Quote:
Originally Posted by Julie Stoner
Er, um, I wasn't going to stir the pot...but the California state constitution STILL, TO THIS DAY, requires all academic employees of all campuses of the University of California and California State University systems to take the following loyalty oath as a term of employment
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Julie speaks the truth about this loyalty oath. I know, because I once had to sign one. And I crossed my fingers behind my back, and felt like a complete whore, since I only signed because I needed a paycheck.
Merwin had way more courage:
"I was supposed to go and read at the University of Buffalo, and I didn't know until fairly close to the time of the reading that I was supposed to -- this was at the time of the Vietnam War -- I was supposed to sign a loyalty oath, not only to the Constitution of the United States, but if you please, to the Constitution of the State of New York, and I refused to sign the loyalty. We went around and around and around about all of the different ways around it, but they involved putting down my name and then putting riders under it that made it empty and I said that I don't see why I should do that. I mean, I don't believe in doing this, I don't think this has anything to do with loyalty, I think it has to do with entrapment. And I won't play the game and I just won't do it. And at that time, it was $1,000 for the reading, and they said, "We won't pay you," and I said, "Well, we'll see about that." And finally I agreed to go because a friend -- it was Robert Haas who invited me, and he was very embarrassed by the situation. He hadn't known about it to begin with."
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/mer0int-4
And George Starbuck, my old professor (may he rest in playful peace) was the reason the Supreme Court struck down at least part of these loyalty oaths:
"The true initiator of the suit was poet George Starbuck, who, then working as a librarian, first received the loyalty oath certificate and refused to sign. That alerted the rest of us to the situation. Pretty much everybody opposed the idea of the certificate. “Loyalty oaths” and blacklisting were very much discredited at the time. The only question was how to oppose the process. To make an impact, it had to be opposed by faculty (who potentially could rely on tenure protection) rather than staff. A larger number of us were initially going to refuse to sign (and many signed “under protest”), but eventually it came down to five who are named in the suit."
He was actually fired for refusing to sign. He sued, and won.
http://academeblog.org/2012/01/23/in...rry-keyishian/
More here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/b...the_great.html
They had courage, I didn't. I remember scrawling my own disclaimers beneath my signature. The woman who collected the signed form and handed me my paycheck didn't care, she just needed something to file. She smiled when she read what I'd written, even made a little joke. But I still find it troubling, to this day.
Thanks,
Bill