POT AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM:
Seib, Kenneth
a sum amounting to almost $1 million in readiness for the next campaign. An alternative to this kind of election financing already exists, of course: the increasingly prominent role played in...
...He is campaigning-not this time for elective office, but to thwart impeachment proceedings...
...Nonetheless, or perhaps because of this fact, the proposal has heavy opposition, led by Senator James Allen, Democrat of Alabama and Governor Wallace's spokesman in the Senate...
...In their Congressional Districts live a sizable number of die-hard Nixon supporters...
...At Western Reserve University, he was relieved of teaching duties for using Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in a freshman English class...
...Statements taken from him in Washington, however, now make clear what mental gymnastics he went through in Mezey's dismissal...
...candidates could finance their campaigns by public or private funds or any mixture of the two, provided they stayed under the specified ceiling on campaign spending...
...It would be a form of Constitutional revenge against the Senate which House members contend is unjustly endowed with greater prestige and privilege by press, political scientists and the populace at-large...
...a blatant housecleaning of liberals...
...Poets are occupationally transient, and it is not uncommon for writers to take short appointments...
...Ness blamed the English Department, moreover, for not drawing his attention to the letters...
...There is reason to believe that indisputably conservative Republicans on the Judiciary Committee have been persuaded that the Watergate scandals implicate the President-as a minimum, his grossly faulty judgment of human beings because 26 of his associates currently stand indicted, including two former Cabinet members and two former principal assistants of his...
...Or, to avoid upholding of the impeachment articles by the 100-member Senate (57 Democrats, 42 Republicans and 1 Unaffiliated, Byrd of Virginia...
...In November of 1967, Mezey was invited to participate in a campus discussion on the subject of marijuana-a "Panel on Pot...
...In 1960, his first volume, The Lovemaker, won the Lamont Poetry Award from the American Academy of Poets...
...in English from Yale, Ness had been executive vice-president of Hofstra University, vice-president and dean of Long Island University, and academic vice-president of Dickinson College...
...The overall limit for each candidate in the primaries would be $16 million, half private and half public, and the same principle would apply on a lower level to House and Senate primaries...
...There has been recently noted a somewhat more perceptible threatening tone toward the President on the part of both Republicans and Democrats within the House of Representatives and, specifically, within the Judiciary Committee itself...
...Richard Nixon is not known for sharing confidences, so it is not clear whether he is campaigning primarily to avoid articles of impeachment from being brought for approval to the full 435-member House by its 37-member Judiciary Committee (21 Democrats and 16 Republicans...
...Nixon's statements, this is the exact opposite of the truth...
...But what really clinched his decision was a two-hour discussion Ness had with Mezey the day before the termination...
...In point of fact, public financing of campaign spending would make sure that no one owns public officials unless that be said of the people who elected them...
...I don't think it's a big deal, or a status symbol...
...As some saw it, Mezey's track record before coming to Fresno was not enviable...
...KENNETH SEIB (Kenneth Seib is himself a member of the English Department at California State University, Fresno...
...Nixon's decision on milk supports that cost the American public upward of half a billion dollars in one year alone...
...Both his department and the Dean of his school had already recommended retention...
...Public financing of elections, he said, is "taxation without representation...
...He even smoked a pipe...
...the physical removal of a department chairman by armed campus police [Commonweal, April 16, 1971...
...Mezey, Ness recalled, gave an unequivocal "yes...
...No one claims that public financing according to this formula will solve all problems of campaign reform, but it would be a giant step, putting an end to the present strong dependence on groups like the milk producers...
...Mezey continued to publish highly acclaimed books of poetry, including an Oxford edition of his collected poems, and to publish in prestigious journals...
...Yet if they were forgeries, the matter must not have been serious, for Ness did not investigate them...
...All of Ness' "red flags," in fact, appear to be red herrings...
...The flirtation between Ness and the college ended in 1967 in what has become known as The Mezey Case...
...If, for example, only one or two conservative Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, such as Representative Hutchinson, the most senior, and Smith of New York, vote to bring impeachment articles before the full House, then each risks being assaulted by Nixonites back home...
...For Ness to terminate Mezey, he had to negate all the democratic decision-making of the college...
...What should be done instead is prompt enactment of the legislation on the public financing of campaigns which is now deadlocked in the Senate...
