Indentured Ideas: The Price of the NDEA

Although the loyalty provision of the National Defense Education Act may appear harmless to many, the University's opposition to the loyalty oath involves much more than mere academic quibbling. The loyalty provisions now in the NDEA (Section 1001f) meet no clear and present security danger, but form instead a perilous restriction on academic autonomy and civil freedoms.

The University has acted wisely in reconsidering participation in the NDEA program. The present, provisional suspension of administering funds should be followed, however, by a declaration that so long as the affidavit remains in the NDEA, the University will not participate in the loan program.

The arguments against the loyalty provision, and especially against the included affidavit requirement have been thoroughly presented. In outline, opponents of the oath contend the following: First, loyalty affidavits are useless, since true conspirators would not hesitate to sign them; second, the oath and affidavit single out the academic profession and young students as a group whose loyalty is suspect; third, the affidavit is dangerously vague and demands that applicants for funds must have beliefs that conform to an undefined and variable norm of safe political thinking. Finally, the affidavit and oath serve as dangerous precedent for burdening future governmental aid to education with political strictures. Harvard has rightly decided that these obnoxious features of the loyalty oath preclude acceptance of the government's funds.

The further issue of how to fight the loyalty provision is a tactical one. So long as the University thought there was a chance that legislative action would remove the affidavit requirement, it accepted the funds; but since this hope has at least temporarily vanished, strategy has had to be changed. Obviously, the University, as well as other schools and academic associations should support new legislation that attempts to remove the oath. Last year, Harvard's ambivalent attitude was cited in Congress as a part of an argument that the loyalty oath was acceptable to even the best schools; but clear support of measures to remove the oath, coupled with a firm refusal to accept funds so long as it is required, should make Harvard's stand serve as an argument against the oath.

Professor Mark DeWolfe Howe has offered a new tactical course. He has suggested that the University could invite a government suit by administering the federal loans without requiring a loyalty oath. In such a suit, he argues, there is a good chance that the courts would strike down the loyalty provisions of the bill.

Regardless of the merits of his legal arguments, there are several objections to the test-case procedure. As Howe himself has admitted, the government might not sue to recover the misallocated funds; it might merely refuse to grant Harvard any additional money. Secondly, University officials could conceivably be prosecuted for willfully and illegally disbursing government funds. Such a criminal action could tend to obscure publicly the central issues of the dispute. Finally, even if the government did sue to recover misspent funds, a complex financial imbroglio could result, for students who get NDEA funds need pay back only half the loan if they enter teaching. Thus, if the University administered these loans without the oath and were then enjoined to return the funds to the government, full restitution would be necessary. And students who had borrowed with the intention of repaying only fifty per cent of their loans would either have to refund the full amount, or the University would have to make up the other fifty per cent.

Questions of complexity alone seem to weaken the test-case method as practical procedure. Pressure for favorable legislation and the moral example of refusing funds thus seem the best form of opposition to the loyalty oath. It is perhaps not generally realized that, when the University demands the removal of the affidavit from the NDEA, it is fighting to lift the loyalty provision from both the loans, which it itself administers, and from the grants, which the government awards directly. Although the University would not be compromised if government scholarships alone were encumbered by loyalty affidavits, it should still persist in the effort to release all federal funds from the affidavit restriction. As a leading academic institution, Harvard must be exemplary in its protest against all loyalty restrictions in federal aid to education.

Any infringement of belief and opinion tends to erode the healthy diversity that is the basis of a free community; once a loyalty test is accepted, succeeding infringements are surrendered to more docilely and imposed more readily. By its continued resistance to loyalty oaths, the University must protect and foster the multanimity that maintains the vigor of a free society.