Off-Limits

The administrators of New York City's five public colleges continually straddle an uneasy dilemma. In prohibiting John Gates, Daily Worker editor from speaking at their schools, they were bowing to metropolitan New York's indignant public opinion. And now the academics are waving the liberal flag, pulling out their J.S. Mill, and causing New Yorkers, and the college administrators, to feel uncomfortable.

Gates, a Smith Act convictee, is undoubtedly a leader of the Communist propaganda machine in the U.S. When Queens college students invited him to speak (ironically, during Academic Freedom Week), they had no illusions about his political sentiments. They merely wanted to hear what he had to say, which would have been interesting since Gates has been under recent fire for his occasional deviations from the party line.

The administrators of the city's colleges knew all this, and perhaps never even slightly feared that Gates' oratorical bag of tricks would snatch up any innocent collegiate minds. But they also knew New York, and knew how the city's Opinion gets quickly up on its haunches when the word "Communist" appears, especially when a real live Red steps inside a city college's gates, paid for by city taxes. Yielding to the incipient pressure and potential indignation, the Administrative Council, whose salary is also paid by city taxes, saw no choice but to prohibit the Gates lecture.

Now the students are up in arms, censuring every one from their parents to the Mayor. And Public Opinion is feeling confused, because it too likes to feel liberal, and is all for academic freedom and dislikes the nasty word "censorship." But the Public considers a Communist off-limits for liberalism; Mill did not know any Communists. So the students rage and the Public turns the other cheek, and the college deans reluctantly earn their city paychecks by kissing the right side of the Public cheek.

Such a dreary situation affords condemning testimony in the case for public education. When education must bow to the whims of an ideologically confused and sub-college citizenry, it can never equal the standards of private education. There will always be the wishes, tastes, and fears of Opinion to consider, the Public that wants education to grow, but only within the mold of its own image.