority views are honestly and openly defended. Totalitarians repress all deviations from party orthodoxy, and we should, above all, be careful not to become totalitarians ourselves in our efforts to defend our system against totalitarianism.
     There are, I think, two methods of approach which will effectively protect our interests. First of all, we should remember that Woodrow Wilson's "pitiless publicity" is an old and tried device in a free society's tool chest. No one need fear the conclusions of our young people if the argument is "out in the open," with the true labels and the real supporters visible for all observers. Secondly, we should remember that Communist infiltration is often successful because there are weaknesses in our treatment of young people which are cleverly exploited by the Communists and fellow-traveler fronts. If we find effective remedies for these


soft spots, the most attractive and insidious propaganda will fall on barren ground.
     How can we apply the old remedy of pitiless publicity to this problem? Local machinery will not suffice, because we are dealing with a national and international adversary. While I disapprove of some of the methods which have been employed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, such public investigative bodies are undoubtedly necessary, and I have no doubt that state agencies can effectively supplement them.
     We should avoid smear tactics which involve people in public hearings with hearsay testimony without offering them the traditional American opportunity of a day in court in which they can offer their reply; but in coping with this problem we need the public agency with sufficient funds to make an informed and well-documented investigation and with full legal powers to force the facts out into the open.
     If such agencies treat testimony about a play that is "pessimistic" as evidence of Communism, they merely encourage sane and intelligent observers to think that the "Red scare" is only a conservative congressman's nightmare; but if the testimony is carefully sifted in advance and the inquiry focuses on substantial witnesses who expose genuinely conspiratorial and camouflaged activity, the mere publication of the facts is a powerful disinfectant, especially if the procedure includes the opportunity to reply under the same safeguards of tested and sworn testimony.
     Public investigating bodies should always include liberal and progressive citizens or legislators to ensure against a confusion of liberal and progressive ideas with genuinely totalitarian practices. If we tag every unconventional reform idea with the "Red" label, the word will lose its value for identifying the real thing, and there is nothing the Stalinists like better than a smear campaign which calls every progressive or unorthodox idea "Communist." When that happens, they can really effectively argue that "Red-baiting" is nothing but a conservative attempt to protect the status quo and to prevent change of any kind.
     The New York State Legislative Investigation—the so-called Rapp-Coudert inquiry—was a model of effective and constructive public service, and it might well serve as an example for other states and even for the House Committee.
     The aim should be to smoke out the facts and to expose false fronts and false whiskers. At Brooklyn College we refused a charter to the American Youth for Democracy because it is neither "American" nor "democratic," and because its officers lied to our faculty committee about their origin and their affiliations. But we chartered the Karl Marx Society, which is a group that openly admits it is interested in the study of Marxist ideas in art, literature, and economics.
     No innocents are trapped when the aims and purposes are openly avowed, and Karl Marx's ideas are obviously a significant part of the contemporary world with which a contemporary student or scholar should be familiar. Most of us in America have no fear at all of the test of truth in open argument with Stalinists, but we must be deeply concerned with the consequences of protecting liars and perjurers with civil liberties and academic freedom which were intended as a safeguard for honest minority points of view held in open competition with conflicting ideas.
     How can we cope with the weaknesses in our educational system which help to give the Communists their opportunity to reach our young people?
     For one thing, we need to face the fact that, while we offer young people more educational advantages than ever before, we have put restrictions on many of the job opportunities which were formerly open to them. For example, it is not nearly so easy for a young man today to become a printer or an electrician, a doctor or a teacher, as it was for his father or grandfather. Through trade unions, professional associations, licensing agencies, and other devices, older people have built higher and higher walls around their own security. If we want to keep our young people from feeling frustrated and rebellions, we can do a great deal through public and educational agencies to lower some of these walls and to restore opportunity.
     For another thing, we would do well to give a good, critical look at the financial provisions for American education. Teaching salaries have not kept pace with the rising cost of living. The average professor in the country's leading 300 colleges receives a salary that is considerably lower than the pay of most wworkers in the building trades in New York City, and many New York truck drivers receive salaries that are higher than department chairmen's salaries in a large number of universities. In the circumstances, able and personally effective teachers are


leaving the campus for more remunerative work, and staff morale is low. Every generation has the type of youth it deserves, and a country which is niggardly in its provisions for teachers and scholars should not be surprised if the chickens come home to roost.
     We can also safeguard ourselves against Communist infiltration by proper measures to protect the country against some of the evil by-products of mass education. Schools and colleges should have ample social and recreational staffs and facilities. A school or a college should be a morally healthy, intellectually exciting, and socially hospitable environment. Today. it is often a crowded factory with standardized impersonal procedures geared to the needs of the mediocre and second-rate. Students will be better citizens .if they enjoy their years in school, and it is nothing less than a scandal that ideological pressure groups should often be able to offer more to our young people than our own educational institutions.
     This is not merely a question of numbers and of adequate space, but a matter of representative speakers, artists, and creative talent which can enrich an educational program far beyond its small additional cost, and which are frequently available to the fellow travelers when comparable talent. cannot be secured by the schools. or colleges because of budgetary limitations.
     Effective protection action is essential. We are in a war of ideas—and, in old-fashioned language, this is a struggle for the soul of our youth.


     The changing issues in academic freedom discussed in this paper are related to three new developments: (A) the problem of teachers who accept political discipline in matters of science and scientific opinion, (B) the impact on scholarly activities of federal security regulations especially in the field of the physical sciences, and (C) the changing sources of academic financial support.                           


     As a by-product of the so-called "cold war" the problems that arise in connection with teachers who accept Communist Party discipline have immediate urgency. The present discussion is conducted as we stand on a quicksand of verbal, as well as factual, confusion in public opinion itself and even in academic circles.
     The changing issues in academic freedom are perhaps most easily characterized with the bald statement that several professors at the University of Washington have recently been dismissed on the ground that they were guilty as members of the Communist Party of violating the principles of academic, freedom and therefore of "conduct unbecoming a teacher."¹  The classical formulations of the principles of academic freedom by the American Association of University Professors contemplated no such development. Neither the 1925 nor the 1940 "statement of principles"² foresaw a hazard to academic freedom in the ideological commitments of the teachers themselves. They speak of the university or the college as the party that "may not place any restraint upon the teacher's freedom of investigation" or "impose any limitation upon the teacher's freedom in the exposition of his own subject in the classroom or in addresses and publications outside the college." It is true that the 1940 "statement of principles" postulates that the "common good" of institutions of higher learning depends "upon the free search for truth and its free exposition," and recent experience has demonstrated with tragic emphasis that political organizations as well as the federal government itself may place more effective restraints or limitations upon the teacher's freedom of investigation or his freedom of exposition that were ever contemplated by colleges or universities themselves.   
     The struggle for academic freedom takes a new form as the intellectual, ideological, and cultural landscape changes. The essence of the tradition must be restated and redefined by every generation in the light of current facts, current
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     ¹  Communism and academic freedom, the record of the tenure cases at the University of Washington, Seattle, Univ. of Washington Press, 1949.
     ²  Reprinted in Bull. Amer. Assoc. Univ. Prof. 35 (1) : 66-72, 1949.



challenges, and current abuses: Those who live in an atmosphere that is comparatively static will abide by the received verbal formulations. Those who live in a climate of opinion deeply affected by new developments—such as, say, in the modern scene, a university with a real experience with communist infiltration or a large number of teachers in the physical sciences affected by federal security regulations—will find little help in a parrot-like repetition of the old words and phrases. If they are to be a living chart—and not an empty verbal shell covering an alien content—their meaning must be hammered out anew on the anvil of experience. In such a period of restatement and redefinition, it is inevitable that there will be an interval of confusion and even chaos arising from the differences in thought and emotion evoked by old and new verbal symbols, and only a process of sharing and analyzing the new experience will contribute to a basic clarification of the issues involved.³
     This conviction leads me to introduce specific illustrations throughout this discussion since a great deal of the heat of the contemporary debate tends to subside once we are all agreed upon the actual data of contemporary experience. Too many college teachers without any actual experience with communist infiltration continue to discuss genuine cases of identification with party discipline as if they were the usual case of describing a non-conformist or philosophic Marxist as a "red" or a "communist," and nothing in this paper is designed to obscure the fact that there are today, no doubt, plenty of orthodox academic freedom issues in which a teacher is dismissed because he addresses a Wallace-for-President meeting, or in which a trustee interested in dairy farming argues that a campus supporter of the removal of fiscal handicaps for oleomargarine Is "promoting communism." These are vulgar cases of reactionary constraint and they should be resisted with all the vigor the academic profession can mobilize. It is precisely the purpose of this paper, however, to argue that we are likely to promote a tidal wave of such misinformed efforts to curb freedom of thought and teaching if we do not vigorously clarify the real meaning of academic freedom in a period when modern totalitarianism itself regards every academic discipline as a potential tool in the capture of power. It is not argued that the number of communists in academic life is so large that they constitute a serious hazard in themselves, but it is argued that the effort to protect teachers who accept outside dictation in their academic activities with academic freedom strengthens the appeal of conventional enemies of intellectual freedom and diminishes the resilience with which the normal sources of defense respond to their challenge. Putting academic freedom to the greatest possible strain is not the most effective method of preserving it.
     The function of a university is the discovery and the dissemination of the truth in all branches of learning and as such the freedom of the academic teacher is essential to the preservation of free society itself. As a social tradition academic freedom is morally anchored in this dedication to truth. For the academic teacher—says Paulsen in a classic passage of The German Universities and University Study—"there can be no prescribed and no proscribed thoughts." A member of the Communist Party, however, accepts party discipline in intellectual as well as political matters. His views are not the fruit of an individual scholar's rational analysis of experience. They are prescribed as well as proscribed. They are a matter of the party's iron discipline, changing every day with the shifts in the party line, and his membership will cease promptly if he deviates in any essential point. It is necessary to stress that this is not a matter of the individual's political beliefs but a question of deliberate action through the acceptance of disciplined submission to the dictation of the party. There are no part-time or casual members of the party. They are all pledged to active participation in the vigilant and firm defense of the party line to insure the triumph of Soviet power in the United States. An article on the role of the teacher in The Communist (May 1937) says:
     "Communist teachers must take advantage of their positions, without exposing themselves, to give their students to the best of their ability working-class edu-
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     ³  There has been considerable evidence of professional rethinking of the fundamentals In current literature. I single out as exceptionally useful: Sidney Hook, Should communists be permitted to teach? The New York Times Magazine, February 22, 1949 ; Alexander Meiklejohn, Should communists be allowed to teach? The New York Times Magazine, March 27, 1949; John L. Childs, Communists and the right to teach, The Nation (N. Y.), February 26, 1949; Sidney Hook, What shall we do about communist teachers? The Saturday Evening Post, September 10, 1949 ; Sidney Hook, Academic integrity and academic freedom, Commentary, October 1949 ; and a symposium on Communism and academic freedom in The American scholar, Summer, 1949, with contributions by President Raymond B. Allen and three dismissed, members of his faculty, as well as articles by Arthur O. Lovejoy, Max Lerner, Helen Lynd, and T. V. Smith.


