Education: N.Y.U.’s Answer

Called before a Senate subcommittee last fall, Edwin Berry Burgum, 59, associate professor of English at New York University, refused to answer questions about his alleged membership in the Communist Party. He was promptly suspended from his job (with full pay). Thereafter, N.Y.U. faculty members began their own investigation of his fitness to teach.

Called before the faculty committee, Professor Burgum declared that the evidence against him was irrelevant, denounced his accusers as professional witnesses. He also insisted that his colleagues had no business prying into his extracurricular activities. The committee disagreed. After 17 sessions and 984 pages of testimony, it made its report, and last week Professor Burgum was fired. Said Chancellor Henry T. Heald: “Refusal of a member of a faculty to answer questions put to him by his university in an effort to determine whether he is bound by commitments which violate his own academic freedom renders him unfit to continue in a position of educational trust.”