Professors at Bay
By DAVID THOMSON Princeton, New Jersey.
UNIVERSITIES on both sides of the Atlantic have just been busy settling down to another academic year, and the preoccupied and harassed expressions, the flurries of handshakes and the confusion of new faces are all very much the same here as in Britain. But this year United States universities, unlike the British, have buzzed with unwonted excitement. The occasion of this excitement had been the great " California crisis." It is by no means a new controversy, for its origins go back as far as January of last year, and it rumbled off and on all last academic year. But it has suddenly, for a variety of reasons, attracted much wider interest, and has assumed the proportions of a major acad- emic crisis which hit the headlines of the Press.
As the universities reassembled last month it becanle known that forty or so of the professors and lecturers at the great University of California had been dismissed by the Regents— the Governing body of the university—for refusing to take an oath that they were not Communists. As a result some forty-eight of that university's normal lecture-courses has suddenly to be cancelled. From some of the greatest univer- sities of the eastern states, such as Princeton and Columbia, came collective expressions of sympathy and support for the faculty at California in their battle with the Regents. The New York Times published a long letter, from Professor Monroe E. Deutsch, who was for forty years at California. In it he pointed out that a bare majority of the twenty-four Regents had, at the end of August, " thrown out of the win- dow " all previous recommendations and agreements designed to end the dispute between themselves and the faculty. When a domestic academic row comes as much into the market- place as this has done, and when even folk as individualistic and as ill-organised as professors show such vehemence and solidarity, issues of some moment are likely to be involved. And indeed they are. Amican opinion this autumn has suddenly wakened up to the fact that in one of its greatest universities the whole cause of academic freedom and integrity is being menaced. - Professors everywhere are at bay, for if this sort of thing can happen in one it could, by implication, begin to happen in others.
What are the issues ? Not one of the dismissed members of the faculty is in fact a Communist, nor has any been accused of being a Communist. The question, in fact, is twofold : whether scholars on the teaching-staff of a univer- sity should be dismissed merely for refusing to sign an oath inserted into their annual contract of employment, even after their case for refusing has been investigated by an agreed procedure and specific recommendations have been made, as a result, that they should be reappointed ; and—more broadly —whether the faculty of a university should have to -submit to so high a degree of control by a body of non-academic Regents.
In the earlier phases of the dispute the details were too technical, confused and—on the surface at least—too insig- nificant for these issues to be well understood outside Cali- fornia. By May, 1949, it was clear that the Regents wanted an anti-Communist oath to be exacted from all the faculty.
From then until last January the faculty became more and more alive to the threat to their independence, and the strength they showed forced the Regents to become more conciliatory.. But after January the Regents grew more and more intransigent, until the alumni association offered to conciliate. Their committee proposed abolition of the separate " loyalty oath " and substitution of a contract in which the signatory would declare that he is not a member of the Communist Party, with a procedure for appeal by those who refused to sign such a contract. The Regents in April accepted these proposals, and the controversy seemed to be subsiding. Of the forty-five non-jurors thirty-nine were recommended for reappointment, and in July last the Regents, by ten to nine votes, reappointed them. Again, the scheme seemed to be working. But in August the Regents reversed this decision by twelve votes to ten, which meant dismissal for any professor who did not either resign or sign by a set date. Thus the whole responsibility for the present storm rests with the majority group of twelve Regents.
The Regents include the Governor of the State of California, Governor Earl Warren, and the President of the University, Robert Gordon Sproul, both of whom have throughout resisted the drive against the faculty. Admiral Nimitz has been mostly absent on other duties, but wired that he would have supported the minority of ten on the last decisive vote.
The leader of the drive on the other side seems to have been John Francis Neylan, an attorney of William Randolph Hearst, who has been one of the large financial benefactors of the university and whose enjoyment of power is no secret. It was Neylan who urged reconsideration of the reappointments in August, and who appears to have engineered this latest coup against the recalcitrant professors. The rest of the twenty-four Regents represent mainly business interests, and it is this fact which lends colour to the charge that the whole affair is essentially a drive of external big-business interests to dominate the dons. , The effects of the latest crisis on the university itself may be momentous, but it is too soon to tell. The result of the prolonged controversy has already been to impede the normal and proper tenor of academic life in California. The faculty is divided within itself between those who saw little harm in the oath and signed, those who signed under sheer economic pressure and fear, those who signed only in order to ".stay and fight it out," those who refused to sign, and those, who quietly sought the earliest chance to resign and find work elsewhere. It seems certain now that, whatever may happen to the forty dismissed members, there will be both a flight of scholars and of students from California, and a reluctance of good men to go there. Among suggestions for breaking the deadlock have been a strike of all the faculty at California, a boycott of Californian degrees by other universities, the offer of posts elsewhere to all the best men at California who wish to leave, and so on. Any of these actions would have damaging effects on Cali- fornia University, which all who have an affection for its traditions are reluctant to inflict. Meanwhile eighteen of those dismissed have taken their case to the courts ; the other professors remain at bay ; and a warning has been issued to all academic persons that something is wrong with a system which destroys academic freedom in the name of anti-Com- munism, and which leads to the dismissal of forty non- Communist university teachers on such palpably flimsy grounds.
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