Wolf at the Door

Last Saturday, Lewis Webster Jones, President of Rutgers, issued an open invitation to all loyalty investigators. With an almost incredible show of naivete, Jones said the current Congressional investigations into education, "would show the public what we are like." Investigators, if given a free run of campuses, would find "the overwhelming majority of our professors outstandingly loyal," said Jones, and relay this information to the public.

Jones statement is analogous to the three little pigs telling the big bad wolf that they are not very tasty and asking him to spread that information throughout the forest. By the very nature of news, the present investigations show colleges as they are not--as Communist spy factories. For the papers that now scream headlines of "Reds in Colleges" will not so avidly print the information that some committee or other has found the great bulk of a Faculty guilty of nothing at all. Purveyors of news must always look for the unusual and ignore the commonplace. Jenner and Velde do the same in their public statements.

Before Jones predicted a whitewash, he should have remembered last year's investigations into corruption in government. They "proved" that the "overwhelming majority" of government employees were honest--over 99.6 percent, if we remember correctly. But the news was of the corrupt, and the entire government service stood convicted in the eyes of the public.

By his blindness to the past records and prejudices of Velde and Jenner, Jones has broken the heretofor solid front of college presidents, starting with Conant last January, who have warned of the necessary evil results of outside investigations of education. President Jones should have looked into past history and the nature of public opinion a bit more closely before he broke the ranks.