Laing Criticizes Private Hearings As Overly Secret

Secret hearings, say critics of congressional investigations, are the answer to the evils resulting from inquiries concerning subversion. There would be no implications in the press, there would be no unpleasant public associations if investigators met with their suspects in private.

But the view of a prominent eastern educator, after an investigative interview last winter, is otherwise:

". . . I left the secret hearing, feeling that I had become part of a secret apparatus, in the dark. Did I speak no ill of any colleague? I had no reason, in truth, for speaking ill of any of them. But was I understood? Was the stenographer competent? Was the stenographer competent? Was there anything that will be misconstrued?"

These incisive questions are those of Alexander Laing, educational services advisor of Dartmouth's Baker Library, and the investigation in question was a private interview with New Hampshire Attorney General Louis C. Wyman.

Becomes Secret Informer

Neither Laing nor the other unidentified scholars who testified before the committee objected to the methods or attitude of the Wyman investigation, begun at Dartmouth on Dec. 10, 1053.

The Laing investigation was part of the gathering of information from members of the Dartmouth faculty who were at Hanover during the days of William Remington (Dartmouth '39), and not directed toward Laing.

But in a letter to the CRIMSON Laing said, "When he (Wyman) made it very evident that no one need ever know that I had seen him, I realized that I was being jimmied into the category of secret informers. . . .

". . . I ask my colleagues to consider carefully whether they are content to give evidence concerning one another in secret, in the presence of no impartial witness, no known friend--no matter what they may have to say. Any part of it that concerns me, from now on, will have to be done in the open."