cation. . Only when teachers have really mastered Marxism-Leninism will they be able skillfully to inject it into their teaching at the least risk of exposure and at the same time conduct struggles around the schools in a truly Bolshevik manner."
     In commenting on this paragraph Arthur O. Lovejoy, one of the founders of the American Association of University Professors, says in The American Scholar:
     "In short, a Communist teacher in a school or university may be expected to be in fact, first and last and all the time, a secret propagandist and an indefatigable intriguer in the interest of the one cause to which he is devoted. Such persons are hardly ideal members of teaching bodies." ⁴
     These things are true not merely of the American communist. They are characteristic of the entire movement throughout the world. The following paragraph from a recent essay by Harold Laski may serve as a succinct summary by an author whose record is full of evidence of sympathetic observation of the movement he so bitterly characterizes:
     To this there must be added the grave issues created by the ethical behaviour of the Communist Parties outside Russia after 1917. The passion for conspiracy, the need for deception, the centralized and autocratic commands, the contempt for fair play, the willingness to use lying and treachery to discredit an opponent or to secure some desired end, complete dishonesty in the presentation of facts, the habit of regarding temporary success as justifying any measure, the hysterical invective by which they sought to destroy the character of anyone who disagreed with them ; these, in the context of an idolization of leaders who might, the day after, be mercilessly attacked as the incarnation of evil, have been the normal behaviour of Communists all over the world.⁴
     In the light of these facts which are based upon sad experience throughout the world, it is disturbing to observe the thick smokescreen of innocent as well as deliberately misleading comment which obscures the real nature of the adversaries who are locked in battle. Critical comment from those who confuse communism with all other types of unorthodox thought can be taken for granted without further citations, and I therefore single out discussion by liberal observers since my principal interest is centered in the confusion of vital issues by the use of opaque language with the ensuing danger of weakening support for academic freedom from sources which would normally be the chief reliance of friends of freedom. Thus, an informed observer like Max Lerner can say of the University of Washington cases that "the fact of belonging to a party which is meant to be a disciplined army, and the added fact of having kept it secret for a period, ought to be a weighty item in any calculation about a teacher's integrity." In spite of this consideration, Lerner does not regard such evidence as clinching because some of the teacher's students testified "that he always made his bias clear to his students," although the same individual admittedly concealed his membership in the party from his colleagues, and Lerner then argues that nonconformism is part of the great tradition of our people" because "dissent sharpens the search for the viable truth."⁶ But how much nonconformism or dissent is there in the concealment of your heresy? How can concealed dissent contribute to the search for viable truth if party discipline compels you to lie? Another good example can be found in the use that is sometimes made of President Conant's statements in defense of intellectual freedom because some of his readers have not carefully read his qualifications. In a criticism of the University of Washington cases, I find Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., quoting Conant's annual report for 1947 as follows :
     The criteria for joining a community of scholars are in some ways unique. They are not to be confused with the requirements of a Federal bureau. For example, I can imagine a naive scientist or a philosopher with strong loyalties to the advancement of civilization and the unity of the world who would be a questionable asset to a government department charged with negotiations with other nations; the same man, on the other hand, because of his professional competence might be extremely valuable to a university?⁷
     Clearly, Conant is right and he is well within the classical tradition of academic freedom. What has this quotation to do with the defense of concealed
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     ⁴ Lovejoy, op. cit.. 335.
     ⁵ Laski, Harold J., Introduction to Communist Manifesto, Socialist landmark, 89-90, London, Allen & Unwin, 1948.
     ⁶ Lerner, op. cit., 339.
     ⁷ Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., The right to loathsome ideas, Sat. Rev, of Lit., May 14, 1949.  



members of the Communist Party at the University of Washington who were engaged in secret activities, assumed "party" names and accepted party discipline? And did Schlesinger entirely overlook the sentence at the bottom of the same page of President Conant's report in which he says : "Granted honesty, sincerity, and ability, there must be tolerance of a wide diversity of opinion.”  In other words, Conant is saying that intellectual freedom must be protected, granted the very qualities which Communist Party members do not possess by definition (because they accept party discipline in these matters). Is this a quotation which can be used to attack a university administration which bases its action upon the disappearance of the very qualities which President Conant takes for granted?
     An indication that a large percentage of the current discussion would cease if the facts of the problem were more clearly understood can be found in the views of President Harold Taylor of Sarah Lawrence College, who—like. many other liberal educators—believes that communists should not be excluded because if we begin by "excluding communists, we will end by excluding any one who says anything provocative, unorthodox or interesting." The relevant query in reply is: Do party liners say anything provocative, unorthodox, or interesting? Or do they rather conceal their identity and, in the language of The Communist, inflect their views "at the least risk of exposure"? Dr. Taylor's lack of experience with the real problem is illustrated by his defense of the presence of communists on teaching faculties with the plea that democratic education should provide a "daily encounter with truth" that is "free and open."⁸ Such a daily encounter that is free and open is precisely the thing that is impossible with members of a conspiratorial, camouflaged group that have accepted party discipline in intellectual matters.
     It would be easy to enumerate other illustrations of the extent to which even academic discussion permits terms to be used with a lack of precision, discrimination, and factual documentation that differs shockingly from the nicety with which the same individuals would use terms in their own professional subject matter. Outside academic circles, we find correspondingly opaque use of language, such as that of a recent judicial opinion on a bill imposing penalties on members of the Communist Party in which the Court, following traditional American use of words such as "member" and "party," argued that "members" of a "party" do not necessarily support its full program. In connection with members of the Communist Party, these are questions of fact and in the abundance of contemporary evidence they are relatively easy to document—and such a statement does not necessarily mean that the bill in question was wise or unwise, constitutional or unconstitutional. It does mean that it is no longer intellectually defensible to assume that the key words in the relevant discussion convey the same meaning that they traditionally imply in a free society.
     The statement that "membership" in the Communist Party is like "membership" in any other legal party is utterly misleading. To be a registered Republican or Democratic voter—which is presumably the meaning of "membership" in such a case—does not imply the assumption of iron discipline in executing the party leaders' orders even in intellectual matters as politically remote as biology, the history of philosophy, or the theory of music, whereas "membership" in the Communist Party really means that the individual becomes the agent of the party—this is the phrase Lenin always used to describe "members"—in every field in which it is seeking instruments to achieve its power purpose. It is also misleading to speak of party membership as "guilt by association" since this would be true of membership in the free society's sense of the term whereas membership in the Stalinist sense means a dedicated commitment to accept the discipline of the group, which is active cooperation and not association.
     The moral prerequisites of freedom are usually not "spelled out." We take them for granted; but the present situation in free society calls for their explicit statement-if vital distinctions in the defense of freedom against its old and its new enemies are to be clearly made. Classically, freedom is always defended as the best method of pursuing the search for truth in which we assume that the truth of tomorrow may be the heresy of today, and the constructive potentiality of heresy is therefore assumed as well as the agreement that each is searching for the truth whatever our differences may be as to its exact nature. It is vital to recognize that the heart of the argument lies in the moral assumption that all of us are dedicated to the truth wherever our individual conscience and insight may lead us to recognize it. Traditionally, we assume that an individual taking
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     ⁸ See article in Town Meeting 14 (44) : 4-5, Town Hall, Inc., New York.



a minority point of view sees truth in an unconventional way and is courageously taking the hazard of testing unpopular positions in open controversy on the merits of the argument.
     Another cause of confusion in evaluating the changing issues in academic freedom is the persistent tendency to confuse issues of academic freedom and issues of civil liberties. In a current report of the American Civil Liberties Union; "academic freedom" is discussed under the general heading of "Civil Liberties of Teachers and Students."⁹  It would seem wiser to preserve some of our traditional verbal distinctions. The term "civil liberties" describe freedoms which are enumerated in constitutional provisions which assure the citizen against governmental limitations or restrictions. There is no "civil liberty" that assures any Tom, Dick or Harry the right to speak or teach in any college or university, or any magazine or newspaper the right to be included in the library of a public high school, and "academic freedom" does not—in any historic fomulation by academically responsible bodies—assure any group of students the right to organize on any campus, or any individual the right to teach. on that campus irrespective of his character, competence, or philosophical views. In fact, some of our most significant "freedoms" in the American type of pluralist and associational society are anchored in the right of a college or church to deny to any individual the right to speak or teach under its auspices, and it is a characteristic tendency of modern totalitarians to prescribe uniform behaviors in that respect for all institutions, and to confuse such uniformity with freedom..
     The essential principle was stated in characteristically crisp style by Justice Holmes in an early Massachusetts decision: "The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman." In other words, a man has a constitutional right—a "civil liberty" to speak freely as a citizen. Under our present law he can "talk" communism, fascism, etc., but there is no "civil liberty" that requires the Department of State or a given college or university to hire him.  In spite of the clarity of our law and tradition in this field, we find an intelligent and informed student of our freedom such as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., discussing the University of Washington dismissals in the light of the "clear and present danger" rule of the Supreme Court in civil liberties cases, leading to the final conclusion that the "monstrous fallacy" of declaring membership on the faculty incompatible with membership in the Communist Party "puts the whole Washington proceedings wholly outside our civil liberties tradition." The statement is essentially irresponsible and uninformed. We do not anticipate or prejudge the final outcome of professional deliberation or mediation upon the University of Washington cases if we recognize that there are some basic issues here that deserve more sympathetic" and careful attention from a friend of freedom. No one at the University of Washington ever claimed that the decision had anything to do with civil liberties. They did claim that members of the Communist Party have no right to protection under the spurious claim of academic freedom for those who are pledged to destroy it. The argument should be met as it was stated, and not evaded by a reference to the rights of citizens as they confront their government. The intellectual confusion is deepened with Schlesinger's citation of Brandeis' statement that "only an emergency can justify epression."¹⁰ The Brandeis quotation is, of course, from another Supreme Court decision in a civil liberties case. These references to Holmes and Brandeis are useful reminders of the fact that freedom never has been an absolute. They are, how-ever, relevant to the rights of men as citizens and not as-scholars. - They have nothing whatsoever to do with a university's right to say that it deems membership in a political group which assumes the right to dictate in scholarly matters incompatible with the responsibilities of free scholarship, or in the words of the President of the University of Washington that "academic freedom means not alone the right to hold unpopular views but the obligation to hold views which, shaped by the accumulation of tested evidence, are subject to no dictation from outside the mind of the holder." ¹¹
     Most of the confusion in our current controversy about academic freedom and civil liberties is embodied in the refusal to admit that today there is no agreement, in fact, on the moral basis of our civil liberties. Justice Douglas
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     ⁹ Civil liberties of teachers and students, academic freedom, a statement of principles, American Civil Liberties Union, New York, 1949.
     ¹⁰ Schlesinger, op. cit. See also Merritt E..Benson's reply in the same journal for September 10, 1949.
     ¹¹ Communism and academic freedom, 19.


