The Ivory Tower

HERE LIES THE EMPTY MIND

For my sins, I have read over one hundred protests against the action of the provost of Queens College denying to John Gates access to college buildings whence to put forward, in a program on Academic Freedom, the views of the Communist Party. Half those I read were written by student editors who, uniformly, have pronounced academic freedom dead on the corpse of Mr. Gates. The other half were by assorted professors and editorial writers of the great metropolitan press. They concurred: no John Gates, no academic freedom. A front-page editorial in the undergraduate newspaper, the Crown, speaks of the negation of “the ideal of the democratic process” and of the destruction of “the concept of intellectual freedom.” “What has happened,” a student orator proclaimed, “is the same thing as book burning” (“a thing which we all detest”). John Gates did his bit by terming the action, in a special interview with a Crown reporter, “akin to what Hitler did.” And a solemn delegation of students hung a placard which read