...The judge in Mezey's intitial court hearing held that Mezey was legitimately fired for his public statements, thus making it clearly a case involving academic freedom of speech...
...He asked Mezey "point-blank" whether he would be willing to see Fresno State "ground to a halt" to achieve some radical objective...
...If Mezey were allowed to return to his teaching, they claimed, it would "possibly retard" their children...
...A judge of the Fresno Superior Court even wrote to Ness urging him to remove Mezey as "one who is unfit to occupy the teaching profession...
...Mezey took his case to a grievance panel of college faculty, which voted for reinstatement...
...Correspondingly if the Judiciary Committee reports favorably impeachment articles, a similar strategy of numbers could be devised, apparently is being devised, within the full House...
...Ness is the only one of four at that meeting who remembered the answer in that way...
...Thus a Presidential aspirant would have to raise $250,000 in private contributions of $250 or less before receiving the same amount in public funds...
...In February, 1968, Ness sent Mezey a curt dismissal, stating no reasons for termination...
...And Mezey had taught at many places for only short periods...
...it won't hurt you...
...However, even though turning this democracy into a plutocracy might avoid having various industries and special interests own individual Senators or Representatives-or a piece of a President-it really is not much of an improvement...
...Letters of recommendation were addressed simply "To Whom It May Concern" and not directly to the college...
...There was the firing of Black and Chicano professors...
...Ness felt obliged, he said, "to investigate what this meant...
...On the campus, three professors circulated a petition charging Mezey with unprofessional conduct...
...In general elections, there would be no matching principle...
...Ness expressed doubt about the authenticity of the "To Whom It May Concern" letters...
...The third "red flag," Mezey's trarisience, should have been clear to a former English professor...
...An alternative to this kind of election financing already exists, of course: the increasingly prominent role played in politics by wealthy men from Rockefeller down who can afford to finance their own campaigns with little or no outside help...
...Furthermore, Ness looked like a college presidentan erect and confident man who was just the sort to greet wealthy alumni and to speak to Rotary clubs...
...But, to carry out a scenario further, if Hutchinson and Smith each can say to his aroused Nixon constituency back home that other conservative party members on the Committee, such as Representatives McClory and Railsback, both of Illinois, Hogan of Maryland, Dennis of Indiana, Maraziti of New Jersey, etc., also voted in favor of approving impeachment articles, then there has been erected a political shelter within which Hutchinson, Smith and like-minded colleagues may stand...
...His opposition is shared by a bipartisan group in the House, many members of which are reportedly reluctant to see their potential opponents get public financing...
...The numbers cited are not without importance, because both the President and the House have adopted what may be characterized as a "strategy of numbers...
...If you haven't tried it and you don't want to, that's fine too...
...As is so often the case with Mr...
...Thereupon they inform their constituents that "all we did" was to bring something to an indictment "an intermediate action"-against the President and that it is now the Constitutional responsibility of the Senate to act definitively...
...Why was Ness disturbed by Mezey's previous employment record...
...Then, to continue with the scenario, the House may vote overwhelmingly, e.g...
...Frederick W. Ness, whose credentials were impeccable...
...this provision would guarantee that only serious contenders were involved...
...Presidential and Congressional primaries, for example, would be financed by matching grants...
...A Ph.D...
...The whole point of this legislation is to reduce sharply the size and importance of private contributions by supplying a form of public financing as an alternative...
...And, obviously, the President himself hears these ominous notes...
...The Mezey Case was Fresno's Watergate, the first of a series of dishonesties that has left Fresno State where it is today-struggling to get back to where it was six years ago...
...If the ruling is upheld in the higher courts, any professor in the nation could be terminated for a public statement that a college administration deemed "damaging...
...Mezey finally took his grievance to the courts, where it remains today...
...Today the remarks seem harmless, but in 1967 Mezey became Fresno's first choice for lynching...
...But dropping Mezey was no easy task...
...The English Department evaluation that so deeply concerned the president...
...The simple truth of the matter, lying in the jungles of legal complexity that Mezey had wandered, is that he was terminated for his public statements...
...The college's procedures required evaluations and recommendations at all academic levels...
...In 1965, Franklin and Marshall College dismissed him for making anti-Vietnam war statements and for publicly opposing the draft laws...
...2 vacancies...
...Under pressure from a conservative community and a group of radical right-wing faculty, Ness violated all rules of academic governance (which, incidentally, he helped to write) in order to placate them...
