A Major Dispute in the ACLU

...IN MANY RESPECTS the most disturbing aspect of "The Burden of Blame" was the degree to which its authors indulged in condemnation of the UFT for what they assumed to be the motives of the Union...

...This contest was itself a direct consequence of a sharp difference of opinion within the NYCLU over the board's decision in the fall of 1968 to forsake its usual posture of political neutrality and plunge into the then-raging New York City school controversy...

...The members of the NYCLU who reject this line of reasoning do so not out of callous indifference to the enormous social injustices existing in American society, but rather in the belief that in the long run the democratic process, for all its imperfections, offers the best hope for endingthose injustices...

...But Glasser apparently is not interested in such details...

...Although Redfield's additional comment about the immaturity and egomania of the present NYCLU staff drew a sharp rejoinder from Executive Director Neier, most of those who protested against "The Burden of Blame" or who offered their resignations received no reply...

...In that case, Neier and the NYCLU quite properly refrained from delving into motives and forthrightly condemned the action of the University for what is was, a prima facie case of the denial of due process...

...I am referring to the summary removal from their teaching duties of a score or more of professors, in December 1965, by St...

...Emanuel Redfield, at one time the NYCLU's general counsel and for 27 years a member of its board, angrily observed: "Once we exerted our energies toward fomenting a climate of civil liberties...

...wholly without political partisanship...

...We are not academics seeking remote judgments made only when we are safely removed from the events...

...In the former, the Civil Liberties Union left it to the American Association of University Professors to write the report...

...On the other side stand those who subscribe with veteran civil libertarian Osmond Fraenkel to the view that COMMENTS AND OPINIONS "to expand our interests in the area of `general welfare' or social reform would deprive us of our unique position as protector of liberty for all and confuse us with the many reform organizations active in the field...

...Herman Benson, a member of the ACLU's Labor-Business Committee who emerged during the ensuing controversy as a leader of the dissident NYCLU group, pointed out that the task of the ACLU is to defend civil liberties, not expose real or alleged hypocrisy...

...John's University...

...The recent board elections were not conclusive...

...The great advantage of such a pro cedure is that it would allow people of radically different opinions on many matters—e.g., those for the UFT, those for Ocean Hill-Brownsville —to continue working together in the ACLU on behalf of civil liberties...

...Aryeh Neier, executive director of the NYCLU, huffily insisted that the position taken (or supposedly taken) by the NYCLU board on community control was "beyond the purview of the ACLU Academic Freedom Committee...

...Swanson of the Niemeyer Commission...

...Now, however, that reputation and the future effectiveness, if not the very survival, of the ACLU is threatened by a basic policy rift...

...In March, for example, in a newspaper interview calculated to demonstrate the viciousness of the New York City school system, he insisted that it was common practice in New York to consign troublesome first-grade pupils to special schools which, he implied, are little better than prisons...

...Then, on October 10, during the time between the second and third of New York's school shutdowns, it published a pamphlet entitled "The Burden of Blame: A Report on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville School Controversy" which purported to disprove the charge of the teachers' union that the rights of the 19 teachers had been violated...

...These diverging opinions at once suggest the depth of division and document its effect, for the statements of Schwartz and Fraenkel were issued this spring in the course of a heatedly contested election for the board of directors of the New York Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU's largest and most influential affiliate...

...In March, at the prompting of Benson and his supporters, spokesmen for the NYCLU board engaged in a public debate with members of the dissident group...

...Quoting Voltaire's "I do not agree with a word you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it," the Monitor observed: "It would be hard to find a more searching test of the genuineness of democratic sentiments than is implicit in this famous dictum...

...It did so as a partisan of school decentralization and community control and, by extension, of the governing board of the experimental Ocean HillBrownsville school district...

...Thus, the main objection to the CLU's intervention on the side of Ocean Hill-Brownsville would be not that it chose the "wrong" side, but that this was an issue it had no business getting involved with at all...

