Word: aau
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...AAU presidents believe all CP members automatically flunk their tests because of the nature of the group to which they belong. While this is probably true in the great majority of cases, it is not necessarily so in all. Dropping the blanket over all CP professors without passing individual judgement is playing too carelessly with the rights of tenure...
...hard to build a hypothetical case of a CP professor who violates none of the AAU's standards. Rightfully or not, the Communist Party is a legal political group in the U.S. The Smith Act itself admits that a person can be a Communist without conspiring against the Government. And there may be tenured professors on faculties today who, for what lame reason we do not know, hold membership cards in the CP, yet neither lie nor follow the Party line in their teaching. The Communist Party in this country is not so perfectly organized that naive teachers cannot hold...
...Communist Party tics of other tenured professors may well lead them to slant their teaching to a party line, especially in the social sciences. Yet the AAU would not fire a dogmatic Marxist or Freudian, both of whom blind themselves to all but a single cause; or a Catholic, whose ideas on certain subjects must change at the order of the Pope. For these beliefs are not presently dangerous to the government. But if only the threat's the thing, it is dangerously illogical to fire a CP member who has never taught threatening ideas. Moreover, any avowed Communist will...
...York City Board of Higher Education use them to fire tenured teachers who invoke the Fifth Amendment, they save all the nasty fuss and publicity that comes with trying to judge each case on its own merits. In their own attitude toward the Reluctant Professors, the presidents of the AAU universities are somewhat more concerned with individual justice. They insist that a tenured professor who uses the Fifth Amendment bears "a heavy burden of proof" of his fitness to keep teaching, but they at least give him a chance to defend his competence before a non-political university body. They...
...Fifth Amendment professors will be the chief sufferers from the AAU's illogic. University "tribunals," well within the policy of the report, can violate the tenure of any one of them, merely because he cannot prove he is not a Communist. Thus, the AAU's ban on Communists opens the gates to widespread firing of tenured teachers who invoke the Amendment, by any AAU university which feels uncomfortable under public pressure. This loophole, then, is the report's great weakness...