This question had caused anxiety throughout the nation in the late forties, and in 1949 under pressure from anti-Communist groups (like the National Council for American Education), the National Education Association appointed a 20-man Educational Policies Commission, including President Conant and Dwight Eisenhower of Columbia, to examine the problem. The commission's conclusion was that "Communists should not be employed as teachers" because membership in the CP meant that they had surrendered their intellectual integrity. In a poll taken among Harvard Faculty members by the Crimson, this point of view was upheld, 218 to 108. Those critical of the commission report felt that a blanket rule should not be applied and that each individual should be judged separately according to his fitness to teach.
Nonetheless, the statement by the commission settled the first of the three questions relating to academic freedom and Communism: if a teacher was a Communist, he would be fired, whether he had tenure or not. But what if he had been a Communist or had taken the fifth amendment? When the Corporation met in March and April to decide the Furry case, a definite position on these matters had been taken by several influential members of the Harvard community, a position which might have been adopted as the University's policy.
In January, 1953, a month before Furry's appearance before the HUAC, Arthur Sutherland, professor of Law, and Zechariah Chafee, Jr., University Professor and a respected civil libertarian, issued a statement intended to clear up ambivalent aspects of the fifth amendment. In sum, they argued that it was "ill-advised" for witnesses to withhold testimony on grounds of self-incrimination in court or before legislative investigation committees. The professors felt the citizen "is neither morally nor legally justified in attempting political protest by standing silent when obligated to speak." Also ruled out as a motive for silence was a "sense of sportsmanship toward suspected associates." Only if the witness "was subjecting himself to some degree of danger of a criminal offense" would his reticence be justified.
The spirit of the Sutherland-Chafee statement was for nearly complete co-operation with the congressional committees, although their long, careful explanation made clear several reasons for using the fifth amendment, and colleges that were floundering in a slough of uncertainty eagerly embraced the statement as an answer to their confusion. In January, Rutgers fired two professors who had taken the fifth before the HUAC. The Sutherland-Chafee "doctrine" was used as justification.
A third distinguished voice also urged cooperation with the investigations. In January, 1953, President Conant was appointed U.S. High Commissioner of Germany and was questioned intensively before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. At the time he stated that he thought professors who took the fifth should be fired. Several weeks later, speaking before his final Faculty meeting, Conant voiced a dislike for the investigations, and said that the University had no a priori policy regarding professors who appeared before congressional committees. Still, his comments before the Foreign Relations Committee and the Sutherland-Chafee statement would seem to have been all the precedent the University needed to fire Wendell Furry for his refusal to testify in February.
As it turned out, these precedents were not followed. In late May Harvard announced that it would retain Furry even though he had taken the fifth. Despite the massive framework of detail and technicalities which the University used to justify its position, the significance of the decision was broad and striking. Harvard had affirmed that it alone had the right to judge the fitness of its teachers and that no blanket rule could legitimately be used in deciding such a crucial question as whether a professor would retain his tenure. Harvard's action reversed a trend which had been the cause of growing friction between faculties and administrations across the country and had resulted in feelings of fear and impotence among the nation's professors. The University's decision also helped to check the very real, if unspoken, influence of Congress over the educational policy of the nation's universities since it courageously reiterated President Lowell's dictum on political independence before a hostile audience.
If the University's decision in the Furry case was of great significance, it is important to understand how the policy was determined and why the point of view of Conant, Sutherland, and Chafee was modified. This is especially intriguing since at one point during the deliberations Furry's connection with Harvard was nearly severed.
To understand the Furry decision it is necessary first to remember the unusual administrative set-up which Conant's departure and the impending Congressional investigations necessitated. The leadership of the University had fallen to Paul Buck, who, as provost and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, was given the job as chairman or a special administrative committee to assume the President's duties. This committee was composed of Dr. Roger I. Lee and Charles A. Coolidge, Fellows of Harvard College, and Paul Cabot, the University Treasurer. The other important ad hoc group was an Advisory Committee of the Faculty appointed by Buck in early February. Members of this committee were: Buck, who acted as chairman; George Baker, professor of Business Administration; Mason Hammond, Pope Professor of Latin Language and Literature; Erwin Griswold, Dean of the Law School; and Edward Purcell, professor of Physics.
The key body in the Furry case was the Corporation. With Conant gone, Buck, as Provost and Dean, had become, more than ever, the Faculty's representative to to the Corporation. And it would be the five Fellows--Lee, Coolidge, William Marbury, R. Keith Kane, and Thomas Lamont (in descending order of seniority)--and Cabot who would make the final determination about Furry.
In fact, to reduce the issue to schematic terms, it was a matter of Buck trying to persuade Coolidge. Each man had varying traditions and forces influencing him, but broadly speaking Buck was for defending Furry, and Coolidge (and the Corporation) was initially unsure. It is the explanation of what caused the Corporation, Harvard's rich, conservative, remote administrators, to act in defense of a radical associate professor of Physics on the unfamiliar field of free speech which makes the case so fascinating.
In a very real sense, Charles A. Coolidge spoke for the fellows. R.I. Lee, the Senior Fellow, may have been senile, often dozing during the Corporation's debates, and leadership fell to Coolidge. Thomas Lamont and R. Keith Kane were newly appointed members and naturally deferred to the experience of the Acting Senior Fellow. Only William Marbury could approach Coolidge's longevity, and although he and Coolidge comprised the Corporation's Special Committee to study the Fury Case, he seems to have followed his colleague's lead. A descendant of the plaintiff in Marbury v. Madison (1803), Marbury was a Baltimore lawyer and personal friend of Alger Hiss. In fact, one reason for his unsureness in the Furry case was a disappointment with the outcome of Hiss's trial and a belief that the convicted perjurer had lied even to his closest friends. Such a view made him suspicious towards other leftists, including Furry.
Therefore, it was to be Coolidge, if anyone, who would swing the Fellows of the Corporation behind Buck in support of Furry. Son of an old Boston family, First Marshal of his class, Coolidge had graduated from Harvard Law School and entered the prestigious Federal Street firm of Ropes and Gray. Acting as head of the Fellows in place of the incapacitated Dr. Lee, he was responsible for all of the Corporation's official announcements as well as the ultimate form of its policy.
During March and April the Corporation reviewed Furry's testimony before the Velde Committee and attempted to set University policy. In this period three other matters impinged upon their deliberations. At the end of March the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security came to Boston and interrogated more members of the Harvard faculty. When