[Roger Slater]

When it comes to freedom of the press, John, Britain clearly is less free than the United States. It's always been much easier to sue the press for defamation in the UK than in the US, which as a practical matter makes it difficult for investigative reporters to report solid stories of great public importance unless they have an extreme and often unrealistically high level of proof and backup. And in the wake of your phone hacking scandals, you folks now have a royal charter to oversee the press -- i.e., the government now regulates the press. This is not freedom, certainly not compared to the US. And the harassment of the Guardian for reporting on Edward Snowden is rather troubling as well.

[John Whitworth]

I've no idea. She told me this. As a guest in the USA she had no intention of discussing the Vietnam war, but she objected to being told she should not. I am glad to hear hers was the only campus where this happened.

Roger, the government does not regulate the press. The press simply ignored the Leveson judgment. The government would like to regulate the press but it does not. The press, and this includes the Murdoch press, writes what it likes, which is often false and defamatory, but that's the way the press is. In the rest of Europe the press is a pussy cat, but not here, I assure you. MPs have gone to prison for improper behaviour, mostly stealing. Cabinet ministers have had to resign and one of them has gone to jail. Because of the press, in this case the Daily Telegraph. Plenty of defamatory stories are printed without proof. The magazine Private Eye exists entirely for this purpose.

This is very possibly true in the United States also. How many Congressman and Senators are in jail? Lots I hope. And I hope you do not believe a word they say. We don't believe any of our politicians since the appaliing Blair.

[Julie Steiner]

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:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter.

The oath John's wife took in 1967 would also have included specific language prohibiting membership in the Communist Party, and obligating the signer to declare any such membership within the past five years; that portion of such loyalty oaths--but only that portion--was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1967 (Keyishian v. [New York] Board of Regents).

I find it entirely plausible that the person who hired John's wife could have strongly implied--or even flat-out stated--that expressing opposition to the Vietnam War might be considered treasonable or seditious, and therefore in violation of this oath.

(The person who hired me in 1993 went to the other extreme, insisting that this oath was an empty formality and didn't mean anything whatsoever...except that if I refused to sign, she would be legally prevented from hiring me. I told her that I don't make promises of any sort lightly, and needed to take a day to think about it. Which I did, before holding my nose and signing it. Doing so is one of the things I am least proud of in my life.)

As recently as 2008 two employees of the California State University were fired for not signing the oath as written. One of them, a Quaker, was reinstated when the oath was accompanied by this statement prepared by representatives of the university: "Signing the oath does not carry with it any obligation or requirement that public employees bear arms or otherwise engage in violence."

Also in 2008, the California state legislature passed a bill to update the State Oath of Allegiance to allow for religious exemptions, but Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it. (Surprise, surprise.)

Back in 1967, in his majority opinion in Keyishian v. [New York] Board of Regents, Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., wrote:

Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom. [...]The classroom is peculiarly the 'marketplace of ideas.' The Nation's future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth 'out of a multitude of tongues, (rather) than through any kind of authoritative selection.' United States v. Associated Press, D.C., 52 F.Supp. 362, 372.

In Sweezy v. State of New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234, 250, 77 S.Ct. 1203, 1211, 1 L.Ed.2d 1311, we said: 'The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made. Particularly is that true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as absolutes. Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.'

We emphasize once again that '(p)recision of regulation must be the touchstone in an area so closely touching our most precious freedoms,' N.A.A.C.P. v. Button, 371 U.S. 415, 438, 83 S.Ct. 328, 340, 9 L.Ed.2d 405; '(f)or standards of permissible statutory vagueness are strict in the area of free expression. Because First Amendment freedoms need breathing space to survive, government may regulate in the area only with narrow specificity.' Id., at 432-433, 83 S.Ct., at 337-338. New York's complicated and intricate scheme plainly violates that standard.

[...]'When one must guess what conduct or utterance may lose him his position, one necessarily will 'steer far wider of the unlawful zone.' Speiser v. Randall, 357 U.S. 513, 526, 78 S.Ct. 1332, 1342, 2 L.Ed.2d 1460. For '(t)he threat of sanctions may deter almost as potently as the actual application of sanctions.' N.A.A.C.P. v. Button, supra, 371 U.S., at 433, 83 S.Ct., at 338. The danger of that chilling effect upon the exercise of vital First Amendment rights must be guarded against by sensitive tools which clearly inform teachers what is being proscribed. (Full document here.)

And yet the portions of these loyalty oaths not specific to Communist Party membership remain in force...and subject to the interpretation of individuals like, presumably, the person who hired John's wife. Hmmm.

[John Whitworth]

Thank you, Julie. Probably that is the way it was.

[Michael Cantor]

Double post (I'm surprised I didn't self-ignite - Jeez!).

[Michael Cantor]

Why don't you ask your wife, John, and actually find out how it was instead of passing on nonsense. You do this regularly, and I'll call you on this one. As Ralph indicates, our campuses were alive with anti-war protests at that time - you couldn't take a breath without discussing the war - and if you would google UCLA and Vietnam you would get some feeling for what was happening.

Is it possible that some misguided zealot incorrectly told your wife that she wasn't allowed to discuss Vietnam (or that you misunderstood what she told you, or only heard the part that registered with your preconceptions) - sure! But if your wife was on the campus in 1967 she certainly must have been aware that Vietnam was discussed, daily and frequently, and with great emotion. Read Ralph's post again. That's what was happening. I don't know what "Thank you, Julie. Probably that is the way it was" is supposed to mean, but I'll interpret it as an attempt to slide out of another one of those incidents where you take a half of a half of a story and present it as a universal truth, and this time around I'll make a fuss about it. Meanwhile, if you want to be blithely superficial I suggest you keep it to poetry.

[W.F. Lantry]

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

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

[Martin Rocek]

Just to chime in--in late 1960's, Vietnam was being discussed everywhere! I was in high school (a public high school in a rather conservative suburb of Chicago). My history teacher invited a friend to sing Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant and discuss the war and the draft. My music teacher had a whole unit on Bob Dylan's Masters of War. There were very strong feelings on both sides, but a USA with no discussion of the Vietnam war just seems to be a different USA than the one that I grew up in.

Martin

p.s. What does this have to do with Shakespeare?

[Michael Cantor]

Bill - this is interesting - and maddening and depressing - as was Julie's - but (a) I don't see anything in either one of them that says Vietnam couldn't be discussed, beyond Julie's supposition that maybe the guy who got John's wife to sign had his own interpretation, and (b) regardless of what the oath said, we all know (well, possibly everybody but John knows) that Vietnam was discussed everywhere and regularly. It dominated public discourse in the late sixties.

[John Whitworth]

Really people, you would suppose my wife and I did not live in the same house. I asked her and she repeated what she had said in no uncertain terms. Indeed, she has said it to me many times since 1969, the year that I first met her. Let's drop it, shall we? I know nothing about the United States then except that there was indeed a war in Vietnam and we were not in it, an improvement on our dismal record lately of attacking the wrong countries, the wrong countries for us, I mean. What the USA does is her own affair.