Phi Beta Kappa Issues Call for Committee on Academic Freedom

In a new departure from its traditionally inactive role as the academic honor society the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa yesterday voted to issue a call to all student organizations urging them to join in the formation of a committee to preserve academic freedom.

Letters will be sent to the organizations asking them to send representatives to a meeting in the near future at which the committee will be formed, it was announced.

Explaining the action, Paul Olum '40, First Marshal of Phi Beta Kappa, declared that the honor society's job was "the maintenance of intellectual standards," and linked the local chapter's action with the national organization's current drive for an "intellectual defence fund."

Olum called attention to recent actions by other universities limiting academic freedom, chiefly at Chicago, where students are not allowed to criticize the administration directly, and at Ohio State, where a Marxist club was banned. Mentioning the refusal by the University to allow Earl Browder to use a lecture hall for a speech, he remarked that academic freedom was especially threatened during wartime.

Must Be Fought For

Olum's statement is as follows: "There has been an awareness in Phi Beta Kappa recently that the tradition of intellectual freedom of the American university is not something to be taken for granted by is something to be fought for.

"This is in no sense a political group. The purpose is simply the maintenance of intellectual standards on the camp us. The preservation of these standards demand complete freedom that students and Faculty be permitted to say what they will to hear whom they will, and to call whatever meetings they will.

"We must be prepared to defend our students and Faculty from the attacks of such outside groups as the Dies Committee, which, if it had its way, would end ultimately in the discouraging of all liberal scholarship and all active student interest in the most important social questions of our day.

"Such a committee may well find no cause for action, and if so it will remain inactive. Harvard has a tradition of 300 years of academic freedom behind her, and we feel sure that this will not suffer especially in the present period of wars and crises. We simply think that there should be such a committee standing ready to defend this traction against attack from any source whatever