Purity Check

The recent Army edict requiring students who enroll in the ROTC to sign a loyalty certificate is poorly timed. Since those seeking the advantages of membership in Harvard's branches of the services expect certain uncivilian demands, such as compulsory saluting and drilling, the certificate represents no great imposition. But following McCarthy's loud and irresponsible charges, this type of security measure smacks mostly of kow-towing and closing the barn door after the Peress has gotten out.

Those who defend the measure point out that in recent years candidates for a commission were required to complete a similar form mid-way through their senior year. But this hardly answers the suspicion that suddenly giving freshmen the same tests is more ostentatious that efficient.

Actually, a loyalty certificate, even for officer candidates, is largely waste motion. All personnel in the armed services swear to uphold the Constitution against all enemies "foreign and domestic." Furthermore they take this oath without "mental reservation," and unlike the certificate's rather muddy legal status, the formal oath is quite binding.

In fact, the loyalty certificate's only virtue is in its partial definition of "mental reservation" as membership, past or present, in any organization featured on the Attorney General's list of subversives. But no conscious subversive, planted in a university to rise in the army through the ROTC program, will be stymied by the certificate. Nor is the perfunctory loyalty check on those who complete the form, mostly conducted in the files of the Defense Department, likely to reveal any damaging evidence about such a person's political associations. If the purpose of the certificate is to uncover memberships that might embarrass the military in the future, the ROTC unit need only post a list of tainted organizations with a request that any student who has belonged to one fill out a form stating the circumstances under which he joined. It would eliminate the feeling attending loyalty oaths, that the organization requiring the oath assumes a suspicious attitude, and it would surely show more trust in future officers than does the present system.

CRIMSON editorial policy is decided by a majority vote of the editors at weekly policy meetings. Although the Editorial Board assigns one editor to write the statements of policy, the views expressed are those of the newspaper as a whole.