Reasons

Columbia University's undergraduate newspaper, the Daily Spectator, invited a few distinguished professors to express themselves on a pressing matter of the day: Should the Communist Party be outlawed and should Communist teachers be allowed to teach in U.S. colleges? Last week the Spectator published their answers. None seemed to want to outlaw the party; three out of four were against any categorical ban on teachers. Reasons:

> Poet Mark Van Doren: "The issue should not be what a teacher is or believes, but how he teaches ... A Communist who . . . deliberately twists or distorts the truth ... is a bad teacher and should not be kept in his job; but so is a pragmatist, a Christian Scientist, or a Mohammedan who does the same thing."

>Economist BorisM. Stanfield: "[Communists] must be purged or reformed not by decrees but by the overwhelming force of an awakened citizenry . . . Our faculties must determine after careful scrutiny and in specific cases whether individual candidates or teachers live up to the standards of intellectual freedom and integrity and act accordingly."

> Sociologist Robert S. (Middletown) Lynd: "Until the present year I have held the general position that it is unwise to engage a Catholic or a Communist to teach the social sciences ... I believe that a teacher should not teach with a bit in his teeth controlled by any organization able thereby to control what he teaches and omits from his teaching and with a record of exercising such control . . . Today, anti-communism is actively fostered as a blanket political weapon, and pressure is being brought on educational institutions to dismiss uncritically actual or alleged Communists ... I have accordingly changed my stand, and it now is: No teacher should be refused a position or fired on the basis of his membership in any organization; but hiring or dismissal should be based solely on the basis of his individual competence as a teacher."

> Columbia College Dean Harry J. Carman: "Any person who is a member of the Communist Party is not free to seek or disseminate the truth . .. The end product of the Communist teacher's work is Communist propaganda."

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