One year ago, two noted Law School professor sent a letter to the CRIMSON which exerted powerful impact on the thinking of American educators regarding testimony before Congressional committees investigating Communism.

In the now-famous Chafee-Sutherland letter, the authors urged reluctant witnesses to cooperate completely with Congressional committees, even when such cooperation was distasteful, as a matter of legal and ethical principle. They decried stubborn use of the Fifth Amendment as an excuse for silence.

An internationally respected educator for a half century, Alexander Meiklejohn, now steps forward to deny the soundness of their logic. Mciklejohn, a former teacher of Chafee at Brown University, questions the Constitutional right of committees to vindictively inflict punishment on witnesses and insists that in this climate of repression and usurpation of authority citizens not only have the right but the obligation to maintain testimonial silence as they see fit.

"Committee methods, which seek, by threats and pressures, to secure confession of unpopular beliefs and associations, are identical, in their own legislative field, with those of the 'third degree,' in the criminal field," he maintains, and pledges himself to the fight to legitimately "abolish" investigations which use such tactics.

The Chafee-Sutherland letter states in part. "The witness is not the ultimate judge of the tendency of an answer to incriminate him. . . A judge must decide when the witness has gone far enough to demonstrate his peril." Meiklejohn points out that in a criminal procedure, the defendant is the "ultimate judge as to whether or not he shall testify." He then asks the question: "On what grounds do they assign to a Congressional Committee an authority over an accused person which, in criminal proceedings, is denied to every agency charged with the administration of justice?"

Meiklejohn alludes to the influence that the Chafee-Sutherland doctrine had on the Association of American University's unanimous statement on "The Rights and Responsibilities of Universities and their Faculties" and reproachfully comments on that statement: "Their renunciation of the obligations of intellectual leadership which they owe to the nation, their desertion, in time of trial, of scholars and teachers whom, through years of association, they had found worthy of trust, is one of the most disastrous actions in the history of American education."

Meiklejohn's full academic career includes an eleven-year stay as Dean of Brown University, twelve years as President of Amherst College, and professorial tours at the University of Wisconsin, Dartmouth College, and St. John's College. He has written widely on philosophy, metaphysics and education and one of his best known works is called, "Free Speech and its Relationship to Self-Government."

The text of his letter follows in full:

On January 13, 1953, you published a letter from Professors Chafee and Sutherland of the Harvard Law School which discussed "the use and the limitations of the privilege against self-incrimination contained in the Fifth Amendment," "No person. . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself. . ." The letter argued from the accepted principle that the privilege of "testimonial silence" which is granted in criminal proceedings at all levels, is also granted in Congressional investigations. On that basis it generously undertook to give advice, legal and non-legal, to citizens who may be subpoenaed to testify in such investigations.

I am not personally acquainted with Mr. Sutherland But, more than fifty years ago, when Zechariah Chafee Jr. was a brilliant undergraduate at Brown University, I was his Dean. Through the ensuing years, I have followed his career with warm admiration and gratitude. But now, speaking as one who might be called to appear before a "committee," I find myself doubting the wisdom of the advice which he gives.

1.

The Legal Side

For the sake of clarity we should, I think, have before us a specimen of the "investigations" to which we American citizens are now being subjected. To that end, I quote an Associated Press dispatch of September 18. It reads as follows.--

"Edward Rothschild, Government Printing Office bookbinder, refused to say whether he was a Communist, stole a secret code, or engaged in espionage. He was suspended from his job within an hour.

"Rothschild was summoned before the Senate Investigations Sub-committee to face what Chairman Joseph McCarthy (Rep.-Wis.) said were 'some of the most serious charges ever made against a Government official'."