of the United States Supreme Court recently made an eloquent plea for the maintenance of civil liberties; in which he made the classical assumption that unpopular minorities consisted of people like John Peter Altgeld, who "do not stand mute when their conscience urges them to speak out." The trouble with our contemporary so-called subversives is, of course, precisely that they consider the truth "a bourgeois prejudice," that they will—as Lenin taught—"use any ruse, cunning, unlawful method, evasion, and concealment of the truth" to help to hasten the triumph of their cause, and that they frequently stand mute when their particular type of conscience orders them to follow the party line rather than the dictates of the truth in the light of the argument and the evidence.
     The same classic assumptions can be found in Justice Holmes' statement in his dissent in the Abrams case that "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market." The phrase "competition of the market," of course, calls for open avowal of the minority point of view, and the phrase, "test of truth," again implies a willingness to follow the evidence and the argument wherever it may lead. The real problem with the modern Stalinist is concealment of purpose, camouflaged vocabulary, and avoidance of competition. Holmes' reliance upon the competition of the market as a test of truth is simply irrelevant in dealing with modern communists. Most of us have no fear at all of the test of truth in an open argument with Stalinists who believe in neither truth nor competition, but we are deeply concerned with the consequences of protecting liars and conspirators with academic freedom and civil liberties which were intended as a safeguard for minority points of view that were morally dedicated to a search for truth in an open comparison and competition with conflicting ideas.
     Recently, the Committee on Academic Freedom of the American Civil Liberties Union took action on student activities in our colleges which is almost a textbook example of the chaotic emotionalism that now passes for thought in this area. The resolution had two parts. In the first, they laid down the principle that any organization for political action, including the Communist Party, should be allowed to organize on any campus. The second part of the action went on to say that if such a group, after being chartered, was proved to have lied about its affiliations, such findings should be published on the campus, but they should not be ground for suspension or any other disciplinary action. Now it is a clearly established principle that an educational institution is supposed to draw some disciplinary conclusion if a student group lies or disregards campus rules, but here the conclusion clearly means that communists have the right to lie without incurring the usual penalties for such behavior. In other words, the American Civil Liberties Union is trying to impose a uniform rule of moral indifference to untruthfulness on educational institutions. The conventional answer to such a statement mimics Pilate's "What is truth?" It is admittedly rather hard to determine "the" truth in many cases. A college, however, need not inquire as to the truth of, say, the program of the American Youth for Democracy or the American Student Union, to mention two well-known "transmission belts" for students. When a college charters a Newman Club, it does not pass on the "truth" of Catholic Christianity any more than it certifies to the truth of the Republican or Democratic platforms when the college charters a Republican or Democratic student group. But it is easy to determine whether the organizers of such groups tell the truth about their sponsors, about their finances, about their national affiliations, and when they lie about these things it may be perfectly defensible liberal doctrine and sound educational procedure to say that they should not be chartered. To say that the college should be morally indifferent to such untruthfulness is to promote the disintegration of free society, which the American Civil Liberties Union is presumably organized to defend^{12
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        12} American Civil Liberties Union excludes members of the Communist Party from its own Council because it has discovered that sincere defense of civil liberties cannot be expected from men and women who do not themselves believe in them. The organization defends the right of communists to a place on the faculty of educational institutions (concerned with academic freedom) since in its judgment membership in the Communist Party has "nothing to do with professional fitness" although in the Union's own judgment such membership disqualifies them from participation in the defense of civil liberties. Here, again, the facts seem to be the issue because Mr. Roger Baldwin, the Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, does not regard a teacher's membership in the Communist Party as an "association" which might "affect" his teaching. Why assume that people who cannot be trusted in the defense of civil liberties are fit to serve on the faculties of free colleges and universities even if they define truth as that which serves the interests of one party and one class? (See Town Meeting 14 (44) : 7.)


     Let us examine another specific case in which all the data are a matter of record. In a recent Albany decision of the Acting Commissioner of Education, the Board of Higher Education of the City of New York was ordered to reinstate with back pay a teacher who had been dismissed after full and open trial by a unanimous Board under the statutory charge of "conduct unbecoming a teacher." The Commissioner based his decision on the argument that membership in the Communist Party was not a ground for dismissal. The ruling missed the entire point in the case because the Board of Higher Education ruling on the principle in April of 1941—a ruling to which the Acting Commissioner refers but which he does not quote—stated explicitly that it was the Board's intention "to adhere to its established policy not to discharge any member of its staffs merely because of membership in a political organization." The formal legal charges in the case made it very plain that the teacher was dismissed because credible witnesses established to the Board's satisfaction that the individual in question was a liar in an educational investigation conducted under the auspices of the State Legislature, which is the ultimate authority in control of public education, and untruthfulness is still—until further totalitarian revision of our professional standards—"conduct unbecoming a teacher," as defined in the law. It so happens that the untruthfulness was established in connection with the individual's presence at a Communist Party meeting. If the untruthfulness had been established in connection with his attendance of a service in a Catholic Church, it would still be untruthfulness and not proof that he had been dismissed because he attended a meeting under religious auspices.
     The issue here was: Should teachers be truthful? The Albany ruling seems to mean that we have amended the Bill of Rights to say that whereas all other citizens will be punished for perjury, totalitarians will be granted a special exemption. Can we really expect free institutions to endure under such a perverted conception of the moral basis of our liberties? It may be very well to say as a matter of principle that our freedoms should be extended to anyone, even to a citizen of totalitarian political sympathies if all other. standards of moral and civic decency are observed, but the sober fact of the matter is that anyone who has embraced a totalitarian party line has also automatically adopted a form of human conduct which is itself—by definition—subversive of the standards of a free society dedicated to truth. It is never a matter merely of unconventional political belief. It is always as an unavoidable byproduct of the party discipline accepted by members of such groups, a matter of conduct and action subversive of the moral basis of free society. I find myself in complete accord with the New School for Social Research which has a bylaw stating that "no member of the faculty may be a member of any political party or group which presumes to dictate in matters of science or scientific opinion." Such a policy seems to me a courageous and realistic translation in twentieth-century terms of the essential content of the classical ideal of academic freedom, which is morally rooted in the acceptance of the ideal of truth, as the evidence and your conscience may teach you to see it, and not as a party or ideological discipline may force you to twist it.
     It is quite unnecessary—and futile—to attempt to remedy the situation created in public education in New York State by the recent Albany ruling to which I referred by new legislation forbidding the employment of communists or other totalitarians. Such legislation may or may not be wise or desirable, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the principles involved in the Albany ruling, or in the underlying decision of the Board of Higher Education. The Acting Commissioner in Albany referred to the political rights of communists, to the defendant's service in the armed forces, and even to the Bridges case, which—like the flowers that bloom in the spring—had nothing to do with the case. In passing he referred to the detailed testimony concerning the truthfulness of the defendant which was presented by witnesses whose credibility was repeatedly tested and accepted by the Board of Higher Education (as well as by a Legislative Committee designated by both houses of the State Legislature), and without any further investigation or examination of the quality of this testimony—which he did not hear—he merely stated that the defendant denied that he was present at the meetings described by the other witnesses, that he (the Acting Commissioner) was not convinced that he was present on these occasions, and continued his essentially irrelevant dissertation on civic rights. What we need in this specific instance is a vigorous reminder to our public administrators that unconventional ideological belief is no excuse for lying and perjury. In other words—incredible as it may sound—we need to make it clear that a communist can be dismissed for the same type of "conduct unbecoming a teacher" which would lead to the dismissal of a teacher who happened to be a Democrat or Republican.  If the


