THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES MONDAY, MAY 30, 1949. MENACE FROM WITHIN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27093, 30 May 1949, Page 4

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES MONDAY, MAY 30, 1949. MENACE FROM WITHIN

In his address to the Wellington Rotary Club on observations made and conclusions drawn from a recent world tour the Chancellor of the University of New Zealand, Sir David Smith, emphasised the threat to democracy which existed in many countries to-day owing to the inroads of Communism. He specifically made the point - that Communism is spreading its teaching “ well out into the Pacific ” and that New Zealand must, like other democracies, take thought and action if our way of life is to be preserved. He emphasised that in Soviet universities, and in some beyond the Iron Curtain, teaching is being perverted to conform to the Moscow interpretation of politics and history. ■ It is right and necessary that the Chancellor of the New Zealand University should take note of these things, and utter his warning against them. But one criticism must be offered of Sir David Smith’s strictures—he has not directed them near enough to home. To deplore the influence of Communism in other countries is all very well, but have not the University of New Zealand, and its distinguished Chancellor, a duty to apply the lessons learned abroad to the University in New Zealand? He must be well aware, as must his Senate, that Communist influences are at work in the New Zealand university colleges, and that Communists are employed as teachers' in these institutions. Whether Communism is being taught to students by subtle means is a question to which the university authorities may not know the answer, but it is one to which an answer should be supplied.

The Party Lin® The conflict between those who maintain that academic freedom can be preserved only by ignoring the political affiliations of teachers, and those who assert that Communists should be debarred from teaching positions, is one that to-day greatly concerns educationists and administrators in education in other parts of the world. In New Zealand it seems not to have risen to the surface of the minds of those in administrative positions in the University. Those who declare that the teacher must be free from molestation, so long as he discharges his functions faithfully, are, of course, ideally right. But the pivotal question is whether a Communist can so function. Here is ground for interminable academic debate, as a Columbia University undergraduate journal found recently, when in reply to a questionnaire three reputable Americans—a poet, an economist and a sociologist—answered in the, affirmative, and the college dean, Dr Carman, returned an emphatic negative: “Any person who is a member of the Communist Party is not free to seek or disseminate the truth. ... The end product of the Communist teacher’s, work is Communist propaganda.” It may be added that the three men who took the other view qualified it by stating that, while' Communist Party membership should not disqualify a teacher, he was, if he used his position to disseminate propaganda, unfit to teach.

In the New York Times recently Professor Sidney Hook, head of the philosophy department of New York University, also discussed this question, his conclusion being, like that of Dean Carman, that the Communist Party member cannot dissociate his political functions from his teaching functions. “According to the Communist Party itself, politics is bound up, through the class struggle, with every field of knowledge,” he pointed out. “A party line is laid down for every area ,of thought from art to zoology. No person who is known to hold a view incompatible with the party line, is accepted as a member.” And again: “The conclusions [of Communist teachers | are not reached by a free inquiry into the evidence. To stay in the party they must believe and teach what the party line decrees.” This position appears to represent, in view, of the critical ideological battle in the world to-day, one that demands the endorsement of those who are determined that the cruel totalitarian doctrine of the Communists must never be imposed upon the free democracies; who are, on the other hand, implacably persuaded that Communism must be fought by the free peoples with a zeal equal to that of its protagonists, and driven back across the frontiers it has already crossed. Is Freedom Earned?

In the democracies there remains, and must always remain, opportunity for the expression of freedom in all the constitutional aspects that tradition and tolerance and struggle have won. But it is foolish, to the point of madness, to interpret conspiracy against the State—the attack upon the very basis of .our democratic institutions —as coming within any possible definition 'of legitimate freedom. The Communist in his thought and in his professions is the enemy of our system. Is it conceivable that he could divorce his habit of mind, his destructive fervour, from the daily requirements of his professional work—upholding for 40 hours a week a system that he is conspiring, during the rest of the week, to overthrow? The Communist’s party line to-day—which is laid down by the Cominform —is not to secure a change in leadership in the democratic countries through the people’s free vote, but to overthrow the democratic system by subversion, by fomenting strikes and revolution, by treason, and ;to substitute a Stalinist form of totalitarian State. There is little of Marx and much of plain gangsterism in the Communist’s approach to his goal, and in his total war he uses with an entire lack of scruple all the weapons to his hand, including prestige and position if these he possesses. He denies by his singleminded fanaticism his right to enjoy the freedoms and immunities that our Commonwealth allows to all loyal citizens.

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