HARVARD IS ATTACKED

All the liberal guns of the nation are being levelled upon Harvard. This "great and traditionally liberal university"--as the National Advisory Council on Academic Freedom ironically termed it--has been charged on every hand with turning reactionary and with limiting academic freedom. After all, Mr. Greene could have expected no other effect when he made his decision. Most of his critics are too earnest in their bias to see the true nature and logic of the case.

Consequently, it must be reiterated that the question of free speech is not involved if facts are taken at their face value. Browder was granted permission to speak at Harvard on a certain date. Meanwhile, he was indicted on criminal charges of passport invasion; so his speaking permission was revoked. From this it should be clear that Browder, for the purposes of the case, had a dual personality: that of the Communist spokesman and that of the passport violator. He was excluded from a Harvard assembly in his second capacity only. If Mr. Greene was sincere--and the burden of proof rests upon those who say he was not--then no one has denied the right of a Communist to speak at Harvard. If Tom Girdler had been indicted for income tax evasion pending a lecture engagement here, he too would have been denied the right to speak.

As it happens, of course, Mr. Greene's reason for his action is a pitifully puny-one. No one questions Browder's authority as a Communist because of this comparatively innocuous run-in with the law. No one seems to take Mr. Greene's objection seriously besides himself; it is uniformly ignored by his critics, who do not bother even to answer it. The Council on Academic Freedom flips it off by stating truly if tritely that "a man is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law."

There is absolutely no question but what the Corporation should reverse the decision made by its trouble-shooter and clean-up man. Such a reversal is dictated not only by the poorness of Mr. Greene's argument but also by the expediency of calling off the dogs. A thousand years of logical argumentation would fail to convince many people that Harvard--by Mr. Greene's action--is not squelching the Communist view of affairs. They will be mollified only by a reissuance of Browder's speaking permit. Indeed, if the Corporation persists in the course chosen thus far, there may be ground to suspect that some of the glibly-flung accusations are justified.