present ruling were allowed to stand, it would lead to a situation in which public administrators would have to insist on lower standards of integrity and decency for communists than for all other citizens, and in which—as a consequence—any type of misconduct would become acceptable if the person in question claimed immunity as a communist from the customary standards of professional honesty and conduct. This is not a denial of the constitutional rights of communists, but the exact opposite, to wit, a demand that they should have the same rights—and nothing more.
     Every case involving concealed party membership with its evasive and devious techniques arouses a storm of protest identifying the "martyrs of freedom" with all the classical cases of the history of freedom. Thus Helen M. Lynd speaks of the dismissal of the teachers at the University of Washington as "a threat to every teacher who values scholarship and responsible teaching above conformity" although the facts in the ease illustrate complete conformity with the intellectual dictates of a totalitarian political group. Max Lerner speaks of the "canker of terror" that we have placed in the hearts of a "potential Galileo or Darwin, a Jefferson or Einstein" because we have "placed political limits on teachers" when the facts, of course, are that the University of Washington insisted on a clarification of a scholar's responsibility for independent judgment in the face of an effort to discipline scholarship in the service of a totalitarian society.¹³ Similar confusion concerning the basic issues and principles is characteristic of every current issue of this type in academic or in trade-union circles.
     The cry of academic freedom was of course heard in connection with every stage of the Rapp-Coudert investigation although it was professionally encouraging to note that the American Association of University Professors which had large chapters in the colleges that were involved never entered the case. Committees of fellow travelers idealized the "victims of the repression of intellectual freedom" as "winter soldiers," as idealists who sacrificed their careers to the truth even if it should be unpopular, and comparisons were made with famous incidents in the repression of minority opinion in the past. If we take a glance back at such incidents as the episode involving the sociologist Ross at Stanford, the economists Nearing and Patten at Pennsylvania, and Robert M. Lovett in the disgraceful Walgreen episode at Chicago, we find in each and every case a man of courage who—whatever we may think of the nature of his thought—had the honesty of conviction to assert his views publicly and to take personal responsibility for his utterances. None of these characteristics emerged in any of the Rapp-Coudert cases.
     Since the facts are almost an exact parallel of those that are now emerging elsewhere, and it seems to be part of the therapy of freedom to pass through a set series of stages of illusion and disabusement, there may be some point in a reference to a student performance of James Thurber's well-known play, The Male Animal, which I attended in the midst of the Rapp-Coudert investigation. Some parts of the audience apparently read a parallel to the current investigation into the play, although even the most superficial acquaintance with the facts would, of course, have made it evident that the cases were almost exact opposites. In the play the young professor got into difficulty with his college authorities because he intended to read to his class from Vanzetti's letter written while in prison awaiting the death penalty. The young scholar, stunned by the challenge to his integrity as a teacher, not only did not lie about the matter but carried his convictions in an above-board, direct, and even provocative manner to members of the board of trustees of his college.
     In the play: courage, honesty of conviction, almost reckless willingness to take the responsibility for an unconventional point of view. In the Rapp-Coudert cases: denial of unorthodox conduct and thought, cowardice, perjury, and complete refusal to take the responsibility for one's actions.
     Personally, I had almost been hopeful that some man or woman of courage would emerge in the Rapp-Coudert hearings who would arise and assert his right as a citizen and as a scholar to a communist point of view. It might be argued that such conduct would have endangered his position but—in view of the fact that no such cases had arisen so far—that would have to be ironed out in the actual trial hearings and in the inevitable subsequent legal test. Such a case would have received my prayerful consideration and it would probably have been a case in which the accused member of the staff would have received the support of my office. Such cases did not in fact arise. Every single case tried
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     ¹³ The Lynd and Lerner articles can be found in the symposium on Communism and academic freedom cited above.



involved clear defiance of the authority of the Board, perjury, anonymous and scurrilous libel of colleagues, or other conduct clearly unbecoming a .member of the staff. Not a single case was based upon open and frank admission of unorthodox political and social views. Every single case was typical of a party that has enriched our political vocabulary with words like "party line," "fellow traveler," "transmission belt," "innocents front," "party name" and other terms indicative of devious procedures. The reason for, the absence of frank and open admission of unorthodox ideas was undoubtedly the character of the Communist Party which would not permit independent thought or action on the part of its members.. They must, by definition, follow the party line, that is to say, they must resign themselves to being intellectual and moral "yes men," and they therefore are almost inevitably involved in conduct unbecoming a member of a college faculty, because their party has no use for members who respect truth for its own sake and who would pursue it even when it conflicted with the day-to-day fluctuations in the instructions from headquarters. In other words: the totalitarian character of the Communist Party organization (or of Fascist organization, if such cases should arise) makes it highly improbable that a case will arise where a member of the staff will be accused merely of membership in the party. Inevitably—because of the character of these antidemocratic groups—such membership will involve the individual concerned in other activities which by themselves are clearly conduct unbecoming a member of a college or university staff.
     It is no answer to say that we must overlook moral niceties in the evaluation of the lunatic fringe on the left because of the nature of the emergency or because of the hysteria which characterizes some of the lunatic fringe on the right.
     Clearly, there are some thoroughly absurd—and even dangerous—things being said by those who, "throwing the baby out with the bathwater," would save the country from totalitarianism by suspending the Bill of Rights. Some months ago, one of my colleagues at Brooklyn College invited Mr. J. Parnell Thomas, then Chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to participate in a college radio program on the topic, "Who and What Is Un-American?" Mr. Thomas said that he didn't like the subject, that it was indecent and shameful for a college to discuss such a subject, that words like American and un-American did not require definition because everybody knew what they meant, that we didn't have the right to discuss it, and when my colleague urged that the Bill of Rights gave us the privilege of discussing any subject as long as it wasn't obscene, Mr. Thomas replied that he didn't care about the Bill of Rights. Most of us are quite ready to grant that a tired public man may sometimes be harassed into the use of careless language, but we may still be profoundly disturbed about a gentleman assigned to the task of applying the yardstick of true Americanism to the conduct and behavior of his fellow citizens, who regards the discussion of his yardstick as shameful or indecent. In fact, in my judgment—and, I feel happily certain, in the judgment of the overwhelming majority of my fellow citizens—such a statement is a perfect example of un-American activity. The fact that there are some folks who abuse their freedoms—of whose conduct we may disapprove as firmly as any one in the Congress—does not change our point of view. It is quite possible to believe that there is a legitimate place for a Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities, and to regret that its present personnel and procedures are frequently amateurish, ignorant, and lacking in the qualities that would make its work fruitful.
     We are in fact in a period in which totalitarian and conspiratorial groups are using academic freedom and civil liberties as a cloak to cover moral indecency totally subversive of the ideals of liberty and truth, while some of the critics of these groups are themselves utterly ignorant of the nature of the. institutions they presume to defend. While the fringes grow and are increasingly irresponsible, it is time to strengthen the center by a vigorous reexamination of our basic concepts in the light of current experience.
     We can all agree with President Conant's recent statement that panic may lead government to submit teachers to a disastrous interference with freedom of teaching and thought. In a free society we need to preserve the process of arriving at reasoned convictions which emerge from diversity of opinions, honestly expressed and freely argued. There are—as Whitehead has said—in every generation those who must carry the cross uphill, and there suffer for the next generation. Whitehead did not say that they could do that while they pretended that the cross was an umbrella, or the painful climb upward a pleasant descent into the valley. There is something obscene in. attempts to justify the misconduct of a conspiratorial group of perjurers and liars by references to

John Peter Altgeld—or even to Socrates. Socrates—and Altgeld—took before the whole world the full consequences of their own passionate devotion to the truth. These are sacred things to a free society, and they do not mean that liars should be protected against the penalty for untruthfulness, or that conspiratorial and anonymous libel of colleagues should be tolerated in the name of the secular saints of liberty and reason.


     The second cause of changing issues in academic freedom, that is to say, the impact on scholarly activity of federal security regulations, has not received attention in public or academic discussion corresponding to the significance of the restraints that have been imposed on free science ostensibly in defense of free society. We do not have to search far for the reasons. "Security regulations" are in their nature not publicized and individuals who experience their administrative application are themselves rarely in a good position to discuss them. Even informed opinion is rarely aware of the nature of the cultural conditions in which free science has prospered in the past, and the restraints imposed on scientists are accompanied by such a vast expansion of financial aid that a critical evaluation of administrative policies seems to run contrary to the patent facts of public support.
     Science has been—and will continue to be—a major factor in the defense of an open society. There is today an enormous public interest in the physical and biological sciences. It expresses itself in public appropriations that may even be in excess of the research and creative potentialities that are immediately available. It springs from admiration of the role played by science in World War II, and from concern about the role science may play in a possible World War III. It is part and parcel of the fear of sabotage and espionage, and it expresses itself in the elaboration and enforcement of a variety of "security" provisions. Some of these provisions or procedures attract public attention, such as the stories in the New York Herald Tribune about the scientist whose "loyalty" was questioned because his landlord found a copy of The New Masses in the family garbage (which could happen even to a rabid "red baiter" with some slight concern for documentation), or his colleague who was deemed unfit for national service because he had "a relative who was married to a communist" (which could happen in the most patriotic family). Others do not attract public attention, but their experience is part of the atmosphere or climate of opinion in which scientists work. In the present Cold War, concern about sabotage and espionage is certainly legitimate. Concern about procedures designed to protect the national interest in science that may "throw the baby out with the bathwater" is equally legitimate—and, in my judgment, vastly more urgent.
     We live in an age of fear and propaganda. Some fifteen years ago a great President reminded us that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Today we live in a climate of opinion in which the drive for security—born of fear and propaganda—has become almost hysterical, and in which we forget that we have just come victoriously out of a war with totalitarianism because a free society can mobilize resources that have been destroyed in closed societies by totalitarian practice.
     Fear could lead an open society like our own to destroy its most precious assets in a struggle with a closed society of the Nazi or Soviet type. This is not beautiful theory or wishful thinking, but the very essence of our own experience in the recent war. The Germans were engaged in atomic research, and German science was no negligible competitor. Atomic research happens to be in a highly theoretical field in which Americans have not normally been interested in the past because of our drive to applied science and technology. But our doors and windows were wide open rather than closed. In accordance with the principles of an open society, we took men and ideas from all over the world, and as ideas from Italy, Hungary, France, Scandinavia, and even Germany played into the customary open and aboveboard process of scientific interchange and reciprocal criticism and enrichment, we ended up with the ideas and the technical execution before the other side did. We did not achieve leadership because we observed rigorous security regulations. The opposite is true. We led because we followed the true principles of an open society and encouraged quite consciously an open process of exchange of ideas. Most of the ideas came from abroad, and many of the men were citizens of other countries or even refugees from our own enemies in the war. Security was imposed in the final stages during

