Last week the Harvard University Corporation rescinded its permission for a student meeting at which Earl Browder was to speak. It did so with the explanation that his indictment for a passport violation had made him unfit for a Harvard platform. Three days later a mob of legionnaires and assorted thugs descended on a Detroit meeting-hall where Communist leader William Z. Foster was delivering an address. They picketed boisterously, and when the meeting ended and the crowd began to disperse, they went into action. They created a tumultuous riot, inflicted injuries on nearly fifty people who had attended the meeting, and went home singing the Star-Spangled Banner. The two incidents were widely separated in space and degree; yet both are part of a pattern of hysteria being woven around us. The vigilante attack on a minority speaker is not without precedent in Detroit; Harvard's ban on a minority speaker is a new departure in Cambridge. But the most startling aspect of Harvard's decision is the frailty of its excuse. Browder has been indicted but has not been convicted, and it is still American doctrine that a man is innocent until proved guilty. The reverse assumption is as alien to basic American concepts as the wanton attack on the participants in the Foster meeting. The most refreshing contrast to this Cambridge ban is the editorial criticism levelled by the Harvard Crimson against the university authorities. What the Communists say these days will probably win them few converts. But the kind of intolerance to which Harvard has given academic sanction can develop into something ugly and uncontrollable. It did in Detroit. --The Nation