The Doffed Line

Years after the squabble seemed to have been won, U.S. colleges and universities last week were skirmishing with their old hoodoo, the loyalty oath. Source of the trouble: a paragraph in last summer's $887 million National Defense Education Act, which provides that to qualify for a loan or fellowship, a student must 1) swear allegiance to the U.S., and 2) affirm that he "does not believe in, and is not a member of and does not support any organization that believes in or teaches the overthrow of the U.S. Government by force or violence or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods."

By week's end, six schools--Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Antioch, Princeton, Swarthmore and Reed--had refused to accept money under the act. Other schools are accepting funds but protesting the oaths. Presidents Nathan Pusey of Harvard and A. Whitney Griswold of Yale praised Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Arthur Flemming for criticizing the oaths, and Griswold wrote: "In our eyes, such measures are at best odious symbols, at worst a potential threat to our profession . . . Belief cannot be coerced or compelled." Other institutions whose heads object to the provision: Colby, Bates, Bowdoin, the University of Wisconsin and Atlanta's Emory University.

Particularly irksome to the colleges is the apparent implication that students and professors are more suspect than other groups. Said Carleton's President Laurence M. Gould: "We give $6 billion to the farmers but don't expect any loyalty oath." Said President Courtney Smith of Swarthmore: "Sheer nonsense. You don't start out by saying that you don't trust your students, by asking a 17-year-old freshman to take an oath."

Surprised at the uproar, South Dakota's Republican Senator Karl Mundt, an old schoolteacher himself, said he wrote in the oaths provision because "it would be the height of absurdity to make funds available to Communists or saboteurs under the heading of national defense." He conceded that Communists would not hesitate to take the oath, said that if they did so, at least they would be guilty of breach of contract. In Congress the oaths are gathering enemies. Three bills to repeal them were introduced in the House. And in the Senate, Massachusetts' John Kennedy, who co-sponsored a repeal bill with Pennsylvania's Joseph Clark, called Mundt's anti-Communist mousetrap "an unnecessary, futile gesture toward the memory of an earlier age."

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