Word: cp
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...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 be closely enough watched by both his students and the FBI that his first violation of the Smith Act will be noticed...
Taking Harvard as an example, we do not feel that membership in the Communist party per se is either "grave misconduct" or "neglect of duty," even though these 17th century terms of the University statutes are eminently clastic. But recruiting for the CP and similar actions are, because they abuse a teacher's classroom prestige in order to train students for potentially illegal acts...
Second, is Furry guilty of "grave misconduct?" Not on the evidence dug up so far. Even if he had been proven a Communist, his tenure should be safe for, except in Georgia, there is nothing illegal in being a CP member. The University should not consider his actions examples of "grave misconduct" until he has been proven guilty of breaking the law--whether it is a matter of perjury, robbery, treason, or any other substantive crime. In other words, a professor's political beliefs should be considered wholly irrelevant except where they influence his ability to teach and to research...