...According to Ness, he discovered "red flags" in the information before him...
...Commonweal: 151 But if anything has been retarded in Fresno, it is the growth of academic freedom in institutions like Fresno State...
...Having politically prospered over the years by appearing as the persecuted, misunderstood man of affairs, the President is now doing what he does best in his own distinctive fashion...
...Ness refused to accept the recommendation-again stating no reasons...
...The English Department's evaluation of Mezey was described by Ness as a "serious questioning of a professional dedication to teaching...
...When Fresno State sought its fourth president in the peaceful days of the mid-1960s, it selected Dr...
...What kind of representation was involved in Mr...
...Such a scenario has great appeal to House members, who dislike the lordly Senate...
...House members, burdened with twoyear terms and this year being an election year, they will have thrown the hot issue to the Senate...
...Ness is currently employed in Washington, D.C...
...The President's involvement may even be greater in a manner not made clear by the sequestered testimony and other evidence now in the hands of the staff of the Judiciary Committee and Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski...
...In reality, legislators too heavily dependent for campaign funds on special interests cannot be said to represent their general constituency fairly...
...COMING: Ronald Christ writing on Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal and translating three of his poems...
...187 Republicans...
...Ness received "material" concerning Mezey on the 19th of February, he claimed, ten days before reaching his decision...
...Not majoritarian numbers, simply one-third plus one of the 100 Senators or 34 at most needed to defeat a motion to convict him of one or more articles of impeachment...
...350 to 85, to impeach...
...On his part, the President, too, is playing his version of safety-in-numbers...
...Even after Mezey's lawsuit was filed, the local American Legion attempted to intervene in the trial court...
...At Memphis State University, he was fired by his own department chairman for teaching William Faulkner (presumably 19 April 1974: 150 on the Memphis Index) and for professing the nefarious doctrine of evolution through Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey...
...Politically, however, these conservative Republicans confront a problem...
...i.e., acquit or convict...
...During the discussion, Mezey made the following statement: I'm not urging the use of marijuana...
...All of this turmoil has made conservative Fresno State, if not a household word, at least an occasional news item...
...Letters poured into Ness' office and into the local newspapers (the press clippings alone eventually weighed more than three pounds...
...Robert Mezey was an Assistant Professor of English, and the subject of controversy from the beginning of his appointment...
...The PTA, the North Fresno Rotary Club, the Fresno Council on Juvenile Problems all urged Mezey's immediate dismissal...
...But when asked whether the Department had submitted all letters at the time of Mezey's proposed hiring, Ness replied that it had...
...If the measure to reform campaign spending survives through the Senate and the House, President Nixon threatens to veto it...
...Or to avoid a majority vote for impeachment by the House itself (246 Democrats...
...The administration must surely have looked at it before hiring such a controversial figure...
...In short, as one professor put it, Mezey was "a college public relations officer's nightmare...
...Yet if ever there was a time when such legislation should have a chance, it is now in the wake of Watergate...
...Mezey's "unqualified" desire to bring Fresno State to a halt...
...The dean of Mezey's school called it a most "thorough and responsible investigation...
...The Constitution states that to convict two-thirds of those present and voting, 19 April 1974: 152...
...But Ness' "reconstruction" of events seems puzzling when put alongside other legal evidence...
...But he was also a talented poet...
...000 0 0 0 0 0 0 ®0 0 0 0 THE MEZEY CASE POT AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM In the Byzantine world of higher education in California, Fresno State College (now a California State University) has had more than its share of trouble...
...he resigned from the presidency under the pressure of a later incident) and has never returned to participate in any of Mezey's complicated legalities...
...WASHINGTON REPORT THE SOUND OF FOOTSTEPS The President's formative years were spent in the 1920s, his critics wryly point out, and, therefore, it should be understood, if not excused, why he took his political clues from the Chief Executives of that decade: the morals of Warren Harding the warmth of Calvin Coolidge and the economic touch of Herbert Hoover...
...And it also should have been clear what the college was getting: Mezey was a gadfly to every administrator that had ever hired him...
...If you've tried it and you like it, use it...
...Appearing with Mezey were representatives from the college (a psychologist and one student) and from the community (the district attorney, the public defender, and a captain from the sheriff's office...
...President Nixon to the contrary, it is hard to think of anything wrong with that...
Vol. 100 • April 1974 • No. 7