...Although the board incumbents seeking reelection were all returned to office, some of them in their campaign statements at least indicated, as did Osmond Fraenkel, that they were not prepared to abandon the provision of the ACLU constitution which states that the purpose of the organization is "to maintain and advance civil liberties, including the freedoms of association, press, religion, and speech...

...I have heard an old Jewish saying, it's not necessary to dance at all the weddings...

...At this time it is not clear which view will finally prevail...

...It is the sheerest nonsense to suggest that such reports should not be issued in `the middle of the conflict,' " Glasser remarked...

...Nor did the NYCLU attempt to apportion blame...

...This was the school board that had triggered the crisis in the first place by its arbitrary, if not capricious, attempt in May 1969 to oust 19 teachers from their assignments in the district...

...This line of criticism brought forth some revealing comments from Ira Glasser...

...Neier and his associate director Ira Glasser proved equally resistant to accounting for the many factual inaccuracies present in "The Burden of Blame," which they had coauthored...

...The AAUP approached that task COMMENTS AND OPINIONS with its usual scrupulous regard for fairness...

...Professor Oscar Goodman of the Academic Freedom Committee, for example, while acknowledging that there had been "hanky-panky" by the Ocean Hill-Brownsville board, insisted that the overriding issue is "the massive and continuing deprivation of freedom to learn of generation after generation of ghetto children...

...They see the Civil Liberties Union as an organization dedicated to the preservation and extension of democratic principles, a partisan of civil liberties, but not of one side or another in the unending struggle for power over and within the nation's institutions...

...But not all NYCLU members who disagreed with the position taken in the school controversy were prepared to quit the organization...

...The NYCLU claimed that the report of the Niemeyer Commission on experimental school decentralization had provided the main source for the findings of "The Burden of Blame...

...It would be interesting to know whether the directors of the NYCLU, who ultimately must bear responsibility for what is done in their name, share Neier's regret that they passed up the opportunity to judge what news is fit to print...

...IN CONSEQUENCE, several hundred NYCLU members resigned from the organization...

...He noted that anyone who read the Niemeyer Report carefully could not have reached the same conclusions as the NYCLU authors, and that in view of the polemical nature of "The Burden of Blame," it constituted a dangerous precedent for the handling of such situations...

...Demanding to know when "political" had become a dirty word, he went on to suggest at the March meeting that if the CLU refrained from participating in the school controversy as a partisan, it would run the risk of being "remembered as a relic of immense irrelevancy...

...This claim, "The Burden of Blame" contended, was a "myth," "manufactured out of thin air," employed by the United Federation of Teachers as a "smokescreen" to discredit school decentralization and "sabotage" efforts to secure educational equality for New York's disadvantaged Negro and Puerto Rican children...

...He and others cited numerous instances in which the NYCLU had defended the civil liberties of persons whose political motives were plainly antithetic to civil liberties principles...

...He then went on to say that the NYCLU had every intention of affecting events with its report...

...Then, as if to demonstrate that he could not be deterred from this approach to his duties, he said that he suspected what his critics within the Civil Liberties Union "really mean is that it is unusual for NYCLU to attribute base motives to our own kindi...

...In a limited-purpose organization such people work together effectively, while pursuing other and perhaps larger ends elsewhere, through political parties, trade unions, community organizations, etc...

...From the beginning, the NYCLU reaction to the goings-on in Ocean Hill was peculiar...

...The authors of "The Burden of Blame" intimated that the Ocean Hill board was guilty of no more than a technical violation of procedure, attributable to the failure of the central board of education to spell out the bounds of the local board's authority...

...The case that came to mind was strikingly similar to the Ocean Hill case in several respects...

...John's and Ocean Hill cases...

...Herman Benson and several score of others determined to do what they could to persuade the NYCLU board to repudiate "The Burden of Blame" and abandon the turn to political partisanship...

...By a limited-purpose organization I mean one that, in behalf of a particular purpose or class of purposes (e.g., civil liberties, the changing of divorce laws, the ending of the Vietnam war), can bring together people of widely different political and social opinions...