the war, but we won our leadership because we followed the principles of free society and free science—and our enemies lost because essential men and vital ideas did not get a full chance to play into their own research programs. S. A. Goudsmit, an American physicist who was officially assigned to the study of the scientific war effort in Germany, has summarized his conclusion as follows
     "Too many of us still assume that totalitarianism gets things done where democracy only fumbles along, and that certainly in those branches of science contributing directly to the war effort the Nazis were able to cut all corners and proceed with ruthless and matchless efficiency. Nothing could be further from the truth. * * * The failure of German nuclear physics can in large measure be attributed to the totalitarian climate in which it lived. There are lessons we can all learn from that failure.”14
     It is vitally urgent to make no mistakes about these matters now. From my own observation of the security regulations now in effect, I doubt whether we are getting the benefit of the strength of our own position. It is one thing to mobilize scientists in wartime when every one is ready to give patriotic service. It is quite another thing to impose controls in peacetime on a professional group which has a tradition of achievement that calls for the exact opposite. The details of these controls and a more extensive analysis of their full impact on intellectual freedom can be confidently left to the authors of other papers in this program. Their impact on academic freedom is sharp—both in teaching and in research.
     Modern wars are won by "big" industry, backed by "big" laboratories and "big" science. No one who reads James P. Baxter's official history of the role of science in our war effort—Scientists against Time16—can fail to be aware of the crucial importance of the relationship, or to overlook the extent to which it was the "open" and competitive character of our scientific life that contributed vital ideas from all over the world. I have already stressed the international interplay of men and ideas that made the atomic bomb possible. Perhaps I should not forget the vital role of Alexander Sachs' intellectual salesmanship in persuading President Roosevelt that a gamble of several hundred million dollars might be rewarding—the fact that an economist for a New York banking firm could know as much as he did of recent scientific developments is itself due to the climate of opinion of a free and open society which lends itself to such relational cross-fertilization in scholarship, industrial applications, and public service.
     The record of our scientists in the war effort is vaguely appreciated by the general public. There is, however, a dangerous tendency to relate scientific activity almost wholly to its military usefulness and there is little understanding of the type of cultural conditions in which science flourishes, and almost no conception at all of the extent to which a continuous flow of achievement depends upon a constant and open process of interplay of ideas, experiments, and discussion. Those who talk about closing doors and keeping secrets—one Brooklyn patriot has even proposed that we "should keep our borders closed, coming and going, to domestic and foreign professors"—should ask themselves who would have had the key ideas in atomic fission if foreign professors had been kept out of the United States. Do these patriotic obscurantists realize that radar and penicillin came from England, DDT from Switzerland and Germany? What would be achieved by preventing the Library of Congress from publishing its List of Russian Accessions—as seriously proposed by congressional statesmen from the Republican (Taber) as well as Democratic (Rankin) side—except that our scholars and scientists might be kept ignorant of significant Russian contributions?
     Security does not spring from control and regulation. It comes to a free society because the open exchange of new truth and knowledge affords a leader-ship that in a world of incredibly rapid change can spring only from a rate of progress and growth which keeps one step ahead of the "secure" and "regulated" conditions of the police state. Scientific information is like a fish that has been caught—it doesn't improve by efforts to keep it well preserved. We grow in science by casting our nets out anew all the time. Our true security lies in the maintenance of this process of casting out the net again and again, and it does not lie in preserving the "security" of the fish that were caught yesterday. The totalitarians had a theory that a state that was "totally" prepared for war would inevitably conquer the "unprepared" democracies. But the record shows that such early "total" preparation froze the economic and technical structure in a
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     ¹⁴ Goudsmit, S. A., Alsos, The search for the German atom bomb with an examination of the failure of German science, xi, London, Sigma Books, 1947.
     ¹⁵ Boston, Little, Brown and Co., 1947.

stage of development that is inferior to that of a society in which a large section of economic, scientific, and technical life remained open to experiment, exchange, and discussion. It is this same society in which, after mobilization, a vast array of new ideas and practices gave a resilience to an eventual war effort that would not have been available if "total" mobilization had been ordered in an earlier stage of preparedness to provide national "security."
     There are, therefore, two conditions which a free society must meet if it is to maintain the leadership in science which we now enjoy. The first is the preservation of the conditions which have given us that leadership in the first place. The second is the development of a form of administrative organization that will preserve professional incentives and establish working conditions which will insure the quality of public service in scientific work.
     If the government wants to secure the services of the ablest scientific personnel, it must arrange for employment conditions that evoke a creative response on the part of first-rate men. President Conant has recently stressed the fact that ten second-rate men cannot take the place of one first-rate man in this field. If we need the services of the cream of the profession, we need employment conditions that will attract them. When scientists observe the treatment received by men like Lilienthal and Condon in scientifically illiterate congressional committees, they draw certain conclusions as to their own desire to submit to comparable abuse. The congressional assumption that you can overcome such difficulties by appropriating large sums of money for research ignores the fact that high scientific ability cannot be purchased like lard or pig iron, but must work under conditions that evoke a maximum use of creative potentialities.¹⁶
     Ours is not a totalitarian world in which men can be ordered around from trade to trade. We would not think of selecting a Secretary of Agriculture or of Labor who was personally unacceptable to farmers or to organized labor. When will our public men learn that the quality of scientific achievement depends upon the selection of men who can evoke a creative response from professional people? Are we, in a spurious pursuit of security, going to throw the greatest resources of an open society away because we fear the operation of the very principles that have given us leadership?
     In a world of dangerous national and ideological competition, there is no security in provisions that make for secrecy about past achievements. The only security that is worth while lies in the preservation of the conditions that have given us leadership thus far, and those conditions call for open and creative interchange of all the true talent, irrespective of race, creed, or national origin. The way to defend an open society is to keep it open—let's leave the closed doors to folks who believe in them as a matter of principle. The history of free science demonstrates abundantly that those who lock the doors to the laboratories are likely to lock out more than they lock in.


     The third cause of changing issues in academic freedom discussed in this paper, viz. the changing sources of academic financial support, has almost completely escaped public discussion although few questions have been canvassed as comprehensively in academic circles. A college president approaches the topic with due diffidence in a period in which the public demand for higher education presents such shocking contrasts with the volume of its financial support. There are some issues here, however, which affect the core of the tradition of academic freedom, and although the interrelations are often subtle and indirect, a pattern of economic support is developing which affects the quality of academic personnel as well as the direction in which its creative talents are utilized. In a sense this is simply a new form of an old challenge—although it is not generally recognized as such—because the "jurisprudence of academic freedom" abounds with citations of cases in which a donor sought to limit a college's teaching or selection of students or faculty personnel by such stipulations as required the teaching of the "fallacies of socialism" or the "defense of free enterprise," and we are all reasonably familiar with the difficulties inherent in the donors' terms concerning certain types of religious bequests.
     The shrinking bases of private financial support in fees or in endowment—which typically permitted considerable professional discretion in determining the priorities of academic expenditure in teaching as well as in research—and the shift to support by foundations and by a variety of government agencies have
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     ¹⁶ Civil liberties of scientists, Science,177–179, Aug. 10, 1949.

given these issues a new form which creates new hazards to free scholarship: If these dangers are clearly recognized, we shall probably be able to cope with them as effectively as we have in the past dealt with similar subversive characteristics of private support. British experience with the University Grants Committee suggests that a democratic government is quite compatible with a degree of professional autonomy in the expenditure of public funds which would seem almost utopian at the moment in the United States, and my plea at this stage is for intensive study of current practice, including the typical stress on progress through the emulation of the "best existing practice" which has always been such a positive force where freedom and organization are combined in a fruitful and constructive fashion.
     The subtle and indirect forces are far more worthy of study than the more vulgar and direct issues. Practical experience has made us all familiar with the restrictive influences that may arise in economics, biology; or chemistry if a large "dairy" bloc in a legislature seeks to protect itself against the competing claims of oleomargarine or other butter substitutes, and corresponding issues in the freedom of social scientists have left their mark in connection with conflicting pressures on budgetary agencies from -manufacturers' or trade union groups. Those who pay the piper and want to call the tune are clearly visible in such cases, and while the characters in the drama have; changed, most of us can see that the intellectual issues raised by wealthy donors or religious groups in the past (and in the present) are roughly similar to the pressures now exerted by farmers or trade-union groups.
     It is more difficult to see that when government sources—either directly or indirectly—support a very large volume of historical research, paying salaries far in excess of current academic levels, they materially affect academic priorities and prestige, and deflect creative and professional talent into the study of problems and "fields" which hardly express the professional views of historians concerning the relative value and promise of alternative projects which may not command public support. Shifting fiscal trends are therefore compelling some of the best of our creative talent to devote their most fruitful years to work selected by government agencies rather than by scholars themselves, and corresponding hazards ensue as to qualitative standards in the remainder of scholarly activity. It is difficult to persuade an individual scholar who warmly welcomes the handsome increase in his meager academic salary that his case is an illustration of a new and subtle hazard to academic freedom, but the conclusion seems unavoidable that the tendency as a whole has such implications, which are more dangerous precisely because they are not recognized as such in individual cases. We do not have to accept the vulgar Insistence that the government will seek to dictate the conclusions of such fiscally supported research. Evidence on the whole does not bear out such a view, but the selection of problems for creative talent—scarce at the best—precludes the selection of Other "free" projects, and in the long run freedom may be more seriously—and subtly—endangered by selection than by outright censorship or prohibition.
     Similar tendencies are inherent in the second category of perils to academic freedom discussed earlier in this paper. "Defense” related research means the selection of research projects by defense agencies, and it appears to be true that our government has been singularly willing to support basic as well as applied research projects. Here, too, subtle and indirect forces are at work. A handsomely financed federal project leads to the availability of expensive equipment—and the development of human skills and aptitudes—which themselves have an influence on the determination and selection of "free" projects, and the relation of this possibility to the modification of the forces which have been the greatest single strength of free science is clear to any student of the cultural setting in which free science has flourished in the past. In fact, some of the data available to me suggests that federal support of such research has gone so far already that more basic research may be supported today by federal fiscal resources than by all the academic sources in the country added together. Doesn't the data suggest the need for some comprehensive  survey of the facts by an academic group interested in the general direction of academic trends rather than in the specific projects that are at present supported? Isn't it at least possible that some general policies may be stated which would protect the values of free scholarship and supply a framework for the discussion and settlement of specific issues?



