What About the Oath?

Do loyalty oaths violate academic freedom?

University faculties throughout the U.S. have been debating this question ever since the regents of the University of California issued their famous "sign or resign" ultimatum to the California faculty last winter (TIME, March 6 et seq.). This week, in a book review* in the New York Sunday Times, a cool and collected sifting of the question came from New York University's Sidney Hook, eminent philosopher and political liberal.

Philosopher Hook gave the regents low marks for imposing the oath in the first place. Moreover, in the course of the controversy, "an overwhelming majority" of the faculty had voted an anti-Communist manifesto of their own, i.e., that Communists, because of their commitments to the party, "are not acceptable as members of the faculty." When that happened, wrote Hook, the regents should have ditched the oath and "left to the faculty the enforcement of its standards of professional ethics." That, he thought, was the real California issue.

But Hook found many opponents of the oath, in their talk of academic freedom, just as much in "incredible confusion" as the regents.

"It is not true," he said, "that the request for an oath is per se a violation of academic freedom. To 98 per cent of the faculty a statement disavowing membership in the Communist Party is like a statement against sin, and 100 per cent have cheerfully taken an oath to support the democratic Constitutions of both the nation and state. It is the height of absurdity to compare [as some of the objectors have done] an oath forswearing membership in a conspiratorial antidemocratic organization with an oath supporting the dictatorship of Hitler or Mussolini . . . Some hysteria-mongers to the contrary notwithstanding, this reviewer knows from personal experience that the faculty of the University of California is as free to teach and reach conclusions in any field of study as any faculty in the country . . .

"It is certainly hard to understand why a convinced non-Communist should make it a matter of absolute and ultimate principle to refuse to affirm he is not a member of the Communist party--needless as the affirmation may be."

*The book: Novelist-Professor George R. Stewart's The Year of the Oath (Doubleday; $2), an account of the California oath from the viewpoint of faculty objectors.

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