...The cavalier attitude of the NYCLU staff and its board of directors toward the accuracy of NYCLU pronouncements confirmed the suspicions of a number of New York civil libertarians that the present leadership prefers the organization play an active and partisan role on the political scene rather than retain its traditional role as an organization devoted to civil liberties...

...Swanson had pointed to basic errors in "The Burden of Blame...

...Before the Academic Freedom Committee, Glasser brushed aside criticisms relayed to the Committee from Dr...

...The complicated social and economic matters involved should have been left to citizens to work out, either as individuals or through a range of other organizations...

...In a real sense, the internal battle has just begun...

...As long as it is only police and Catholics and others outside the civil liberties family to whom we attribute motives, we don't seem to get any criticism from within the family," Neier added...

...That's where the battlements are, and that's where we should make our loud proclamations...

...There is another significant point to be made in comparing the NYCLU's handling of the St...

...We are trying to affect events...

...Once, he said, the NYCLU starts inquiring into people's motives, it "might as well give up...

...Whether the UFT was being hypocritical or not in focusing attention on the denial of due process, Benson said, should not alter the teachers' right to protection against arbitrary treatment, or relieve the NYCLU of its obligation to exert itself in behalf of the teachers' rights...

...He scorned the suggestion that it should comport itself in such matters as the AAUP did...

...Dissident candidates, those critical of the Neier administration of the CLU, polled approximately 40 percent of the vote, a quite substantial showing for a group organized only a few weeks earlier...

...The proof of all this was the alleged discovery by the staff of the NYCLU that the local board had not attempted to "fire" the teachers, but merely to transfer them out of the district...

...Certainly, if this conduct of the NYCLU does not argue against the politicalization of the ACLU, it clearly indicates that, unless the present trend is reversed, the determination of what is or is not a civil liberties issue is likely to hinge less on legal and constitutional considerations and more on what Elmer Rice would call questions of propriety and morality...

...The fact that members of a national ACLU committee took issue with an affiliate produced something of an organizational crisis...

...FOR NEARLY A HALF CENTURY the American Civil Liberties Union functioned, to quote the late Elmer Rice, as "a nonpolitical, nonpartisan, nonsectarian organization whose sole purpose is the protection and perpetuation of those rights and liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights to every American...

...Instead of troubling to come to grips with these and other serious criticisms of their pamphlet, Neier said his only regret was that COMMENTS AND OPINIONS the pamphlet had not attacked the Council of Supervisory Associations with the same gusto with which it had attacked the United Federation of Teachers and the central board of education, and had not criticized the New York Times for distorted reporting...

...Attorney Stephen Vladeck, a former and longtime NYCLU board member and counsel, put the matter more bluntly...

...It stood foursquare then for the right of teachers to due process, regardless of whether they were tenured, regardless of the institution's assurances that the teachers whose services were being terminated would be paid in full for the unexpired portions of their contracts, regardless of the fact that the University may not have violated any of its own rules, and regardless of indications that a majority of the school's faculty, student body, and alumni approved of the administration's peremptory action...

...There is another basic principle involved, that of the limited-purpose organization...

...When it becomes a partisan of one of the contending forces, it has compromised its role as the defender of the civil rights of its opponents...

...But, on a more serious note, Mr...

...In fact, however, boys are not accepted in the City's "600" schools below the fifth-grade level and girls are not admitted under the age of thirteen...

...In the March debate Reverend Howard Moody, speaking for the NYCLU board, made no effort to disguise the CLU's role in the school situation...

...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Tins APPROACH TOUCHES a sensitive chord in the minds of many liberals...

...Although not ordinarily prone to minimizing due process issues, the NYCLU confined itself at first to the release of a rather tepid press statement affirming support for due process for teachers...

...Despite what appeared to be one of the most flagrant cases of the denial of academic dueprocess in American history, the AAUP afforded all parties the opportunity to reply to charges and published its report only after impartial investigation...

