The Communist Menace, the Supreme Court, and Academic Freedom

OW MUCH academic freedom may professors claim the light of the cold war? This question deserves careful consideration if the academic profession is to take a realistic stand which it can defend without equivocation. The threat to our free society was the chief, though sometimes unexpressed, concern a number of recent significant Supreme Court cases. It is back of the indifference with which the public greets the protests against test oaths and disclaimers. Unless it is met, the demands for academic freedom will fall on unsympathetic because uncomprehending ears. Does communism represent a threat to our way of life? How shall we judge? Shall we count the number of party members, the number of Communists our legislatures, our schools, on our judicial benches, positions of leadership law, labor, business, and industry? Shall we count the convictions for espionage, sabotage, and treason? Shall we measure the output of literature? Shall we analyze the content of films? Or shall we look abroad? Is it Hungary which serves as the yardstick? Korea? Red China? No doubt the Communist menace consists the minds of the American people of a melange of all these. It is Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, Soviet tanks Budapest, and Khrushchev's blustering threats and boasts. But above all, it consists of names names of persons who have been named as Communists or Communist-sympathizers or who have denied or admitted that they were such or who have refused to assert or deny that they were such. The names are the stock-in-trade of various investigating committees, the most prominent (and notorious?) one being the House Un-American Activities Committee. The rationale for the naming is, of course, that to protect ourselves against the Communists we need to know who they are. Do we identify thus an enemy or only a dissident? If we are willing to, grant that communism is a doctrine calling for intellectual exploration like utilitarianism or the quantum theory or Darwinism, then the entire problem takes on a new light. If the Party of the United States is a political association organized to publicize a point of view, to gain converts, and to enact a program just like the Democratic and Republican parties not a conspiracy to commit illegal acts, then again the whole problem is radically recast. Unless we come to grips with this issue, our protestations will seem to many to lack sincerity. The U.S. Congress has officially declared the Party of the United States to be in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.'The Internal Security Act of 1950 asserts that there exists a world movement which, its origins, its development, and its present practice, is a world-wide revolutionary movement whose purpose it is, by treachery, deceit, infiltration into other groups... and any other