     In the social sciences these new fiscal influences exercise a negative rather than a positive influence. It is clear that the vigorous promotion by federal subsidies of research in the physical and biological sciences—and of personnel training programs in those fields—may widen the gap that already threatens the stability of our society between scientific and technical change on the one hand, and the relative inflexibility of the moral, social, and legal framework of society, on the other hand. It is equally clear that more intensive study of techniques of. social adjustment, including the possibility of an imaginative and constructive program in the humanities, might contribute to the possibility of minimum assurance of stability. The various social sciences may have a great deal to contribute in this field but we are politically unprepared for the acceptance of these moral and intellectual possibilities. The same legislators who press for large federal subsidies for additional physical and technical research—thereby contributing to the strength of the causes clearly working towards unbalance—refuse to appropriate funds to study the social and economic by-products of the new developments in the physical sciences. Our legislators find it very hard to distinguish between the study of social change on the one hand, and the advocacy of social change on the other. Any one who has had experience in the legislative process knows how easily social science and collectivist propaganda are confused. It is a large share of the resources supporting the physical and biological sciences is to come from federal sources in the future, academic groups may have a special responsibility to insure that the social and humanistic studies do not shrink to proportions that will themselves constitute a major hazard to the future of free society, and therefore to the "freedom" even of the fiscally more privileged physical scientists.
     This paper has offered a hasty but suggestive survey of some of the most urgent of emerging issues affecting the position of free scholarship in our open society. The treatment has not been "objective" and value judgments have been freely expressed. Free men and women cannot afford to be neutral when the survival of free society itself may be at stake. The defense of freedom will not come from minds that are "so open there's nothing left but a draft." The present struggle for freedom does not call for objectivity but for reasoned prejudice—prejudice in favor of the conditions in which freedom can continue to flourish and to grow. No pretense is made that the issues have been discussed comprehensively and it is hoped that a sharp formulation may stimulate further discussion and inquiry concerning relevant facts and policies.
     Freedom is first of all the availability of choice, and the survival of freedom calls for an intellectual understanding of the choice as well as for the development of a moral will to choose. A free community depends upon the strength and vitality of its shared values. Historically, freedom emerges when internal checks can be substituted for external constraint, and—conversely—freedom is endangered if a free community's shared values are no longer sufficiently vigorous to create the moral cohesion on which the discipline of free men rests. When you pulverize a rock, you have dust. When it rains on dust, you have mud. That—in brief—is the problem of a free community anchored in shared values when it is tested in vital challenge by a totalitarian enemy after it has undergone continuous erosion in a purely analytical period of secularization. That is how a free democracy may become what Walt Whitman called a society of men with hearts of rags and souls of chalk. The only remedy is a resolute breed of men—resolved to think anew the moral conditions of freedom and determined to act on the fruit of their thought.




     Like Humpty-Dumpty, our contemporary fellow travelers use words to mean just what they choose them to mean—neither more nor less.
     The Rapp-Coudert Investigation has revealed a concerted effort on the part of certain groups to protect abuse of public and professional trust by raising a smoke screen about "academic freedom," "red baiting" and "witch hunts."  In the hope of rallying "innocents" to the defense of subversive elements, battle cries of the past are revived without concern for their relevance. An attack upon subversive activity is described as an effort "to abolish the city colleges"—although the city colleges and subversive activity are not yet synonymous, whatever our left-wing friends may say or think.
     The issues are likely to be misunderstood by those who are not familiar with the organization of the city colleges. At Brooklyn College student activities are as nearly self-governing as anywhere in the country. The overwhelming majority of our students are worthy of such confidence. Peace activities of many varieties flourish on the campus. During the past year, the college administration twice suspended regular classes to permit participation in collegewide "peace" programs, after the application for such recognition by the regularly constituted student agencies and the subsequent approval of the Faculty-Student Committee on Student Activities. The American Student Union "demonstrations" which took place late last spring were unauthorized and flagrantly contrary to college regulations which had been formulated by the Faculty-Student Committee of which ASU leaders were participating members.
     The penalties that were administered by the Faculty-Student Committees were justified because of flagrant violation of college regulations that were formulated and administered in a democratic fashion—that is to say, with continuous participation of student representatives.
     It is in the light of these facts that we must evaluate the testimony of a leader of a so-called professional teachers' organization that his group had supported these lawless activities and that his only "regret" lay in the fact that it had not supported them more fully. Crocodile tears about "peace activity," "civil liberties" and "academic freedom" should be judged in the light of this violation of democratic procedures and of professional responsibility.
     Freedom of any sort must mean freedom under law, and not freedom from law. Equality of opportunity implies equality of responsibility. If administrators are to share powers with faculties and students, then the faculties and students must share in the responsibility of the administration as well. In the long run, no social or academic structure can endure in which rights are exercised without a corresponding participation in responsibility. To participate In the formulation and administration of regulations, and simultaneously to promote activities subversive of such procedures, is to promote chaos and to lend support to the thesis that only crude and autocratic patterns can be effective.
     The issue in the New York public schools is not whether a man may be an objective teacher of mathematics in his professional capacity, and a member of the Communist Party in his private life. If this were the issue, a legitimate question as to constitutional rights might arise. It may be an open question whether a man can be a "regular" Communist today without casting a reflection upon his moral integrity or his intellectual competence. It may be urged on the other hand that any relaxation of the rule that his political or religious views are irrelevant, may set precedents that will ultimately exclude other minorities. The attitude of the American Civil Liberties Union with regard to Communist members on its own board, shows that doubts about the wisdom of an absolute position concerning these matters have developed even "left of center." The provision in the constitution of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New School of Social Research, "that no member of the Faculty can be a member of any political group which asserts the right to dictate in matters of science or scientific opinion," indicates that even liberals like Alvin Johnson wish to set up safeguards against totalitarian practice.
     Can we accord democratic privileges to those who do not share democratic values? These are stirring questions that are a matter of deep civic and professional concern to me—and I think I have earned a right to my views in this area. But the issues that have arisen in the Rapp-Coudert Investigation thus far, are not of this variety. The questions here are of a more primitive type: May a teacher continue to function if he lies or perjures himself about his political activity? Are conspiratorial practices by a "fraction" on the staff compatible with democratic procedures and professional trust?
     These issues have been obscured in a battle of slogans, probably quite deliberately. It is sober reality to note that no one thus far admits membership in the Communist Party and that the legitimacy of such membership is therefore, not under discussion. The issue is therefore, not concerned with a noble crusade for minority rights. It is the cruder elementary question of veracity. Either the charges are lies—and that would be serious for those who perjured themselves in making them. Or the charges will be substantiated; and then the question will read: Can teachers be  trusted in a public and professional capacity if they lie and perjure themselves—irrespective of whether they are Republicans, Democrats or Communists?


     I am thankful that the issue can be formulated in this crude manner for it gives a classroom illustration of a fundamental thesis which I have been urging for some time, to wit: The struggle for freedom is fundamentally a moral issue. This is so in the area. of our political and social liberties as well as in connection with the professional privileges associated with freedom of teaching.
     It may be necessary for every generation to restate the elementary truths that govern us in this respect, to meet its own changing vocabulary and to find its own peculiar accent. The central truth about all our so-called "rights" is, of course, the obvious fact that they all presuppose common responsibilities before there can be any question of common rights. There can be no "freedom" for the teacher unless there is first the admitted "responsibility" to seek and teach the truth. If a person. admits he is wearing intellectual or moral blinkers, he is insincere in his quest for truth from the beginning. Or if he thinks truth is just a "bourgeois prejudice" he can obviously not be trusted with freedom, which is morally justifiable only if the responsibility to seek and respect truth is postulated from the beginning.¹
     Our difficulty today lies in these areas of common responsibility—or, if you prefer, common loyalty. Loyalty is frequently confused with a rather narrow spirit of patriotic devotion to the national government and its symbols. It is of course much broader than that. In fact, part of the contemporary difficulty with loyalty lies in its constantly narrowing appeal. We are loyal—or should be in a healthy democratic community—to our family, our neighborhood, our religion, our church, our profession, and so on. The obvious fact about contemporary loyalty is the reduction of opportunities for loyalty that lies in the dwindling role of the family, of religion, and of local and regional appeal. In a national emergency a society with loyalties that are narrowed in this manner will seek its salvation in sudden sharp stress on the loyalties that remain, and there are likely to be overtones of chauvinism in this process.
     Chauvinistic patriotism is of course only a veneer of loyalty. It is likely to be intolerant of free personality and, therefore, ultimately subversive of freedom in general. The remedy is not simple. It certainly does not lie
in oratory or manifestoes about "freedom." It lies rather in the slow, long-run process of rebuilding loyalties of the most diversified sort. Fundamentally, loyalty means the dedication of a person to a cause or purpose. In fact, the whole notion of personality is inconceivable without the notion of purpose. Training the young—or retraining the adult—for loyalty is therefore not a short-run process of routine drill, or superficial observance of patriotic ritual. It means the creation of opportunities for new loyalties or the reinvigoration of old loyalties. It is impossible to force people to be loyal, but it is possible to provide a framework for new shared experiences in discipline and in leadership, to reveal new opportunities for loyalty and to develop examples of various types of loyalty in the arts and through biography and history in general. Broadly speaking, this means a new emphasis in education on the contribution of personality and on the opportunity for dedicated service to a value or ideal.
     We are in a hurry, however, and we are likely to narrow loyalty even further by following the pattern of European developments where the decline of local, professional and moral loyalties was overcome by centralized government and corresponding national patriotism.  This is a substitution of power or force for loyalty in the old rich and diversified sense. It is the substitution of cohesion through discipline, for the social cohesion that is built upon shared values. It may be the easy road to a solution of short-run difficulties in a national emergency, but it intensifies long-run trends inimical to democratic values, and is fundamentally subversive of responsibility and free personality.
     We should keep our eyes on these basic factors as the tension of national and international life increases. We should not forget, however, that the society about us has a legitimate right to expect us to "clean house," when clear abuse of professional trust is established. The incidental encouragement to individuals and groups that are themselves subversive of American values—including the primary value of equality of opportunity as implemented in our public schools—should not deter us from doing our duty as we understand it, if and when abuse is proved on either side.
     Freedom and democracy are best served by a courageous respect for truth. Democratic is as Democratic does. We shall be able to take care of overt
________
     ¹ It is an interesting comment on the respect for "truth" of certain groups that bulletin boards at the College were covered with coats and obscured in other ways to prevent students from reading materials that did not confirm the ASU "literature" on the subject.


enemies of our institutions when the challenge arises in due course. We certainly should not tolerate abuses from one type of enemy of our institutions because an attack upon its vested interests might conceivably encourage adversaries of a different ideological hue. Anything less than a dynamically evenhanded position will weaken our common cause.
     Abuse of integrity would be harmful in any profession, but it is fatal in a vocation that is morally and socially anchored in a professional dedication to truth.




