The Council also recommended censure of St. Louis University and North Dakota Agricultural College, passing on the suggestion of its standing committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure in these standard tenure cases.

On April 6 the Association met in St. Louis, with about 400 professors, representing 150 institutions, present. After some heated debate the committee's report was accepted and censure was voted for St. Louis and North Dakota. Time ran out before any decision could be reached on the other six institutions, but not before H. Gordon Hullfish, vice-president of Ohio State, had attacked the censure move as premature:

"The special committee," he said, "did not do a thorough enough job to get all the facts. If we persist in our actions we will damage the Association." He added, "If we believe deeply in democratic living and democratic action, then this association must lean over backwards any time it moves to censure" a college organization.

But his call for moderation was answered sharply by William Heckle of Rutgers, who replied, "I could not disagree more than I do with the Ohio position. For four long years the Rutgers chapter has fought this fight alone. If criticism is to be directed on this committee, it should not be because of speed, but because of its too long delay.

In the next day's session the issue was not too clearly joined on the merits of the censures. Ohio State objected because of the lack of an on-the-spot hearing; Temple representatives felt the situation had improved sufficiently so that censure was no longer called for; California felt that the paying of back salaries to dismissed faculty members had cleared it. But most of the attention went to a decision to limit debate to forty minutes on each censure proposal. This measure, adopted in order that the convention might end on time, drew bitter criticism from the California camp, and Professor George R. Stewart, long a leader in the fight against loyalty and disclaimer oaths at Berkeley, walked out of the meeting saying:

Tyrannous Action

"I will return to the University of California where I shall inform my colleagues that the action you have taken here is tyrannous. I shall also tell them that they should wear their censure proudly as a badge of torture given by a tyrant."

Nevertheless, censure was passed against all six institutions, and by overwhelming, sometimes almost unanimous, votes.

The effect of a censure vote is only a moral one. It carries no legal force, but puts the Association on record as saying that an institution does not live up to proper standards of academic freedom and tenure. Furthermore, as Benjamin Fine noted in the New York Times, "Some members [of the AAUP] will not join the faculty of a college that is on the censured list."

Two circumstances mar the force of the AAUP's censure, but by no means nullify it. The first was the lack of an on-the-spot investigation by the special committee, except at Oklahoma and California. But as Talcott Parsons, professor of Sociology and a member of the special committee, explains, the "list of cases was too long to hope to get investigations of all in time for the meeting." He maintains that the committee felt it was important to take a stand at this time, and relied on the public record only where that in itself justified censure. He points to the University of Vermont case, where the committee made no recommendation except that the standing committee conduct a further investigation.

The other detraction is the one noted by Professor Stewart. But Fuchs observed in a letter to Time, "had [Professor Stewart] used his time in the meeting for arguing the merits of the censure action proposed and then asked for an extension of time if he needed it, he would have been able to state his position adequately." Fuchs pointed to the investigations of the special committee as evidence that the AAUP's actions were "far from hasty."

Furry and Kamin

Leon J. Kamin '48, former research assistant in Social Relations, was acquitted last January of the contempt of Congress charges he faced for refusing, almost exactly two years before, to answer six questions Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R.-Wisc.) asked him about former Communist Party associates. His trial had lasted ten days.

Federal District Judge Bailey Aldrich, who had been trying Kamin's case without a jury, handed down the acquittal verdict after a month and a half of deliberation. To reach his decision which he explained in a 25-page opinion, he placed what was up to that time one of the severest limits yet imposed on Congressional investigations.

His ruling, which held an entire McCarthy investigation illegal, assured the dismissal of similar charges against Wendell H. Furry, associate professor of Physics.