The Bowles Campaign

The Middlesex Superior Court last week ordered the Corporation to reinstate Samuel Bowles until the constitutionality of the Massachusetts Teachers' Loyalty Oath is determined. The University has indicated that it will comply with that order and simply postpone any action against Bowles until a suit brought by Joseph Pedlosky, as M.I.T. professor, is heard this October.

Pedlosky has contested the constitutionally of the statute requiring the oath because it demands a "kind of orthodox nationalism contrary to the principles of free speech and thought." He claims the statute says, in effect, that the only way teachers may express their support of the constitution is to sign this particular oath. Pedlosky has included two other arguments in his suit; that the actual procedures of the law violate the notion of due process and that it discriminates against teachers, singling them out as a group whose loyalties are particularly suspect.

Legal experts are pessimistic about Pedlosky's chances of winning his suit. Several professors of Law have predicted that the oath will stand in the Supreme Judicial Court. The oath is widely regarded as an innocuous one; it has no disclaimer and merely requires signers to affirm loyalty to the constitutions of the Commonwealth and the United States and to promise to "faithfully discharge the duties" of their offices.

Pedlosky plans to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, and a long, perhaps futile, judicial struggle now seems inevitable. While the suit is being adjudicated--and in case it fails--Bowles, Pedlosky, and their supporters should consider the most effective remaining alternative: legislating the repeal of the oath by mobilizing sentiment on campuses throughout Massachusetts. If they sincerely believe that the loyalty pledge represents a threat to academic freedom, they should extend the campaign through petition from Harvard and M.I.T. to other colleges across the Commonwealth.

A Salem representative and the Massachusetts Federation of Teachers previously introduced motions to repeal this oath and a similar one required of public employees; they were unsuccessful primarily because they failed to marshal the support of the academic community. Certainly colleges and universities are not apathetic toward the oath; many members of the Faculty have admitted privately that they resent the oath and consider it discriminatory.

Although the University fought the Oath in 1935--and officials have criticized it repeatedly since then--the Corporation decided not to disobey the law by refusing to fire Bowles. The campaign organized by Bowles and his supporters should provide officials with the opportunity to reverse this neutral stance without engaging in an act of lone defiance. We hope the University will explicitly state its opposition to the oath, and join other universities across the state in a movement to repeal it.