Judge Says Students 'Too Scared to Think'

"Your presence at this meeting will be common knowledge tomorrow and will be held against you," Judge Hubert Delaney of New York told 23 students attending a civil liberties forum in Emerson Hall last night.

One of three speakers on the subject: "Are We Losing Our Civil Liberties in the Search for Security?" Delaney told the audience it was to be congratulated for courageously attending the program in the midst of the current "hysteria." College students today are generally "too frightened to think" or to be seen at such a meeting, he declared.

Reischauer Speaks

Other speakers at the forum, which was sponsored by the Society for Minority Rights, were Edwin O. Reischauer, professor of Far Eastern Languages, and Dunbar Holmes '35, Boston attorney.

Delaney, who is on the boards of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and of the National Lawyers' Guild, which is currently engaged in legal action to stay off the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations, expressed disappointment at the small number of Negroes in the audience. "I would have liked to see more interest and less fear on the part of the Negro students hero," he stated.

There were three Negros among the 23 persons at the forum.

Delaney deplored the current intellectual atmosphere in the United States as one of conformity and fear, and charged that "the liberals, not the conservatives, have deprived us of our civil liberties. It was supposedly liberal Supreme Court justices like Holmes, Brandeis, and Frankfurter who weakened the First Amendment by writing the 'clear and present danger' theory into the Constitution," he added.

Reischauer, an expert on Far Eastern affairs, told the forum that the undermining of our civil liberties is seriously weakening the federal government. He gave his own case as an example, saying that the State Department no longer feels free to ask him for advice because of his affiliation with "a university of doubtful reputation."

"Steady Deterioration"

During the last seven years this atmosphere of fear has caused a "steady deterioration of our ability to cope with problems of Far Eastern relations," Reischauer assorted.

Holmes in his speech explained the "legal aspects of academic freedom," and stated that "the law can give very little protection" to teachers who have been arbitrarily discharged.