Red Roses for Ianello

This is the time of year for slush, not only in the streets of Cambridge, but in the legislative chambers of the State House. As regular as the weather, and about as agreeable, are the bills to bar Communist teachers proposed by representative Charles Iannello and others.

The good faith of the bill's proponents is, at least, questionable. One of this year's crop is substantially the same as a bill held unconstitutional by the State Supreme Court in an advisory opinion last year. Clearly there are political advantages in blasting Harvard as "a nest of Communists," and offering bills to purify the Cambridge menace. While the measures appear unlikely to pass in their present form, the Massachusetts legislators have been known, as a senior member observed, to do "some awfully stupid things."

With a state official as both prosecutor and judge, one of the bills, H. 2120, would provide a hearing to ferret out subversives on an institution's faculty. Defining subversives as members of all organizations on Attorney General's list, the bill gives institutions the option of losing their subversives or their charters. In the case of Harvard's non-revokable charter, tax-exempt status would be withdrawn.

H. 708 instructs presidents of colleges and schools to fire any "communist sympathizers" from their teaching staffs. The bill defines a "communist sympathizer" in part as a person who refuses to answer questions "relative to his communist status." The most harmful clause of this bill is that it equates use of the Fifth Amendment with an admission of guilt.

While the present teachers' oath simply requires affimation of the Constitution, H. 707, one of Iannello's perennials, demands a further statement that the teacher has never been a Communist party member. The statement is superflous to the oath and its retroactive nature is surely constitution ally objectionable.

Beyond the specifically dangerous aspects of the individual bills, they all seek something inherently unsound--to establish state standards for the beliefs of university teachers. These institutions can function best, can only function, when they are free to set their own standards for the conduct of their faculty. State control will stifle the freedom necessary to worthwhile education.