Conant Scores Barnes Bill As Harbinger of 'Hysteria'

Enactment of the Barnes Bill would danger-signal to nations everywhere that "the American people had begun to succumb to a panic" destructive of "the whole basis for our success in a worldwide competition with an alien and hostile ideology." President Conant testified at the State House yesterday before the joint House-Senate Committee on Education.

Speaking officially for the President and Fellows of Harvard College, Conant joined with representatives of five other leading educational institutions in the Commonwealth and a group of fifteen noted citizens to urge an adverse Committee report on 11220, proposed by Massachusetts Attorney General Clarence A. Barnes for the ostensible purpose of preventing the inculcation of Communist doctrines through the schools.

Conant Testimony

"I imagine the gentlemen in the Kremlin have high hopes this democracy will fail." President Conant ventured, "and if I were in their place I should seize every bit of evidence that tended to supports this view. I should eagerly await news that indicated the American people . . . had lost confidence in those historic principles which had guided their developments in the past."

Conant challenged the proponents of the legislation to prove that persons advocating the overthrow of government by force posed a danger to the state of nation. "I know of none anywhere on our teaching staffs," he said.

In his view the bill would furthermore "completely reverse the basic American notion of delegation of power to many small groups of citizens responsible for our schools and colleges": the school committees of the public education system and the alumni of chartered colleges and universities who are "special electorates, so to speak."

Wellesley's Mildred McAfee Horton stressed the importance of dealing with Communism "in the open." To back up her thesis that "students are adept at bursting bubbles," she cited the pre-war case of "a very attractive young Nazi instructress so clearly a pawn in the hands of her mentors that everything she said was torn apart."

James Phinney Baxter registered the objections of Williams College officials accompanied by President Howard Jefferson of Clark University; Beancroft Beatley of Simmon College; Chester M. Alter of the Boston University Graduate School; and James R. Killian acting in the absence of President Karl T. Kempton for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology