THE STUDENT NEWS

Mr. Hearst and other Red-baiters will doubtless find in the publication of a newspaper by the Harvard National Student League further evidence that the seats of higher learning are rotten with un-Americanism. The "Student News," however, fulfills a legitimate function, defined in a remarkably calm editorial as: "to ensure adequate presentation of our activities and policies." If only as evidence that Harvard's traditional freedom of speech actually exists in a vital and elastic form, the existence of the new paper is justified.

When Communistic organizations are allowed public expression for their views, the oft-repeated charge of Fascism in education becomes pointless. Any attempt at censorship in the name of Democracy, moreover, is absurd and dangerous. Among liberal democratic ideals the freedom of the individual--which involves freedom of expression and of publication--is fundamental. Minorities, if we are to avoid crystallization and decay, must be allowed to criticize existing conditions and in turn to submit their proposals to criticism, so that the evil or the unworkable may be rejected and the valuable utilized. The defensive panic of reactionaries, rather than any communistic agitation, is the greatest existing menace to democracy and free capitalism.

Obviously the right of disagreement, which is exercised by the editors of the "Student News," extends also to its readers. Those who assume that Harvard students "en masse" will accept the Marxist doctrine under the stimulus of four pages of weekly propaganda simply question the validity of individual judgment and therefore the theory of Democracy--in short, they state a belief that would be far more acceptable to Josef Stalin or Benito Mussolini than to Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln.

These facts should be obvious to any true believer in Democracy. Nevertheless, a tendency towards repression, towards the use of coercion to enforce an orthodoxy rigidly if unofficially defined, has been marked recently. It is chiefly as a repudiation of this tendency that the "Student News," however ridiculous or subversive its viewpoint may appear, should be encouraged. One need not believe in the wickedness of Mr. Durant nor in the divine inspiration of "Das Kapital" to be an uncompromising defender of free speech.