NEAFC 31st Annual Conference.pdf - New England Association of ...

NEW ENGLAND ASSOCIATION OF FIRE C:HIE.t~S
they denounced investigations as assaults on academic freedom. Then, he went on to
talk about his own investigation and~ the investigations condu,cted by Senate Com,
mittees regarding the New York Schools. He said:
"I am not inquiring-into the political beliefs, of teachers, ..but I am inquiring
into their activities in an organization which advocates the violent overthrow of
our government, an organization which gives allegiance to an outside government
rather than our own, which teaches people to hate, and which justifies lying a’s
a means of accomplishing its goal."
The trial examiner in the previous cases made it very clear that the political existence
,of the Communist Party does not give its members a cloak of immunity to practice
un-:American activities.
There is a man who is in a position to know what i’s~ going on, at least in the public
schools .of New York, and his testimony is that other educators he knows are becoming
increasingly alarmed.
Well, of ~course, some educators are, -and some ~tucators are not. Some educators,
such as Dr. Conant, say that it i.s not the duty of a university to investigate its own
faculty. He has no objection to the government, to the Senate or House Committees
conducting investigations of his faculty, but he doesn’t think that the university should~
have to do it. Whereas the President of Dartmouth College, the President of Brown
University, the head of the American Association. of Universities, all take the opposite
viewpoint. They say that it is really none~ of the government:s businessl and that it is
up to the schools themselves to investigate their own faculties.
The President .of Brown recently came out with a statement which attracted relatively
little attention, but it was a very acutely thought-out statement, in which he
said that academic freedom has nothing whatever to do with the relations, of a faculty
member to the United States Government, that academic freedom applies only to the
relations between ~. Prc~fessor, a faculty member, and the Board~ of Overseers, the
President, or whatever is the governing body of his particular school. The Professor
has duties, just as the citizen ha,s, and the cry of academic freedom is so often used
and so often employed to discredit the investigations in this country, that it has gotten.
to the point of incredibility.
They have succeeded in convincing a good part of the world, particularly Great
Britain, that all our schools are in a turmoil, because Senator McCarthy is running
them, when, actually, as Rebeoca West points out, Great Britain has gone through
exactly the same ’sort of investigations in the so-called, Lyndon Report by the Lyndon
Committee, as we have had in this country, and they have gotten rid of disloyal people
in that way.
However, the investigators are really up against a great deal of opposition; it is
put in one word--~McCarthyism. But, of course, long before Senator McCarthy started
any investigations or took part in any, there was Martin Dies, who headed the un-
American Activities Committee, and the same things that are now being said about
Senator McCarthy were ,said about Martin Dies. And, those same things are being
said about Senator Jenner, Senator McCarthy, and Representative Velde, who, incidentally,
is a former F. B. I. agent, and up until the point that he took charge of an
investigating committee, was held to be a reputable citiaen.
So that the so-called McCarthyism ,could be Dies-ism; it could be Jenner-ism; it
even could be American-ism.
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