THE SYMBOLISM OF NDEA

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The current protests against the loyalty oath and affidavit in the National Defense Education Act seem to assume that the issue has only one side--as if it were merely a contest between the enlightened and the ignorant, or a defense against perversity. But every social and political issue, just by its nature as social or political, has two sides. And since the understanding of any such issue requires a grasp of the essential validity of both sides, I should like to say a word for the neglected other side of the present issue.

It has been assumed that the required loyalty oaths and affidavits are in principle bad. And I should not want to hold the contrary. But I am not sure that we can say that they are bad because they impose restraints on the free exercise of the mind; they may in fact not impose such restraints, and they may well not even be appropriate devices for the imposition of such restraints on any occasion. Rather, what is bad is the existence of a belief among common men that intellectuals cannot be trusted as citizens. The oaths and affidavits serve, it seems, as reprimands. And to those who judge the reprimands wrongly directed they have also seemed insults, as the language of the protests ("offensive," "odious") indicates.

But the judgment that the reprimand is deserved is, I regret to say, not altogether unfounded. And evidences supporting it are amply provided by members of our profession who--often speaking in such a way as to appear to represent all of us--have made it plain that they suppose that their profession puts them above the duties and responsibilities which are the usual concomitants of assured rights. Both in their lives and their public pronouncements they have left it open to doubt as to whether they have any local commitments. Yet the free society rests on the postulate that every man is equal before the law and that no man's position in life or profession puts him above the law, nor indeed above local responsibilities. While the life of the mind requires no intrusion from without, the intellectual still is in his private life and in the actual exercise of his profession an individual man; and it is nothing but an affront to good common sense for him to insist that his profession precludes commitment to the local (institutional) conditions of his own personal--indeed professional--existence. The matter is made worse by the fact that the typically abstract mind is not always capable of local commitments and tends often to treat this defect as if it were a merit.

In this situation, it is not unnatural that ordinary men should demand of intellectuals some symbol of commitment or loyalty. And it is precisely as symbol that they do demand it in the Act in question. It is an assurance they seek. They are not out to produce loyalty as an effect; for such an effect could not be achieved by any device, let alone this. Nor are they out to eliminate potential traitors, who might even welcome the opportunity to deceive. Loyalty oaths of this type are plainly not utilities; but they are not for that merely irrational.

If my remarks are at all accurate to the case, perhaps we ought to be a little humble before this reprimand, even thought we may know that we as individuals do not really deserve it. For we are not altogether guiltless, if only in that we have allowed ourselves to be so poorly represented. Surely we ought to take care not to make the egregious mistake of supposing that the issue is one-sided; and we ought scrupulously to avoid letting those lead us or speak for us who have made the imposition of the symbol imperative. Robert E. Gahringer,   (Ph.D., 1953).