Sag Rule in Ohio

Ohio State University was seething last week. It was in the middle of the hottest argument over academic freedom since California's loyalty oath controversy (TIME, April 16). The thing that started the row was a decision by Ohio State's board of trustees that all speakers invited to appear on the campus must be cleared in advance by President Howard L. Bevis. While President Bevis soothingly tried to explain that the new decree was simply aimed at out & out Communist propagandists, the faculty and most of the student body protested that the trustees had clamped on a gag rule that would make any speaker worth his salt or his honorarium steer clear of the Ohio campus.

The row had been building up since last July, when a graduate school group invited as a guest speaker Dr. Harold Rugg, emeritus professor of Columbia University's Teachers College, whose left-of-cen-ter textbooks have long been stirring a storm in U.S. public schools. No sooner had Rugg appeared than-two Ohio newspapers sounded the alarm. "Marxian doctrinaire," cried the Ohio State Journal. The Columbus Dispatch echoed: "A defiant and unabashed radical." The newspapers needled Ohio Governor Frank Lausche into requesting a trustee investigation of the charges, and in short order the trustees issued their edict.

Pro-Rugg or and, the faculty and the students thought they had an issue worth fighting for. When President Bevis made the first use of his new powers by banning Dr. Cecil Hinshaw, a Quaker and former president of William Penn College, the whole state of Ohio began scrambling into the act.

Aside from the Journal and Dispatch, few voices rose to defend the trustees. The Ohio Education Association, the executive board of the state's C.I.O. Council, Roman Catholic Bishop Michael J. Ready of the Columbus Diocese, Methodist Bishop Hazen G. Werner, all felt that the board had acted in ill-considered haste.

Last week a faculty committee sat down with the trustees for a series of conferences, to thrash out the whole sorry affair. Caught in the middle, with little apparent relish for his dictatorial license, President Bevis addressed a rhetorical question to both sides: "Do you want my job?"

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