Princeton Professors Petition U. of California Against its Loyalty Purge

A group of 295 Princeton men, including 76 percent of the regular teaching staff, have sent a statement to the University of California, protesting the action of California's Board of Regents in firing professors who refused to take a non-Communist oath.

This news follows by a day the disclosure in Cambridge that 87 Harvard faculty members had taken similar action. Hence both letters were probably sent at about the same time. Some correspondence between various Eastern colleges is indicated by the fact that similar petitions have been circulated at Columbia, N.Y.U., Oberlin, Yale, and Rutgers).

The letter was sent to the academic senate at California. In part it stated, "We recognize that this action of the regents constitutes a dental of an enlightened policy of tenure and repudiates the principle of the self-determination and responsibility of the faculty . . ."

Deans Also Sign

Included on the list of signers were four emeritus deans and the present Dean of Princeton College, Francis R. B. Godolphin.

The letter was signed by 100 percent of the men available in the departments of Art and Archaeology, Aeronautical Engineering, Economics, English, History, Music, and Religion during the three-day period that it was being circulated around the campus.

Forty-eight courses have been dropped from the California registers because of professors and instructors lost in the purge.