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10 Tax Review 1 (1949)

handle is hein.tera/tafoutaxt0012 and id is 1 raw text is: TAX REVIEW

JANUARY 1949, Vol. X, No. I

Published by the Tax Foundation, Inc., 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York 20, New York
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Fire Bell in the Night
by HENRY M. WRISTON, President, Brown University
E VERY once in a while an event occurs which does not seem in itself to be of great magnitude,
but which is a portent of something vastly significant. In 1820 when the admission of
Missouri as a state raised the slavery issue, Thomas Jefferson wrote: Like a fire bell in the
night, [it] awakened and filled me with terror. Ten years afterward all the pollsters would have

said that Jefferson's alarm looked ridiculous,
crises seldom mature rapidly; those who read
aright the signs of the times may well take
thought when they perceive a cloud small as
a man's hand.
Teachers' strikes should be regarded as a fire
bell in the night, although from a quantitative
point of view they have not been important.
The teachers' economic situation urgently called
for redress; public authorities were laggard in
recognizing the issue, dilatory and half-hearted in
attempts to meet it. A crisis in salaries was the
occasion for the strikes, but it by no means sup-
plies a complete explanation. For nothing is more
firmly established historically than that the teacher
is poorly paid. If there is any labor of love which
involves contributed services to a high degree,
teaching shares the distinction with preaching.
That single fact is all the evidence necessary to
prove that teachers' salaries were only the occasion
and not the cause of the strikes.
There is no possibility of accounting for the
strikes without taking into consideration the drift
of many intellectuals away from a profound con-
viction as to the rightness and the validity of the
existing social, economic, and political situation.
So far as universities and colleges are concerned,
there is criticism of the Red doctrines sup-
posedly preached in the classroom. State legisla-
tures launch investigations. Men lash at the
symptoms but fail to make adequate diagnosis.
Neither Red nor un-American is a precise
term. Each is an omnibus catchword employed to
indicate any disharmony between the teacher and
his social-economic-political environment. I agree
entirely with Gen. Eisenhower that the colleges
Copyright, 1949, by Tax Foundation

but eventually he was amply vindicated. Great
have very few Communists or even Communist
sympathizers on their faculties. But it would be
folly to deny that there are many teachers who are
intensely critical of our present social and eco-
nomic structures-both of which seem to some of
them to be stratifying dangerously.
My purpose is neither to praise nor to condemn;
I am essaying an analysis, seeking to make clear
what caused the emotional tensions now all too
obvious, and to present some intimations as to how
so dangerous a trend may be reversed.
Many or most of the arguments with regard to
the American economic system have no direct ap-
plication to teachers in schools, colleges, and
universities. The profit motive, often described as
the main-spring of business, and properly so de-
scribed, is not and should never become the
dominant element in their lives. For example,
America has many Nobel Prize winners in the
sciences; it would be a shallow and ignorant man
who gauged their worth by their income. What is
true of them applies also to thousands upon
thousands who quietly do their work in schools,
colleges, and universities. Without their labors
neither our society nor our economic system can
survive; yet they function to a large extent outside
that system of economics.
Academician Is a Risk Taker
That may be one reason why industrialists some-
times find it hard to understand professors. It
accounts for the scornful comment so often heard:
If professors had enough ability and the competi-
tive spirit they would not be teaching. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Those who do not
1

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