ON THE OTHER HAND

...This course is fatal...

...2) the use of falsehood and deceit as normal means of persuasion...

...Communists, except in West Germany, are not disabled by the European universities...

...It fired one of its associate editors on the unsupported—and false—charge that he was subversive...

...I remember the late G. A. Borgese saying, "We believed that the Italian universities would be the last institutions to surrender to Fascism...

...I pointed out," said the fired man, "that the evidence against me was a little flimsy and could easily be answered...

...As chance, and not virtue, has it, I am not now, and never have been, a Communist...

...What business, I say, of my colleagues (or of my superiors) is it how I vote, what party I join, support, or tout outside the classroom...

...II The universities of America have —at least officially—surrendered to Americanism...

...And this is the reason why the AAU has abandoned university principles...

...You would have no allies...

...This despotic claim upon the professor's candor is, since the laws and ordinances protect the community against his acts, nothing but thought control...

...if, for no other reason, because he cannot without being demonstrably incompetent...

...What it obviously refers to is his political views...

...Since the suppression of independent writing and teaching is the prime object of all totalitarianism and an infallible sign of its progress, I hope that the professors of the United States will be at least as distressed by the CoZ/ter's-like behavior of the Association of American Universities...

...It is precisely this conclusion as to the conduct required by these systems that the argument is all about...

...for bad news of which, read on, and weep...

...This would seem to be the time," says the Catholic Commonweal, "for American Catholics to repay The Catholic Worker, in some small way, for what it has given to all of us...

...That this is the fact, the AAU admits...

...In what American factory, store, or even public office, does a man owe his colleagues a statement of his political views...

...The venality of the AAU's statement is attested by its inclusion among those proscribed not merely the professors whose attachment to Communism might pervert their teaching of, say, economics or history—the assumption is, of course, that a professor's attachment to capitalism will not pervert his teaching of those subjects—but also those teachers of, say, mathematics, an absolutely abstract science, which could not, by definition, be perverted by the instructor's attachment to one orx another social doctrine, and which is, by definition, immediately susceptible of analysis for objectivity...

...We know they're deluded...

...To make the crime fit the punishment, Communist indoctrination would have to be illegalized...

...The men whose business is education—the members of the AAUP—have got to fight on two fronts now...

...The American people, unfortunately, are given to understand that the AAU represents the men, since its name sounds as if it might, and the commercial press of America, which also represents the money, does not take the trouble to make the distinction...

...McCarthy's work for him and fire me if it could...

...Like other ordinary men and institutions that scuttle their principles for their lives or even for their money, the AAU is trying to save the universities from the total destruction with which the McCarthys threaten them...

...money to support philosophy and theology has to be stolen from the school lunchroom...

...But the oddity is only apparent...

...Even under the Smith Act, I must be convicted of conspiring to overthrow the government before I can be disabled, and membership in the Communist Party does not yet constitute such conspiracy in itself...

...Their business is, to be sure, how I act under the laws, but that is their business as citizens, not as colleagues or superiors...

...and the natural sciences, whose transcendent function is now the production of unnatural torment, have been inflated to Frankenstein proportions...

...At the same time, and in the same statement, issued under the title, Rights and Responsibilities of Uni~ versifies and Their Faculties, they promulgate anti-Americanism...

...The principle of thought control is accepted, the quarrel with the McCarthys arising from the fine old question, Who is to do it to whom...

...And thus, the very point that is moot the AAU assumes as axiomatic or, at least, demonstrated...

...a dilemma which, however, is avoidable in fact...

...Adherents of a doctrine which embraces deceit as a necessary tool—I have never heard it advocated as desirable in itself—represent in theory an intolerable threat to the foundation of human society, namely, trust...

...It says, in its statement, that a professor owes his colleagues "complete candor...

...But a learned demonstration must be conclusive, and several hundred million people, not every last one of whom is silly, dispute .the conclusion...

...His life belongs to the administration...

...But America is not a weak society, or so, until lately, we had supposed...

...A few months ago I interviewed Prof...

...The business of the AAU is not education but the money involved in education...

...including "capitalist imperialism's" worldwide revolution against, as the Communists view the thing, the toiling masses...

...We are all in its debt...

...Contributions, however small or however large, should be sent to The Catholic Worker, 223 Chrystie Street, New York 2, N. Y. It would be a sad comment on American Catholicism if now in their time of need, the merciful themselves be denied mercy...

...I am a sort of university man, on and off, myself...

...IV This pernicious notion is of the very essence of the one-party state...

...Protestants, Jews, and good red-blooded American agnostics who sing God Bless America owe the Catholic Worker movement, through which God blesses America, just as much as Catholics do...

...I think it is not important, one way or the other, whether Communists, Presbyterians, or Sons and Daughters of I Will Arise teach in the universities...

...Mogens Fog, the eminent neurologist of the University of Copenhagen...