...Clearly, the New York affiliate did not take kindly to the idea...

...Nor did they explain why they touted as a great discovery the information that the 19 teachers had not actually been dismissed outright, when it was pointed out that the New York Times had reported this fact on May 10, 1968...

...As a member of the Academic Freedom Committee observed, the NYCLU report, on its face, was "tendentious and out of keeping with judiciousness...

...Neier and his supporters in the NYCLU responded by insisting that there was nothing unusual in the NYCLU's indulging in speculation about motives...

...In its current drive for new members, the ACLU proudly recalls a laudatory comment which appeared in the Christian Science Monitor...

...And," the Monitor continued, "it would be equally hard to find an organization that subjects itself to this test more often and more willingly than does the American Civil Liberties Union...

...On one side stand those, such as Professor Herman Schwartz, who believe that the time has come for the ACLU to "go beyond traditional civil liberties concerns to work for social and distributive justice" and what is called "a meaningful democratic participation...

...Two months earlier Ira Glasser had candidly admitted that "'The Burden of Blame' was a political pamphlet which attacked a political position of an organization...

...According to a high ACLU official, this marked the first occasion on which such a committee had questioned the activities of an affiliate...

...Glasser's unconcern for the accuracy of what he had to say, so long as what he said had the propagandistic effect intended, has been demonstrated repeatedly...

...Here is hoping the ACLU will continue to meet that test...

...Neier's glib remark served to remind me of a case involving a Catholic institution that does not share the concern for safeguarding academic freedom, a concern fortunately manifest at Manhattan College, a Catholic college at which I teach...

...The fact that at a later stage in the school controversy Neier issued a press release attacking the accuracy of material circulated by the UFT at least suggests that the NYCLU has been rethinking its traditional support of free expression...

...Speaking personally, I found it amusing to learn that, as a Catholic, despite a decade of service on the Academic Freedom Committee, I do not qualify as a member of the civil liberties family...

...Glasser made the rather curious comment that because the Niemeyer Commission was committed to only a certain degree of decentralization, its basic premises and presumably its assessment of the facts had to be different from those of the NYCLU...

...Bert Swanson, Executive Director of the Niemeyer Commission...

...Consequently, Neier said, he saw no point in debating it before that committee...

...By contrast, the NYCLU report was rushed into print without any attempt being made to allow the accused to answer the charge...

...Neier attempted to persuade the members of the Academic Freedom Committee that questioning the motives of the UFT was of a piece with the NYCLU's criticism of Catholic authorities who sought to substitute the language of the First Amendment for the explicit prohibition in the New York State con stitution on aid to parochial schools, and to the NYCLU's criticism of the police for opposing civilian review boards...

...The crux of our argument," one of Benson's supporters wrote, "is that the NYCLU engages in this kind of politics at the risk of its libertarian soul...

...now there is a devotion to a nihilistic attitude toward society...

...By carefully refraining from taking sides on what Rice called "debatable questions of doctrine, dogma, propriety, or morality," the ACLU established an enviable reputation as a politically disinterested but highly effective guardian of "the rights of the individual within the structure of the law," an organization in which people of varying political views could work together for the common end of civil liberties...

...Only a third of the Union's 27,000 members returned their ballots...

...Although both attended a meeting of the Academic Freedom Committee in November, they refused to admit that they had either carelessly or deliberately inverted the sequence of critical developments in the Ocean Hill conflict, despite irrefutable proof that they had...

...The accuracy of the NYCLU pamphlet was immediately challenged, not only by the UFT but also by civil libertarians including members of the national Academic Freedom Committee of the ACLU and by Dr...

...The ultimate outcome of the struggle within the New York affiliate is certain to have an important bearing on the future of the parent organization...

...Moreover, several dissident candidates from NYCLU chapters were elected to the state board...

...The great disadvantage of the Neier course is that it forces partisans of at least one side to regard the CLU as a political opponent and thereby to weaken their attachment to it...

...e., teachers, principals and Board of Education lay and staff members...