     Now that the Rapp-Coudert investigation seems to be on its way to liquidation, there would seem to be some point in putting on record for the guidance of those in our profession who are sincerely interested in academic freedom, and in the rights of students and teachers, an episode involving the Board of Higher Education and the municipal colleges. The record in this incident throws characteristic light on  the techniques used by some self-constituted defenders of truth and freedom. If this record does stress details, it is precisely the details that will enlighten those who think of the Bill of Rights in abstract terms.
     What follows is actually a case study.
     Dean Dearborn, as National Chairman of the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, recently circulated a document dated September 24, 1941 and entitled "An Appeal for Unity behind Democracy." It was addressed in part to the Board of Higher Education of New York City and was sent to the members of that body with a statement that it had been adopted "by unanimous vote" of the members of his committee, whose names were all given on the first page of the document.   
     I did not make an immediate reply, but took pains to secure the original press statements distributed by the committee as well as copies of the underlying analyses by Professors E. M. Patterson and Harlow Shapley. Upon inquiry from these two gentlemen, I found that their analyses which were widely publicized in this effort to smear the Rapp-Coudert Committee and the Board of Higher Education, were marked "Confidential—not for general distribution." In my judgment, the contents of the committee's release constitutes a reckless,. false, and silly attack upon what in all essentials (regardless of minor errors common to such undertakings) was a common, ordinary, decent attempt on the part of the Board of Higher Education to hold a very small minority of the staffs of the city colleges to the most ordinary standards of conduct normally observed by college teachers everywhere.
     I was not, however, primarily concerned with the content of the committee's document. The public hearings in the Ackley case run to 481 pages, the trial committee report to 26 pages. If Dean Dearborn, Professor Boas, and Mr. M. L Finkelstein were not shocked at the evidence presented in these voluminous documents, I felt sure I would not be able to convince them in a few words of comment. My concern was—and is—with the method that was used to discredit the Board of Higher Education and the City colleges under the protective coloration of the sixty-three names that were released on the first page of the committee document. I was shocked to think that all the men and women listed in the committee's letter to the Board of Higher Education, including such men as Professor Robert A. Millikan of the California Institute of Technology and Dean Carl F. Wittke of Oberlin College, had approved such a document, and I decided to check the truthfulness of Dean Dearborn's statement concerning the unanimity of approval by writing a letter to each and every member involved. In this letter (copies of which can still be had in my office) I analyzed the committee document. I concluded with the following two paragraphs:
     "In my considered judgment this whole incident is a perfect case of a front of ‘innocents’ misled by an inner group that has a special ax to grind. It may even be a case of the unauthorized use of names. I intend to clear this up either way—the Committee will have to clarify its authority to use your names in this matter,, or you will have to accept the full responsibility for the manipulation and distortion of evidence that is clearly involved.
     "I hope that those among you whom I and my colleagues in the city colleges of New York have long looked upon, as scholars and educators of unusual distinction and genuine integrity, will make a reply that will make possible the continuance of our respect and admiration."
     The ensuing correspondence with individual members of the committee was most enlightening. I found that Professor Harlow Shapley, who as an analyst had not even seen the vital exhibits in the trial, and who practically admitted the perjury of the individual involved, was of the opinion that all the members of the committee known to him were "anti-Bolshevist." As an outsider I could only inform him that the founder of the committee, Professor F. Boas, had been a supporter of American Peace Mobilization until the time of the German invasion of Soviet Russia, when he suddenly became a leader of those who are convinced that the war changed its character at that point. Without mention of others—and it would be easy—I also pointed out that the Committee's secretary, Mr. M. I. Finkelstein (until recently a part-time instructor on an hourly basis in the Evening Session of City College) has been definitely identified as a member of the Communist Party in public testimony. Like all the others, he denies such affiliation but the witness in question has stood up very well in cross examination.
     Some of the members apparently felt that my description of the committee in its entirety was composed of Communists or fellow travelers. The term "front of innocents" implies emphatically, of course, that most of the members are "innocent."
     The Committee would be of no use whatsoever from the standpoint of the manipulating minority if the reputations of most of its members were not impeccable in that regard. The committee has always avoided criticism of Soviet totalitarianism in its profuse denunciations of Fascist abuse. Such omissions are, of course, not accidental and they serve the purpose of the insiders, even if most of the signatories are completely unaware of such aims. Perhaps I should say: especially because most of the signatories are unaware of such aims. Thus, the New Times—the Communist Party faction newspaper that was published by New York Times employees—used the omission of Soviet Russia in the "Manifesto on Freedom in Science"—which was the keystone upon which the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom was built—to prove that its signatories did not regard Soviet Russia as comparable to Nazi Germany, where science is "frozen under a dictator" (January 1939). The committee can only serve such purposes if it obviously includes many members who are in no way involved in party associations of less definite types.
     The cry of academic freedom has of course been heard in connection with every stage of the Rapp-Coudert investigation. Committees of fellow travelers have idealized the "victims of the repression of intellectual freedom" as "winter soldiers," as idealists who sacrificed their careers to the truth even if it should be unpopular, and comparisons are made with famous incidents in the repression of minority opinion in the past. If we take a glance back at such incidents as the episode involving the sociologist Ross at Stanford, the economist Nearing and Patten at Pennsylvania, and Robert M. Lovett in the disgraceful Walgreen episode at Chicago, we find in each and every case a man of courage who—whatever we may think of the nature of his thought—had the honesty of conviction to assert his views publicly and to take personal responsibility for his utterances. None of these characteristics have, of course, emerged in any of the Rapp-Coudert cases.
     Recently I attended a student performance of James Thurber's well-known play, "The Male Animal." Some parts of the audience apparently read a parallel to the Rapp-Coudert investigation into the play, although even the most superficial acquaintance with the facts would, of course, make it evident that the cases were almost exactly opposite. In the play the young professor gets into difficulty with his college authorities because he intends to read to his class from Vanzetti's letter, written while in prison awaiting the death penalty. The young scholar, stunned by the challenge to his integrity as a teacher, not only does not lie about the matter but carries his convictions in an above-board, direct, and even provocative manner to members of the board of trustees of his college.
     In the play : courage, honesty of conviction, almost reckless willingness to take the  responsibility for an unconventional viewpoint. In the Rapp-Coudert cases: denial of unorthodox conduct and thought, cowardice, perjury, and complete refusal to take the responsibility for one's actions.
     Personally, I have almost been hoping that some man or woman of courage would emerge in the Rapp-Coudert hearings who would arise and assert his right as a citizen and as a scholar to a communist viewpoint. It may be argued that such conduct would endanger his position but—in view of the fact that no such cases have arisen so far—that would have to be ironed out in the actual


trial hearings and in the inevitable subsequent legal. test. Personally, I can say , that such a case would get my prayerful consideration and—although I cannot state it unqualifiedly until the facts and circumstances are clearly establishedit would probably be a case in which the accused member of the staff would get the support of my office. Such cases have not in fact arisen. Every single case tried thus far involves clear defiance of the authority of the Board, perjury, anonymous and scurrilous libel of colleagues, or other conduct clearly unbecoming a member of the staff. Not a single case is based upon open and frank admission of unorthodox political and social views. Every single case is typical of is a party that has enriched our political vocabulary with words like "party line," "fellow traveler," "transmission belt," "innocents front," "party name" and other terms indicative of devious procedures. The reason for the absence of frank and open admission of unorthodox ideas is undoubtedly the character of the present Communist Party which would not permit independent thought or action on the part of its members. They must, by definition, follow the party line, that is to say, they must resign themselves to being intellectual and moral "yes men," and they therefore are almost inevitably involved in conduct unbecoming a member of a college faculty, because their party has no use for members who respect truth for its own sake and who would pursue it even when it conflicted with the day-to-day fluctuations in the instructions from headquarters. In other words: the totalitarian character of the Communist party organization (or of Fascist organization, if such cases should arise) makes it highly improbable that a case will arise where a member of the staff will be accused merely of membership in the Party. Inevitably—because of the character of these anti-democratic groups—such membership will involve the individual concerned in other activities which by themselves are clearly conduct unbecoming a member of the staff.
     My correspondence finally elicited the crucial information from a member of the committe that the vote of the Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom was not unanimous but that thirty-eight members voted "yes" and twenty-six members did not vote at all. The use of the term "unanimous vote" is now apparently explained as an "error" that occurred in one communication whereas "in all public statements" the words "without dissenting votes" were used. Of course, efforts to poll those members of the Committe who did not originally vote on the appeal for unity, subsequent to the challenge of the use of the phrase "by unanimous vote" are completely and utterly irrelevant. The fact still remains that these members of the Committee had not expressed an opinion at the time their names were used.
     If I should notify a public board that John Doe had falsified justice, it is hardly an adequate remedy to report later on, and privately, that I made an error about the word "falsified." In this case, wide publicity was secured for an attack upon the Board of Higher Education and the New York City colleges entitled "An Appeal for Unity." The basis for the publicity was the letter by the Chairman of the Committeee, Dean Dearborn, to the members of the Board of Higher Education. This letter—the important document in the whole affair—gave the names of all members, and of some former members, and stated that the members of the committee had adopted the enclosed "Appeal for Unity" "by unanimous vote."
     Those of us in the New York picture who are deeply aware of our responsibility in a situation in which certain elements are prepared to call anyone a "red" who does not conform to their conception of orthodoxy, while others apparently try to cover any type of abuse—up to and including anonymous libel and perjury with an appeal to academic freedom and intellectual liberty, were— deeply impressed by the unanimous action of the committee. Here was a document that carried respected and distinguished names, and it said that this statement had been unanimously approved. If it had said: "Thirty-eight of the sixty-three individual names appearing on this statement have approved its contents," we would have glanced at the list, recognizing some of the old familiars in the line up, and then we would have gone on with the day's work. Dean Dearborn's document explicitly stated that it had been approved by every one—and we therefore took it seriously.
     Now the sad truth stands revealed in all its shabby detail. My correspondence reveals that Professor Robert A. Millikan and Dean Carl F. Wittke—not to speak of others—were not even members of the committee at the time the statement was released. Twenty-six of the names used to draw attention to the document were names of individuals who had not approved the statement.



