An exchange of notes which Edwin B. Newman, lecturer on Psychology, filed and forgot nine months ago has suddenly yielded a flood of letters and newspaper editorials praising him and also damning him as "fuzzy-minded" and "un-American."

The landslide has its origins in a request sent last February by little Bloom-field College in Bloomfield, N. J., to Newman, new chairman of the Psychology Department. Bloomfield asked Newman to recommend a Ph.D. for a teaching job. Among the qualifications were these:

"Definite, positive loyalty to American political ideals and traditions. Reds, pinks, near-pinks, and 'fellow-travelers' will not fit into the policy of Bloomfield which, while aggressively committed to criticism and correction of the abuses and inequalities of our present economic order, is fundamentally committed to the American system as against communism or socialism."

Newman Astonished

Newman immediately replied to President Frederick Schweitzer of Bloomfield, telling him he was "astonished" at these criteria and stating, "It has long been a canon of academic freedom that a man's political opinions had no bearing on his ability to obtain and hold an academic appointment.

"I think it is even more basically a principle of our American democracy that every citizen should enjoy freedom of speech and freedom of thought...You...blatantly propose to violate the principles on which both our democracy and our educational system are founded."

Having dispatched this message to Schweitzer, Newman forgot the whole episode. In May Schweitzer asked for permission to reprint the correspondence. Newman agreed, and then forgot about it once more.

Six months later, unexpectedly, and for no apparent good reason, the mail started coming in.

Schweitzer Covers Nation

Finally, after the deluge, pro and con, calm and hysterical, had spread all over Newman's office, he found out that Schweitzer had printed his and Newman's statements in a pamphlet and mailed thousands of copies of it all over the nation.

On the cover of the pamphlet was the prize-winning photo of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima along with the words, "Should AMERICA'S College Professors be pro-AMERICAN? A thought-provoking contrast in points of view from Bloomfield College..."

The thoughts that the pamphlet did provoke were often violent and mostly anti-Newman. The Tribune of Tulsa, Okla., took advantage of the occasion to slam Harvard and Professors Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Samuel Eliot Morison in an editorial entitled "Harvard's Fuzzy-Minded Teachers."

"Time was," the Tribune said, "when Harvard was American."

An editorial writer in the Dallas Morning News claimed that academic freedom is nothing about crackpot arrogance with mortarboard and gown."

Blast from Chicago

An anonymous Chicagoan stated, "Harvard alumni throughout the nation hand their heads in shame and disgust at Harvard's tolerance for...pro-Red professors."

"It's just too, too naive," announced the president of the National Small Business Men's Association from Akron, Ohio.

A member of the Federal Grand Jury which last summer indicated 12 Communist Party leaders on conspiracy charges wrote in to tell Newman he was wrong.

But Newman found praise in his mailbox too. The managing editor of the Bayonne, N. J., Times sent a letter applauding Newman's position. So did a building construction man in Baltimore, Md., a South Orange, N. J., housewife, and a Presbyterian minister from a small town in New York State.

Newman himself is "surprised and amused" at all the furor, but he says, "I have no desire to change what I said before: that people in academic life have got to stand for freedom of though and freedom of investigation, or whatever we mean by academic institutions will fall to the ground."