Freedom & Lines

Off campus, almost no one had known or cared about the two professors who had been fired at Oregon State College. A few weeks ago President A. L. Strand had simply told them that, after June, their yearly contracts would not be renewed. Since he had given them "timely notice," he saw no reason to explain.

Then anonymous letters began arriving in Portland and Salem newspaper offices. Here was a question of academic freedom, the letters hinted, which reporters should investigate. After that, the rumpus began. By last week, the firing of Chemist Ralph Spitzer and Economist L. R. La Vallee showed signs of becoming as celebrated as the recent dismissals at the University of Washington (TIME, Jan. 31).

At Oregon State, no charges of Communist Party membership had been made. Spitzer, a brilliant, fidgety man of 30, had been an active campaigner for Henry Wallace; his wife, an Oregon State student, was the firebrand of the campus Young Progressives organization. La Vallee, too, was a Wallaceite. Some students thought he was "pretty radical" in his economics classes, but he still taught his subject from standard texts. As for Spitzer, he had stuck pretty close to chemistry.

Thunder on the Left. As the rumpus spread, the protests grew louder. The Young Progressives made most of the noise. Meanwhile, President Strand's stand got support from some members of the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors; the president, they said, was entirely within his rights. Spitzer and La Vallee countered by declaring that they would appeal to the A.A.U.P.: they insisted that they were being fired for their Progressive activities. Finally, Strand's patience snapped.

Last week, in his first official statement, he released a blast at Chemist Spitzer. Spitzer, he said, had recently written a letter to the Chemical and Engineering News protesting the magazine's panning of Soviet Geneticist Trofim Lysenko. Spitzer argued that Lysenko's experiments in genetics, on which Moscow now bases its biological party line (TIME, Sept. 6), and which most of the world's geneticists consider unscientific, had not had a fair examination in the U.S. Then he went on to defend Soviet policy on science and culture in general.

"Dialectical Murder." That was too much for Strand. "Why," he demanded, "should a chemist bother to stir up such a controversy in the field of genetics? I can tell you. It is because he goes right down the party line without any noticeable deviation, and is an active protagonist for it ...

"Many men in Soviet Russia . . . have died in concentration camps, or by other means, because they would not accept the untruths that Dr. Spitzer has chosen to espouse . . . Dialectical materialism! A better name would be dialectical murder . . . Any scientist who has such poor power of discrimination as to choose to support Lysenko's . . . genetics against all the weight of evidence against it is not much of a scientist, or, a priori, has lost the freedom that an instructor or investigator should possess."

President Strand, who had explained nothing about La Vallee, now considered the case closed. Actually, so far as Oregon State was concerned, it might be. All question of the Spitzer and La Vallee cases apart, U.S. citizens could understand the right of a university administrator to fire a teacher for professional incompetence. Did Communist Party membership lead to that kind of incompetence--by imposing a party line where there should be freedom to inquire? That was a big issue in the Washington case. Now, it seemed, U.S. public opinion, which had never decided for sure what academic freedom consisted of, might have to chew on another: Does party-lining without membership in the party destroy that freedom, too?

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