The Witnesses

Congressional investigations of U.S. education bulldozed on last week, and U.S. educators, whether they wanted to or not, continued to make headlines. Among them:

Mrs. Hulda McGarvey Flynn, 42, for eight years (1933-41) a teacher of psychology at Mt. Holyoke and Smith, was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee after an FBI counterspy testified that she had once taught at the Communist-run Samuel Adams School in Boston. When Mrs. Flynn refused to say whether or not she had ever been a Communist, the committee asked her about her husband, now a psychologist at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda. Said Mrs. Flynn: "I decline to answer.''

Professor Abraham Glasser, 38, of the Rutgers Law School, was called because FBI reports alleged that as a special attorney in the Department of Justice in 1938, he gave information to three OGPU agents known as "X," "Nikolai Stern" and "Ovakimian." Another Justice Department report cleared him of being a Communist agent, but recommended that he be dismissed for "careless and improper" disclosure of official information. When the committee asked whether he could identify photographs of "X" or "Stern," Glasser refused to answer. About the only thing he would say: he is not now an "actual, official, card-carrying, organizationally connected and integrated" member of the Communist Party.

Physicist Wendell H. Furry, of Harvard, one of last month's most reluctant witnesses, hinted at a change of heart. He requested the committee to grant him a return engagement in April.

President George N. Shuster of Hunter College made another sort of headline: he proposed that Senator McCarthy be investigated. "I would remind you," he told the National Civil Liberties Clearing House in Washington, "that the university has always been a forum in the presence of which the lords of the passing hour are subjected to scrutiny. No doubt the time has come to ask on what meat this our Caesar has fed, and to review his activities with the utmost objectivity, calm and chilly resolution, so that an authoritative report can be made to the people ..."

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