...Excitable people forget that the Communists got 38 per cent of the Czechoslovakian vote before the 1948 coup...

...and it would be my suspect word against a great patriot's, a Budenz's or a Bentley's...

...If, when you and I quarrel, you would only admit at the outset that I am right and you are wrong, there would be no quarrel between us...

...Strong in its faith, rich in its produce, and increasingly equitable in its distribution, the United States was not in any danger of the New Order...

...And it adds: "Since present membership in the Communist Party requires the acceptance of these principles and methods, such membership extinguishes the right to a university position...

...By the American universities they are...

...It's a shame, because they need all their energies for a third, broader front, the increase and dissemination of knowledge...

...The higher learning does not permit its votaries to contain the conclusion in the premise, and, if most Americans are not expected to keep their logic clean, learned men are...

...The shame of the AAU is its unique surrender, unique among free educational systems, in the face of mere hysteria, not, as in Russia, Italy, and Germany, in the face of actual tyranny...

...they simply fire him, thereby starving him to death and visiting upon him the extreme penalty of the law without even giving him his day in court...

...if it were, Communist mathematics professors, whose competence is fairly readily tested, would be exempted...

...No Communist, Fascist, Nazi, or anyone else who wanted to change American society radically has ever been elected to any responsible office in this country, and without a mass base, active or passive, the social order has never yet been overthrown anywhere...

...That's what's known as Russian reasoning, and I am happy to say that the fired man's colleagues are at least, in a memorandum to the management, "distressed that this could happen on a magazine that once had a reputation for independent judgment...

...Prof...

...I am now, and always have been, an anti-Communist...

...And if I invoked the protection of the Fifth Amendment, which was written to protect me from the government, not the government from me, the AAU would do Sen...

...A weak society must, if, like all societies hitherto, it is ultimately concerned with its own preservation at any cost, sacrifice tolerance for self-preservation...

...This practice, so clearly repugnant to the principle of the independent, and, therefore, secret ballot, is prohibited by the Constitutional guarantee to the states of a republican form of government...

...They offer to do their own "policing"—their own anti-American thought control and unconstitutional persecution for resort to the Constitution—in the hope of diverting the McCarthys...

...Is it really worth preserving the universities, for the sake of housing, recreation, and job training, when their abdication of their unique obligation to advance and communicate wisdom leaves them no longer distinguishable from other, less expensive, types of institutions which offer housing, recreation, and job training...

...but they know that we are...

...as, indeed, they haven't...

...But I am an anti-Fascist, too, and if Sen...

...The AAUP specifically attacked the dismissal of professors for invoking the Fifth Amendment...

...Robert A. Taft doesn't see why Communists shouldn't be university professors, and neither do I. And neither do the Europeans...

...In the honest interest of an honest dollar, the AAU is trying to surrender the educational process to the present evil temper of our time and place, reducing the men whose business is education to the condition of peons, denying them their Constitutional rights and their pre-Constitutional responsibility to think for themselves...

...The questions, and the only questions, are competent behavior on the job and lawful behavior on and off it...

...Learned, and especially higher learned, men know that these three vicious principles, which you know and / know are confined to the Communists, are precisely the principles which the Communists for 104 years have ascribed to the bourgeois capitalists, that is, to you and to me...

...The Universities Surrender Sen...

...This is the society —or so we thought—that above all others did not have to be afraid of the lies of revolutionaries...

...They deny, of course, that they hold him guilty...

...With a few uneasy exceptions, the universities in America are no more, nor less, heroic than the Elks, and are much more expensive to maintain...

...They were the first...

...It cannot be advanced in the case of a church, whose objective is not the salvation of lives or money, but of souls...

...At that point Collier's performed an intentional service to totalitarianism...

...But it is especially disturbing to be asked such a question by a professor, even by an American professor...

...But the editor said that such charges would be very hard to disprove and that, if they could be, the mere fact of their having been made would be bad for the magazine...

...and (3) thought control—the dictation of doctrines which must be accepted and taught by all party members...

...Taft and the Europeans and me outside the pale of the Association of American Universities, which does...

...In those countries, where resistance meant death, it would have been better, for education itself, and therefore for the countries involved, if the universities had died rather than surrender...

...But he will on his day off, going fishing or getting a $1.50 haircut...

...Ill It started imperceptibly, that first mincing little step down the primrose path, with an R.O.T.C...

...error, even the most malicious error, could be quite lightly tolerated...

...what is deplored is not the university's control of its professors' thought but the control of the universities by the McCarthys...

...When freedom is nowhere in jeopardy, they talk heroically of freedom and invoke its privileges, including the special privilege of tax-exemption accorded hospitals for the salvation of the body, churches for the salvation of the soul, and universities for the salvation of the intellect...

...In this country, the spectacle of surrender in order to live, not to live in a responsible way, but in any old way, is not inspiring...

