Counterattack

To President Harold Taylor of Sarah Lawrence College at Bronxville, N.Y., the tension was becoming unbearable. Said he, "Symptoms of extreme anxiety have broken out ... Everyone seems jumpy, nervous, suspicious and distrustful of the human intellect . . ." President Taylor was plainly jumpy himself. He was not alone last week.

Drastic measures were being proposed to solve the nation's hottest educational problem--whether Communists and their sympathizers should be barred from U.S. campuses, and if so, by what means. The University of Nebraska had not only barred teachers, but also any textbooks that the Regents might consider subversive. The House Committee on Un-American Activities had called on 107 colleges to send in full lists of their textbooks for investigation. "I suppose this must include the Bible," cracked Wellesley's retiring President Mildred McAfee Horton.

What Do You Believe? Meanwhile, the University of California's Regents suddenly decided to broaden and sharpen its loyalty oath. Henceforth, on pain of dismissal, the university's 4,000 staff members would have to swear that they had never joined, supported, or even believed in any organization that wanted to overthrow the U.S. Government.

Then the Illinois State Legislature's Broyles Commission, which had been investigating both the University of Chicago and Roosevelt College, let go with the loudest blast of all. It called for the expulsion of any student who might refuse to state whether or not he was a Communist, any teacher who would not resign from a Communist or Communist-front organization. It also recommended that colleges which tolerate "subversive" groups on campus should lose their tax exemption.

Were the purgers and cleansers going too far? Some Americans thought so.

Can You Imagine? The University of California faculty wanted no dictating. The Academic Senate of the university's northern section (composed of 700 professors and instructors) refused to accept the Regents' new loyalty oath unless the senate's own representatives were allowed to help revise it. Meanwhile, the University of Connecticut flatly refused to send in any book lists to the Un-American Activities Committee. Heads of other colleges protested. Said President Francis P. Gaines of Washington and Lee University, "Can you imagine a group of erudite Congressmen telling us what books our professors may use [in] literature and social anthropology?"

By week's end, two powerful voices joined the counterattack. "Teachers are being intimidated," said the national Phi Beta Kappa society, "and students are being led to believe that colleges dare no longer engage in the disinterested pursuit of truth." The society warned local chapters to resist "such emotional pressure." Then Harvard University spoke up.

Alumnus Frank B. Ober, a Maryland lawyer, had written to propose that "practical steps" be taken to eliminate "disloyal teachers." By their extracurricular pronouncements, said Ober, such men as Astronomer Harlow Shapley were giving "aid and comfort to Communism." The university's answer: "Harvard is not afraid of freedom . . . Teachers have rights as citizens to speak and write as men of independence . . . There will be no harassment of professors."

Harvard, it appeared, had laid down a distinction for educators to consider. Only a week before, Harvard President James B. Conant had joined other members of the Educational Policies Commission of the National Education Association (TIME, June 20) in a finding that Communist Party members should not be employed as teachers in U.S. schools.

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