To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Recently Professor Chafee and others have discussed in your columns the propriety of an ascription in congressional hearings of the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination. I suggest that the following analysis may be helpful in solving the broader problem of academic freedom from governmental restraint.

(1) The House Un-American Activities (Velde) Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee (Jenner) subcommittee on Internal Security are now investigating our colleges. Distinguished philosophers, physicists and mathematicians have been subpoenaed and interrogated privately and publicly with respect to past and present associations. There are indications that the committees are interested in the composition of the faculties, the textbooks used and the curricula. In the instance of at leant one college professor, a student has been subpoenaed for the purpose of repeating classroom discussions. . .

Congress Out of Bounds

(2) The current congressional investigations are not bona fide hearings for legislative purposes within the constitutional of local education, Congress cannot legislates in this field of local education, are has it over sought to do so. Historically public educational institutions have been regulated locally by municipalities and states. Private institutions have been subject to no governmental control with respect either to their faculties or curricula.

(3) In any event, the kind of legislation that would emerge from hearings of this type would certainly do violence to basic principles of academic freedom and to First Amendment rights under the Constitution. As Dr. Conant has said: "The colleges of the United States have nothing to hide, but their independence as corporate, scholarly organizations is of supreme importance. One need hardly argue this point in view of the dramatic examples of what occurred under the Nazi and Fascist regimes as well as what is now going on in totalitarian nations."

The Aim of the Hearings

(4) The objectives of the Velde and Jenner hearings is not to legislate but to root out dissent. The means used are to expose and humiliate nonconformists (a term explicitly including New Dealers), to compel confession, to create informers, to deprive the stiff-necked of their jobs, to terrorize the un subpoenaed members of the educational community, and to use the committee bearings as a sounding beard for the speeches of the Congressmen. These conclusions are supported by the frequent committee assertion that it possesses the information it seeks; by the committee practice of holding first an executive session and then a public hear in gin which the witness must state his address so that he can be subjected to community pressure; by Congressman Velde's statement that while the Jenner committee is investigating Communism, his committee's function is to express the individual Communists on the campuses, and by the House Un-American Activities Committee's self-description in its 1948 Interim Report: "It functions to permit the greatest court in the world--the court of American public opinion--to have an undirected, uncensored and unprejudiced opportunity to render a continuing verdict on all of its public officials and to evaluate the merit of many in private life who were openly associating and assisting disloyal groups or covertly operating as members or fellow-travelers of such organizations". . .

(5) One plain purpose of these committees is particularly reprehensible: subpoenaing witnesses in order to entrap them by interrogation into the minutest details in the long distant past and not their political beliefs so as to subject them to contempt or perjury indictments. The most notorious example is that of the Internal Security Subcommittee in the Lattimore case.

(6) Messrs. Velde and Jenner may claim that Communism is always a sufficient reason for hearings on any subject. But we have abundant legislation, both state and federal, on this subject. No investigator has doubted its sufficiency or propriety. It would require the utmost ingenuity to think of legislation more drastic than the McCarran Internal Security Law, the Smith Act, the McCarran-Walter Immigration Law, and other contemporaneous related statutes.

Hearings Resemble Oath Test

(7) The current hearings are merely an aggravated form of the test oath. All of the objections to this oath which were asserted in the University of California fight and in the recent Oklahoma litigation apply in much greater degree to congressional bearings in which one is first compelled to reiterate his loyalty under oath an then to submit to an elaborate cross-examination on his beliefs, friends, and support of liberal causes in the committee's effort to break him down. Mr. Justice Black has said that "Test oaths are notorious tools of tyranny. When used to shackle the mind they are, or at least should be, unspeakably odious to a free people." The hearings accentuate the evil.

(8) Both legal right and moral duty require us to resist the oppressive actions of these committees. No great legal rights have been secured or preserved by submission to tyranny; constitutional rights are never above the level of those who receive their protection. The imprisonment of countless Puritans gave rise to the constitutional right not to be a witness against oneself. Many editors went to prison during the period of the Alien and Sedition's Laws, thereby establishing more firmly the freedom of the press. The abolitionists who stood up to statute, decision and administrative and mob action are responsible in great part for the ultimate end of slavery. In the present instance, the academic community has a special duty to resist because it knows the effects of loyalty purges in the field of education's, in this country as well as elsewhere. These who resist congressional hearings of the present stamp are doing so loss for themselves than for their students to whom they have a major responsibility.

Refusal to Cooperate

(9) In refusing to cooperate with the Velde and Jenner committees the witnesses are asserting their constitutional right to freedom of speech, belief, conscience and assembly. The Supreme Court has not consented to hear such First Amendment claims in recent cases involving congressional investigations. That is not a reason for failing to assert rights which the individual citizen believes that he possesses. The denial of certiorari, we are told repeatedly, is not an adjudication by the Supermen Court. The Court has frequently changed its mind in the past where it has come to realize the significance of the problem presented to it.