Loyalty Oath

Strange things happen in Washington when the Congress is in a hurry to adjourn. One of the more peculiar remnants of the hectic last days of the 85th Congress is a loyalty oath provision attached to the National Defense Education Act.

The amendment--pushed through by that old crusader Karl Mundt--requires that a recipient of Federal grants or loans under the act sign a loyalty oath, stating "that he does not believe in, and is not a member of and does not support any organization that believes in or teaches the overthrow of the United States Government by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods..."

The American Association of University Professors recently got around to protesting the oath requirement, branding it as "repugnant to our traditions," and urging its repeal by the incoming Congress. The old and valid arguments against loyalty provisions in educational aid maintain that such laws single out members of a specific professional group for unwarranted suspicion, but do not ever accomplish the purpose they seek. True subversives, of course, will have no qualms about signing a loyalty oath, but loyal citizens who sign are then open to what the AAUP characterizes as "the possibility of perjury prosecutions resting on vague allegations or improper and intimidating inquiries about their conduct and their beliefs."

Certainly, loyalty oaths or pledges of allegiance are out of place in a free society. But many universities receiving federal aid manage to survive despite them; Harvard, for example, will match a federal award for any deserving applicant who refuses to sign the oath. Not all schools, however, are as well-off as Harvard, and it is possible that funds could be unjustly withheld because of the loyalty oath requirement.

Loyalty oaths are now required of recipients of aid under both the National Defense Education Act and the National Science Foundation Act, which was passed at the height of the McCarthy scare when educators were too timid to protest such obnoxious provisions. The 86th Congress, which is scheduled to consider new educational aid legislation anyway, would do well to remove loyalty restrictions from both bills. Rather than aids to education, loyalty oaths are purposeless and dangerous hindrances to the spirit of the legislation containing them.