...The university administrators who comprise the Association are as easy in conscience right now as business men always are who are not themselves rich, who have not stolen money, and whose business is the disbursal of funds for eleemosynary purposes...

...This craven surrender to the sickness of our time—and of our particular place—reveals the shame of the universities which the ivy-leaf has so long hidden from the modest eyes of the American people...

...and even there their business is confined to calling the coppers when they stumble on me in flagrante delicto...

...that is, the business...

...You would not even have any heart to quarrel, because there is one thing you can not bear and carry into the fight, and that is the knowledge that you are a wrong man fighting a right one...

...To us democrats—democracts, not necessarily capitalists—totalitarianism poses an insoluble dilemma in theory...

...I accused Collier's of having so often run ostensibly anti-Communist articles which were grist for the Red mill that somebody ought to investigate to see if the magazine's repeated services to the Communists were unintentional...

...The laws explicate the standard of lawful behavior...

...That Communist mathematics— or astronomy or logic—professors are included in the AAU's proscription means, of course, that the universities are to arrogate to themselves, that is, to their administrators, whose first responsibility in practice is to trustees or regents, the right to dismiss professors on account of their legal private lives...

...If there are no standards of competence in education, so that men may be hired and fired for competence or its lack, whatever their social views, then the Association ought to close the American universities until it gets some...

...This is the society, strong in its faith and rich in its goods, the kind of soil in which revolution does not take root, that we have here—or thought we had...

...In their recent statement denying the right of a Communist to be a professor, they have promulgated an exclusively American doctrine which civilized people, here and abroad, must find depressing...

...Another House Crumbles No sooner did I damn Collier's, two months ago, for providing the Communists with "proof" of America's war-lust, than it started falling to pieces...

...How easily fire destroys such poor places as the House of Hospitality in New York, where, in Christ's name, men and women who live as Christ told us all to, open their doors and their hearts to the needy —and ask no questions...

...unit behind the ball field, and wound up, and there are some famous instances, with government money as the decisive item on the black side of the ledger...

...This they do by holding guilty of a crime any professor who invokes its protection...

...Wliy," I said, "if you are in your right mind, are you a Communist...

...It is, rather, from the outermost suburbs of the academic shades that the prescribed are to be driven...

...Thus the humanities and the social sciences (except for the psychological warfare experts), in a country where both these wisdoms were already peculiarly underdeveloped, have declined precipitately...

...The Communist mathematics professor will not indoctrinate his students on the job...

...As of even date, then, the professor's day off, wherever he is, becomes the province of the university...

...Oddly enough, the AAU's statement deplores thought control...

...And I do not see how it can be advanced in the case of universities, whose concern with the salvation of lives and money is, if it is legitimate at all, incidental to the concern for the intellect...

...Joseph McCarthy told me, in his unconstitutional, anti-American way, that I had to tell him my politics, I would tell him to go back to Russia, where he came from...

...My own field, you know, is the study of sanity...

...The AAU says of Communism that three of its principles, particularly abhorrent to us, are (1) the fomenting of world-wide revolution as a step to seize power...

...In such a society as ours, then, the theoretical dilemma of sacrificing either tolerance or preservation could be ignored...

...But are thCrevolutionaries lying...

...The AAU statement followed hard upon the AAUP convention, which reaffirmed its historic position that an otherwise competent and honorable professor should be dismissed only if his guilt of a legally defined subversive act has been established by due process of law...

...But the historic American answer to this claim of "complete candor" is, "Says who...

...It is not from the classroom alone that Communist professors are to be driven, on the single test of competency in their fields...

...Mayer," he said, "that is a question which only an American would ask, and that is what worries us Western Europeans about America...

...The catch here is that the AAU represents one aspect of the universities, the money, while the American Association of University Professors represents another, the men...

...But the salvation of the intellect has been evaporating these last decades, since the advent of income and estate taxes, and the special privilege the universities now claim is government support...

...If nearly all Americans are basically satisfied with the condition of American society and are, therefore, uninterested in overthrowing it, there can be no danger of its collapse by subversion, and those who would use deceit, and therefore have a superficial advantage over those who are honest, will make no headway...

...They overthrow the American form of government by repealing the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, commonly known as the privilege against self-incrimination...

...VI Now a university is an institution of higher learning...

...Tell me, are the American universities now accepting the view that Communists are insane...

...For this special privilege, whose name is money, and whose end is ruin, the universities are compelled to surrender every other, and they have finished by surrendering the most precious, the privilege of maintaining inquiry uninhibited by their countrymen's passions...

...If I answered his question, and told him I wasn't a Communist, he would produce a Budenz or a Bentley to prove that I was...

...This does not, presumably, or, at least, not yet, refer to his love life or his religion...

...That puts Sen...

...That is precisely what the McCarthys want to achieve, and that, if it is to be logical, is what the AAU will have ultimately to call for...

...It may succeed, though it seldom does, in the case of a nation or an individual, whose objective is no nobler than self-preservation...