Word: oaths
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President Conant, although personally opposed to the oath, nevertheless brought pressure upon Mather to get him to sign. "It is out of the question for Harvard University to consider not obeying the law," Conant said...
...career as teacher and geologist, Mather estimates he has taken oaths of allegiance to the Constitution "at least 50 times." His objection to the Teachers Oath centered around the need for a professor, presumably independent of the government, to take it. With such an oath, he stated, "Education would then become the crassest of propaganda and the fascist spirit would dominate a land from which liberty had been banished...
...letter circulated to Faculty members Oct. 8, Conant made clear the University's position: Any teacher who refuses to take the oath cannot work at Harvard. "It is clear that the act does not require you to take the oath if your duties are wholly and clearly apart from teaching," he wrote in a remarkably restrained tone...
...signed the oath, but attached a three-paragraph proviso, thus making the entire oath invalid. At the same time, Mather issued another statement, calling the oath "completely antagonistic to the spirit which breathes through the Constitution of the United States and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts." (He smilingly recalls, however, that he constitution of the Commonwealth was out of print at the time, and that he "couldn't find a copy of what I was swearing to uphold...
...which I object appears to transfer to state legislatures and to officials appointed by partisan governors a responsibility which has constitutionally resided in non-political quarters," he wrote. The State Commissioner of Education returned Mather's oath, and Mather was faced with the alternative of taking the oath or resigning from the University. He signed the oath, and the controversy ended...