The Danger Signals

In Boston last week, the law school of Harvard had to decide what to do with the second-year students who had refused to tell the Jenner subcommittee whether they had ever held a Communist meeting at their homes. Meanwhile. Boston University was debating the case of Professor Maurice Halperin, the former OSS man and Latin American expert who had refused to say whether he had ever known Elizabeth Bentley. In a sense, the fate of these individuals was only a part of a larger problem facing U.S. campuses last week. The big question on U.S. educators' minds: what overall effect are the investigations having on the nation's colleges & universities?

Most top educators seemed to agree that 1) Congress has a right to investigate whatever it pleases, and 2) Communists should be barred from teaching. Nor was anyone in a state of panic. And yet, the climate of the campuses had already begun to change. The investigations, said Dean Milton Muelder of Michigan State College, "have cast a pall, a shadow, creating doubt as to how far scholars can now go in discussing controversial issues."

If it were not for the personalities and methods of the investigators themselves--Velde, Jenner and McCarthy--the shadow might not loom so large. But the nation's teachers feel they have little reason to trust their accusers, and their attitudes towards the investigators range from resentment to contempt. "For the most part," says Harvard's Mark DeWolfe Howe, "a committee ascertains in a closed hearing the facts it needs to know. Following that, it proceeds to conduct an open meeting, with the realization that the people who kept silent will keep silent and suffer public disgrace." They are, adds President Philip Davidson of the University of Louisville, "unnecessary, irresponsible fishing expeditions" that could well destroy public confidence in the whole teaching profession.

Apparently they are beginning to destroy the profession's confidence in itself. For students and teachers alike, the new watchword seems to have become "caution," and, says President Virgil Hancher of the State University of Iowa, "Teachers were never meant to be cautious." To some extent, the caution is still something to joke about ("What, reading Communist literature again?" said a Princeton student, on spotting a classmate with the New Republic). But the jokes are not much more than a veneer. The academic motto for 1953 is fast becoming: "Don't say, don't write, don't go."

On campus after campus, the danger flags are out. At Michigan State, department heads have for the first time been asking their deans how far they should go in expressing their own political opinions. At the University of Pennsylvania, a young instructor said that the only reason he would not join the liberal, non-Communist American Civil Liberties Union was that "I don't want A.C.L.U. membership on my record." When a large Texas campus wanted to fire an incompetent teacher who happened to be a rabid antiCommunist, a professor warned the president that the firing would look like fellow-traveling to outsiders. On one Midwest campus, a professor who gives a course in comparative legal procedures was asked by a guest: "Do you use Vishinsky's Law of the Soviet State?" "I haven't," replied the professor. "Do you intend to use it as part of your course?" "Well, let's put it this way. I haven't used the book." "But wouldn't it be a good, a logical book to use?" Said the professor: "Certainly. But I haven't used it."

At the University of Minnesota, Physiologist Maurice Visscher--an acid critic of superpatriotic pressure groups--tells another sort of tale. A local scientific club recently withdrew an invitation asking him to speak because two refugee scientists on the planning committee blackballed him as a "controversial figure." Visscher rightly guessed their reasons: "I was very much distressed," he wrote them, "to learn . . . that you are so alarmed about your security under the terms of the McCarran . . . act. It is unfortunate that you are in fear of being deported, and I would, of course, do nothing to increase your anxiety . . ."

How significant are these danger signals? No one can accurately say, but some U.S. educators have begun to wonder whether education is not losing its boldness. "I confess," says Robert Bolwell, professor of American literature at George Washington University, "that after finishing a lecture, I sometimes wonder if somebody is going to take it to Papa or to some reporter . . . One lecture could damn anybody." Adds his colleague, B. H. Jarman, professor of education: "Can you imagine a Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution or a Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class coming out today? You're afraid to use your imagination. Of course every one of us pulls his punches. I do."

Established professors are not the only ones pulling their punches. Young scholars, says a once outspoken Texas historian (he now would rather not say anything for quotation under his own name), "examine everything in their writings, not for correctness, but for sentences that might conceivably be twisted around to trap them." Other educators fear that young people will stay out of teaching altogether: "Why should they endure low salaries--and be a target too?"

For students, the situation is just as serious. "When I was an undergraduate 35 years ago," says one California college professor, "I enjoyed one luxury students don't have now--the luxury of making a mistake." Today, adds Dean Barnaby C. Keeney of Brown University, "students are reluctant to take part in liberal discussion. I have seen intelligent, loyal students stay out of organizations that have been healthy. These organizations, or their names, are now abandoned to the radicals." Last week, in the Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Dean Carl W. Ackerman of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, summed up by deploring the passing of "freedom of individual, independent expression of opinion on controversial subjects."

Said Ackerman: "Today the vast majority of teachers in all fields of instruction have learned that promotion and security depend upon conformity to the prevailing community or national concept of devotion 'to the public welfare.' Although a few university administrative officers . . . still publicly proclaim their adherence to the philosophy of 'academic freedom,' there are few teachers today who would venture to test its application . . . There are not many classrooms in the country today where students are advised to be 'drastically independent' . . .

"Before or after graduation, a student must look for a job. He knows all employers now 'investigate' before hiring . . . Students know also that federal agencies investigate . . . They interview professors, public-school teachers, references and follow up leads like prosecuting attorneys. In practice, students are 'tried' secretly without their knowledge and without an opportunity of explaining or defending their records . . . And the appearance of an agent at a newspaper office or elsewhere where the student may have been temporarily employed raises a signal of suspicion . . .

"After 22 years as dean I am now discontinuing my practice of cooperating with the federal, state and police investigating agencies, except on written request and on advice of counsel . . . The practical problem which confronts deans, professors, schoolteachers and students today is 'political freedom' to discuss public affairs in the classrooms or at luncheon or during a 'bull' session without fear that someone may make a record which may be investigated secretly, upon which he may be 'tried' secretly and also be convicted secretly, either by a governmental official or by a prospective employer . . . Silence on controversial subjects during private conversations, as well as in classrooms, is becoming so prevalent that it is dangerous to our liberties."

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