Investigations and the AAU: I

The Jenner and Velde investigations have stirred so much response from the educational world recently that last week's report of the American Association of Universities tends to get lost in the piles of similar documents. It shouldn't. coming from the top official of each of the thirty-nine leading universities in North America, (Provost Buck signed for Harvard), it dwarfs in significance any other statement to date. All thirty-nine now have a common policy on what to do with Communist professors (fire them), and Fifth Amendment teachers (make them reprove their competence), and how to treat a number of other questions that have haunted educators since the Great Red Hunt began.

The report is comprehensive, and, although its words were weighed for six months, it is refreshingly unambiguous. Although we cannot agree with it completely, the full report is something American education can be proud of.

Its greatest advantage is its unity. Congressional committees know exactly what they want and how to get it; their victims have suffered in the past because their defense has been scattered. Against those who would end free teaching, discussion, and research in the name of finding criminal conspirators, the report constructs a wall of defense for the free exchange of ideas solid and unified enough to encompass all colleges and teachers.

A large part of the report tries to redress the balance of public opinion. The public's press diet of investigation coverage has been so one-sided that the small fraction of communist or former communist instructors seem to many representative of faculties in general. "By every test of war and peace," the report states, "universities have proven themselves indispensable instruments of cultural progress and national welfare." This statement should remind the public that the stream of research, products, and experts flowing from the universities to Washington has done more to strengthen the nation than the comparative trickle of red influence has poisoned it.

The AAU has also redefined concepts that have become fogged with overuse and misuse. The educators have shown that academic freedom is not a shield for subversives; it is an integral part of free enterprise--a term which everyone mumbles in the same breath as "mom's apple pie" and fundamental Americanism. They have explained the meaning of faculty tenure, a concept which seems to confuse the public, by comparing it to the tenure of a judge. A professor must be able to teach, securely removed from monetary and social pressure which might force him to hew a fixed line. The university's goal is to present its students with a free choice of theory from an unbiased presentation of facts.

The AAU directs the rest of its statements to faculties. Its report directs universities in its behavior toward communists and those faculty members who refuse to testify. Ostensibly, the report applies the same standards of fitness to both, but the results are quite different. Here lies the weakness of an otherwise excellent policy statement. Tomorrow's editorial will examine the illogic of the AAU's decision that tenured communists in all cases are unfit to teach.