Much of the fear prevalent on the campus is due to reports of the manner in which investigations have been conducted by the regents, the attitude exhibited not always having been sufficiently clear and consistent to be wholly reassuring. Doubtless such impressions are sometimes due to mere inadvertencies; but the fact is that a member of the faculty, when summoned to answer charges preferred, frequently finds himself unjustifiably on the defensive....
Evidence has been brought to the attention of your committee which plainly indicates the use of espionage by external forces that continually attempt to exert pressure upon the authorities as to university teaching and personnel. Your committee is firmly of the opinion that such pressure is not in the public interest. The invasion by private detectives of the domain of academic life and thought is scarcely compatible with the maintenance of a sound and wholesome intellectual spirit. The methods and point of view of these people may be illustrated by your committee’s own experience. Early in the course of this investigation, one of these agents sought and obtained an interview with a member of your committee, in which he volunteered the information that the “Foolscap” editorial (which, as it subsequently developed, he had not even read) was a piece of political propaganda, that he knew the particular party headquarters whence it came, and that it was certain he could discover the real author concealed behind the editorial screen. He offered, accordingly, on the assumption that your committee was interested, not in the question of fact raised by the editorial, but rather in the exposure and punishment of a quasi-criminal conspiracy supposedly involved in its publication, to worm himself into the confidence of the editor of the “Foolscap” and to procure for your committee by betrayal of this confidence the name of the guilty propagandist author. It is deplorable to note the constantly extending nets of private spy systems in civil life, and it is to be hoped that the threatened invasion of academic life by this sinister influence may be prevented. No thoughtful person can fail to see how blighting would be its influence, when once firmly established, in the destruction of mutual confidence, and in rendering impossible that frankness of discussion and opinion without which the intellectual life is not freely nourished and stimulated.