The recent hearings on the bill to repeal the Teachers' Oath Law in Massachusetts have proved the efficacy of the oath in turning college professors into rebels--a result the reactionary legislators could hardly have intended. A veritable War of Independence was fought with all of Boston either taking part or looking on. Broadsides of passion, eloquence, logic, ridicule were all fired at the law by the biggest of academic shots. But despite this unanimous support of the repeal bill, it is still in committee, and both the temper of the hearings and the composition of the House make its adoption unlikely.

The teachers' oath laws in some twenty states have bombed out of their shelters thousands of such men and women. Led by a few who from the first have realized the dangers implicit in the law, teachers in schools and colleges are mobilizing a belated but sturdy and almost unanimous resistance. And everywhere they have won the support of the students in their institutions and the more sophisticated groups in their communities. The middle class begins to scent trouble.

Not that the protest against the oath implies any fundamental social choice or even a clear realization of the nature of the threat. On the contrary, the chief emotion of the majority of protestants is resentment at the "imputation of disloyalty" in the oath laws, the suggestion that teachers might also be radicals. And behind this sense of injured innocence lurks a further feeling of outrage that members of a learned calling should be held to account for their words and acts by politicians representing a noisy rabble of legionnaries, professional patriots, and the yellow press. Those who have taken the next step and identified themselves with the jailed Communist or the terrorized picket are relatively few. But the identity is there; and the protest is shaped out of the same sound impulse in both cases. After all, armies are never made up of altruists. Only a few men fought for woman suffrage; only a handful of Gentiles will work with genuine zeal for the rescue of the German Jews. As long as repression, however widespread, is aimed chiefly at workers and avowed radicals, the middle class will inevitably minimize its importance or deny its existence. But when the stink bombs begin to drop in the academic trenches the troops tumble out and become aware that a war is actually on. And in this particular war, whether either of them likes it or not, President Conant and Angelo Herudon are enlisted in the same service--along with all the rest of us whose right to speak or publish our undictated opinion has been challenged or abolished. --The Nation