Monday, Mar. 07, 1949

Violators & Sympathizers

So far, nobody had put the question of Communist professors any more plainly than New York University's Philosopher Sidney Hook. And Hook, a longtime student of Marxism, had found some plain answers, too. In this week's New York Times Magazine he wrote them down.

Could a teacher be "free" if he belonged to a group that dictated what he should think? Certainly not, was Hook's fast answer. Did the Communist Party dictate that way? Said Hook: look at it.

"There are no ... passive members of the Communist Party . . . The statutes of membership define a party member as one who not only 'accepts the party program, attends the regular meetings of the membership branch of his place of work,' but 'who is active in party work.' Inactivity as well as disagreement with the decisions of any party organization . . . are grounds for expulsion." For detail, Hook quoted an official party organ (The Communist, May 1937): "Communist teachers must take advantage of their positions, without exposing themselves, to give their students . . . working-class education." They must be thoroughly grounded in "Marxism-Leninism . . . inject it into their teaching at the least risk of exposure and at the same time conduct struggles around the schools in a truly Bolshevik manner."

The question of whether the party is legal or illegal is beside the educational point, said Hook. The point is that Communist professors are under specific orders to violate academic freedom; when they do, they forfeit the right to enjoy that freedom themselves.

What about professorial fellow travelers and party sympathizers? The problem is more difficult, said Hook, but the solution is simpler. Since such teachers are not under the hard discipline of the party, "they may still be sensitive to the results of honest inquiry. Whatever harm they do is incomparably less than the harm that would result from any attempt to purge them."

Who should decide whether a man is competent to teach?

Hook's answer: his peers. "I am confident that if the execution of the policy were left to university faculties themselves, and not to administrators and trustees who are harried by pressure groups, there would be little ground for complaint. In the last analysis there is no safer repository of the integrity of teaching and scholarship than the dedicated men and women who constitute the faculties of our colleges and universities."

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