So far the officers of the committee have not apologized for their tactics. So far they have not written to the members of the Board of Higher Education informing them of Dean Dearborn's error and revealing the names of those who are in fact prepared to take responsibility for their attack on the Board and on the city colleges.
     We have no quarrel with anyone's right to a responsible opinion. If Dean Dearborn and his associates believe that the conduct revealed in these hearings is "conduct becoming a teacher," that is their privilege. If they believe that anonymous libel and perjury are a matter of "intellectual freedom," that may be. their privilege. If they believe that analyses of trial conduct and hearings, which overlooked essential exhibits, are a valid basis for the use of terms like "mock trial," that, too, is their own personal responsibility.
     There can be no difference of opinion, however, as to the irresponsible tactics that were employed in this case under the protective coloration of twenty-six names of which the use had not been authorized. At the very least, Dean Dearborn and his associates should issue a public apology for their error—and seek to give it as wide publicity as they gave to the original falsehood which was the basis of the attention this statement attracted in the first place.
     Dean Dearborn ignores all this in his communication to our faculty. The Committee argues as if the issue were the merits of the Ackley case. Insofar as I did touch upon the merits of the Ackley case, it was merely as an approach to my real charge, to wit: that the methods used by Dean Dearborn and the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom were spurious and fundamentally dishonest.



     Just as it is one thing to cry "Fire" in Central Park, and another to do so in a crowded theater, it is one thing to be subversive in a time of ideological peace and national solidarity and another to be subversive in a period of cold war in which the idea of infiltration and ideological camouflage has become a recognized weapon of power politics. Those of us who are concerned to preserve a Bill of Rights America cannot do so effectively by a mere reiteration of old texts. The basic ideas have to be rethought in terms of new facts and circumstances.
     Classically, freedom is always defended as the best method of pursuing the search for truth, in which we assume that the truth of tomorrow may be the heresy of today, and the constructive potentiality of heresy is therefore assumed as well as the agreement that each is searching for the truth whatever our differences may be as to its exact nature. It is vital to recognize that the heart of the argument lies in the moral assumption that all of us are dedicated to the truth wherever our individual conscience and insight may lead us to recognize it. Traditionally, we assume that an individual taking the hazard of testing unpopular positions in open controversy does so on the merits of the argument.
     Most of the confusion in our current controversy about civil rights is embodied hr. the refusal to admit that today there is no such agreement, in fact, on the moral basis of our civil liberties. Justice Douglas, of the United States Supreme Court, recently made an eloquent plea for the maintenance of civil liberties, in which he made the classic assumption that unpopular minorities consisted of people like John Peter Altgelt, who "do not stand mute when their conscience urges them to speak out." The trouble with our contemporary so-called subversives is, of course, precisely that they consider the truth "a bourgeois prejudice," and that they frequently stand mute when their particular type of discipline requires them to follow the party line rather than the dictates of the truth in the light of the argument and the evidence.
     The same classic assumptions can be found in Justice Holmes' famous formulation that "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of .the market." The phrase "competition of the market," of course, calls for open avowal of the minority point of view, and the phrase, "test of truth," again implies a willingness to follow the evidence and the argument wherever it may lead. The real problem with the mod-

ern "subversive" is concealment of purpose, camouflaged vocabulary, and avoidance of competition. Holmes' reliance upon the competition of the marketplace as a test of truth is simply irrelevant under these circumstances. Most of us have no fear at all of the test of truth in an open argument with Stalinists who believe in neither truth nor competition, but we are deeply concerned with the consequences of protecting liars and conspirators with civil liberties which were intended as a safeguard for minority points of view that are morally dedicated to a search for truth in open comparison and competition with conflicting ideas.
     There is a deep-seated and dangerous confusion in our present controversies about "loyalties," "subversives," and "civil liberties,'' and only a vigorous argument clarifying these conceptions in the light of present facts will help us to hammer out working definitions designed to preserve the essentials of a free society.
     Recently the American Civil Liberties Union took action on student activities in our colleges which is almost a textbook example of the chaotic emotionalism that now passes for thought in this area. The ACLU laid down the principle that any organization for political action, including the Communist Party, should be allowed to organize on any campus; although I think it can be discussed whether any totalitarian group whose primary loyalty lies elsewhere should be included in such action, I accept that for the sake of discussion as a typical "civil liberties" point of view. The ACLU went on to say that if such a group, after being chartered, was proven to have lied about its affiliations, such findings should be published on the campus, but they should not be grounds for suspension or any other disciplinary action. Now it is a clearly established principle that an educational institution is supposed to draw some disciplinary conclusion if a student group lies or disregards campus rules, but the Civil Liberties Union is saying that Communists have the right to lie without incurring the usual penalties for such behavior.
     Similarly emotionalism seems to underlie the recent Albany decision of the Acting Commissioner of Education ordering the Board of Higher Education to reinstate with back pay a teacher who had been dismissed after an open trial by a unanimous Board under the statutory charge of "conduct unbecoming a teacher." The Commissioner based his decision in the Thompson case on the argument that membership in the Communist Party is not ground for dismissal. This ruling missed the entire point in the case. The Board of Higher Education, ruling on the principle in April, 1941, stated explicitly that it was the Board's intention "to adhere to its established policy not to discharge any member of its staffs merely because of membership in a political organization." The formal legal charges in this case made it very plain that the teacher was dismissed because credible witnesses established to the Board's satisfaction that the individual in question was a liar in an investigation conducted under the auspices of the State Legislature, and untruthfulness is still—until further totalitarian revision of our professional standards—"conduct unbecoming a teacher," as defined in the law. It so happens that the untruthfulness was established in connection with the individual's relationship to a Communist organization and his attendance at its meetings. If the untruthfulness had been established in connection with his presence at services of the Catholic Church, it would still be untruthfulness and not proof that he had been dismissed because he is a Catholic.
     The issue here was simple: Should teachers be truthful? The Albany ruling seems to mean that we have amended the Bill of Rights to say. that whereas all other citizens will be punished for perjury, totalitarians will be granted a special exemption. Can you really expect free institutions to endure under such a perverted conception of the moral basis of our civil liberties? It may be very well to say as a matter of principle that our freedoms should be extended to any-one, even to a citizen of totalitarian political sympathies if all other standards of moral and civic decency are observed, but the sober fact of the matter is that anyone who has embraced a totalitarian party-line has also automatically adopted a form of human conducts which is itself—by definition—subversive of the standards of a free society dedicated to truth.
     There are some thoroughly absurd, and even dangerous, things being said by those who, "throwing the baby out with the bathwater," would save the country from totalitarianism by suspending the Bill of Rights. Some weeks ago, one of my colleagues at Brooklyn College Invited J. Parnell Thomas, the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to participate in a college radio program on the topic "Who and What is Un-American?"  Representative


Thomas said that he didn't like the subject, that it was indecent and shameful for a college to discuss such a subject, that words like American and un-American did not require definition because everybody knew what they meant, that we didn't have the right to discuss it. When my colleague urged that the Bill of Rights gave us the privilege of discussing any subject as long as it wasn't obscene, Representative Thomas replied that he didn't care about the Bill of Rights. Most of us are quite ready to grant that a tired public man may sometimes be harassed into the use of careless language, but I am profoundly disturbed about a gentleman assigned to the task of applying the yardstick of true Americanism to the conduct and behavior of his fellow-citizens, who regards the discussion of his yardstick as impermissible. In my judgment, and, I feel happily certain, in the judgment of the overwhelming majority of my fellow-citizens, such a statement is an example of un-American activity. If Representative Thomas and his Committee would like a fight about that, I am sure that there are many of us who are sufficiently true to the spirit of our institutions to let him have it, and the fact that there are some folks who abuse these freedoms, of whose conduct we disapprove as firmly as anyone in the Congress, does not change our viewpoint. There is a legitimate place for a Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities, but I regret that its present personnel and procedures are frequently amaturish, ignorant, and lacking in the qualities that would make its work fruitful.
     We are in fact in a period in which conspiratorial groups are using civil liberties as a cloak to cover moral indecency totally subversive of the ideals of liberty and truth, while some of the critics of these groups are themselves utterly ignorant of the nature of the institutions they presume to defend. While the lunatic fringes grow and are increasingly irresponsible, it is time to strengthen the liberal center. The best way to do that is to re-examine our basic liberties in the light of current facts and current abuses. There is very little help in a parrot-like repetition of the old words and phrases. If they are to be a living chart, and not an empty verbal shell covering an alien content, their meaning must be hammered out anew on the anvil of experience.
     It would be futile to attempt to remedy the situation created in public education by the recent Albany ruling in the Thompson case, by new legislation forbidding the employment of Communists or other totalitarians. Such legislation may or may not be wise, but it has nothing to do with the principles involved in the ruling, or in the decision of the Board of Higher Education. The Acting Commissioner in Albany referred to the political rights of Communists, to the defendant's service in the armed forces, and even to the Bridges affair, which—like the flowers that bloom in the spring—had nothing to do with the ease. What we need is a vigorous reminder to our administrators that unconventional ideological belief is no excuse for lying and perjury. If the ruling in this case were allowed to stand, it would lead to a situation in which public administrators would have to insist on lower standards of integrity and decency for Communists than for Republicans or Democrats or other citizens, and in which any type of misconduct would become acceptable if the person in question claimed immunity as a Communist from the customary standards of professional honesty and conduct.
     We can all agree with President Conant's recent statement that panic may lead government to submit teachers to a disastrous interference with freedom of teaching and of thought. In a free society we need to preserve the process of arriving at reasoned convictions which emerge from diversity of opinions, honestly expressed and freely argued. There are in every generation those who must carry the cross uphill, and they suffer for the next generation. There is something obscene in aattempts to justify the misconduct of a conspiratorial group of perjurers and liars by references to John Peter Altgeld—or even to Socrates and Gallileo. Socrates and Altgeld and Gallileo took before the whole world the full consequences of their own passionate devotion to the search for truth. These are sacred things to a free society, and they do not mean that liars should be protected against the penalty for untruthfulness, or that conspiratorial and anonymous libel of colleagues should be tolerated in the name of the secular saints of liberty and reason.
     There is no method more certain to create distrust of the social function of freedom of teaching and of inquiry, than the establishment of the principle that the common standards of moral and professional decency, integrity and truthfulness do not apply when a teacher accepts an unorthodox political faith or

ideology. What is sauce for the Republican or Democratic goose should be sauce for the Communist gander.
     Civil liberties and rights will have become a fit subject for Gilbert and Sullivan when it becomes necessary to argue that the First Amendment did not establish special exemptions for lying and perjury on condition that the defendant embrace a totalitarian ideology.