ODE TO LIBERTY

The best possible answer to the fatuity of the Teachers' Oath Bill was yesterday's all-star array of talent at the legislative hearing. Harvard should be proud of the logical and sincere defense of academic freedom made by President Conant, who exchanged thrusts with the embattled farmers of Beacon Hill with enough force and conviction to allay any fears that the heads of the American universities might he shirking their proper intellectual leadership in the community.

President Conant did the greatest service of the day in stressing the sadly-neglected difference between the class-room and committee-room. He met the challenge of defining the always clusive ideal of academic freedom by calling it, "the right of a professor to seek that which we call truth according to the best of his ability and his conscience and expound it to his students as well as he can." The legislator who proposed that the majority of the taxpayers determine just what is truth, places much more faith in the electorate than it has so far merited. Until the millennium arrives it would seem advisable to let each citizen of the Commonwealth establish his own definition of truth for his private consumption.

If victory in such a conflict can be judged, it must go to the leaders of education who maintained poise and patience, even when Representative Pierce showed the true colors of many of his colleagues by announcing, "It's the college professors we want to get at." Mr. Walsh probably exaggerated the obstacles the oath placed in the way of his freedom, but the nuisance value of the measure was clearly stressed by all the witnesses. President Neilson gave it its truest appraisal when he said that such legislation does more than anything else to undermine respect for the laws of the Commonwealth and the legislature that makes them. The move for repeal of the Oath Bill is a battle against obscurantism and indifference. The latter enemy, at any rate, was severely wounded yesterday by the belligerence of the Massachusetts universities, who now, no more than ever, desire to take the road to either Moscow or San Simeon.