Communists and the AAU: II

Blanket rulings are handy things for university administrators. When places like Rutgers University and the New York City Board of Higher Education use them to fire tenured teachers who invoke the Fifth Amendment, they save all the nasty fuss and publicity that comes with trying to judge each case on its own merits. In their own attitude toward the Reluctant Professors, the presidents of the AAU universities are somewhat more concerned with individual justice. They insist that a tenured professor who uses the Fifth Amendment bears "a heavy burden of proof" of his fitness to keep teaching, but they at least give him a chance to defend his competence before a non-political university body. They even mention standards such rump courts can judge by. Yet strangely enough, when it comes to admitted Communist Party teacher's, the AAU forgets its standards and slaps on the blanket.

These are the standards of competence the report suggests: Outside his university a professor must avoid criminal or conspiratorial actions and keep from jeopardizing his citizenship; inside, he must shun in his teaching the three typical methods of the police state--advocacy of revolution, deliberate lying to convince students, and blind adherence to a party line laid down by someone else.

Ostensibly, this is a good set of criteria. Academic tenure is not so inviolate that it should shield people who do such things. But if a Fifth Amendment professor can show himself free of these stigmas he should keep his tenure. This includes Harvard's own problem professor, Wendell Furry, if he comes back from his next testimony still wrapt in the Fifth Amendment. But we see no reason why the same standards should not be just as individually applied to known members of the Communist Party.