Word: fairfielders
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
WILLIAM S. FAIRFIELD, managing editor of The Crimson in 1948, wrote an article on June 4, 1949, which reported that undercover FBI agents "wander in and out of (Yale) Provost Edgar S. Furniss's office every day" to inform on young faculty up for tenure. The physics department received the most extensive surveillance. Fairfield reported. The FBI approached Henry Margenau, a professor in the Physics Department and now Higgins Professor of Physics and Natural Philosophy Emeritus at Yale, to reproach him for speaking before the New Haven Youth Movement, a group with supposedly leftist leanings, Fairfield claimed. He noted that...
...that was one of the minor incidents. Fairfield alleged that the FBI provided Yale President Charles Seymour with clandestine, often inaccurate reports on faculty members' politics. That procedure clearly broke the president's official policy of accepting no secret, unsolicited information, even though he also did not want to hire any Communists. The university did allow one official liaison from the FBI but prohibited the presence of the other informants, whom faculty members told Fairfield were "suspected of watching their homes and in one case of opening their mail." Fairfield also reported that Robert S. Cohen, a post-doctoral student...
...Finally, Fairfield cited a third "probable case" in which the FBI "again definitely violated its own code of ethics" by using scare tactics. Furniss told Fairfield that late one night "an eminently respectable" Yale faculty member, "a one-time refugee from Nazi Germany," received a mysterious phone call...
...voice continued to ask probing questions. The next day the professor showed up in Furniss's office, extremely disturbed by the mystery caller. Furniss called the FBI liaison man into his office and warned him to tone down his information-gathering techniques. Fairfield's story ended by reporting rumors that Yale officials supplied "complete appointment lists...
...CRIMSON received an official-looking letter, six days after Fairfield's article ran, from J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, labeling the piece "inaccurate, distorted and untrue." Hoover insisted that: no undercover agents or general informants operated at Yale; no secret files were provided to "Yale or any other educational institution"; no FBI agents "influenced Yale academic and political activities; and no FBI agent ever investigated "applicants for teaching positions in Yale or any other college or university." Finally, Hoover asserted, two people quoted in Fairfield's story had denied the statements attributed to them. The letter...