Word: freedom
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Certainly Communists, if they really follow the party line, sacrifice their intellectual freedom; if they do not follow it, they are not Communists. This sacrifice of freedom extends to all branches of knowledge: no good Communist can teach the objective facts about genetics today; and the party line dictates one's approval or disapproval in literature, art, music, and philosophy...
...working with you on this or that issue, their actions reveal that they have different and incompatible ends in view. Hence I think university presidents are justified in not hiring known Communists, and are justified in firing them in cases where a teacher has clearly sacrificed his freedom to use his own independent judgment. Use of this latter power, however, threatens a flood of abuses; it can only be held in check by an aroused and vigorous public opinion, among faculty and students and (so far as possible) among the public at large...
...this time. Not only does it mean something else that must be answered, not only does it involve further financial sacrifice, not only does it mean the loss of a drinking companion--from a purely objective point of view means that some unsuspecting sentimentalist is voluntarily signing away his freedom...
Ever since the war, groups which consider academic freedom an elastic commodity have been putting the squeeze on American universities to cleanse their faculties of "radicals" or even "liberal" thinkers. This newspaper recently documented many of these attempts at purification, and last week the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee requested textbook lists so that he could look for "disloyal" sentiment...
...congratulated on your recent coverage of the problems of academic freedom. The two editorials on the Report of the Educational Policies Commission come as a fitting climax to your job of documenting the increasing hysterls on this subject...