In his original article Mr. Lowe argued as if any policy based on an inference about membership in a class as such, when applied to individuals, was an instance of “vicious intellectualism.” His use of illustrations from natural science showed that he was making the argument completely general. All I was concerned to show is that there are situations in which a policy based on this mode of argument is perfectly legitimate. He now admits that there are some situations in which this is a reasonable procedure, in which there is nothing intellectually vicious in formulating a policy based on the assumption that despite differences among individuals of a class, particular instances will exhibit the generic trait of the class. He explicitly asserts that “this assumption is sufficiently reasonable for many subject-matters, many respects, and many purposes” but denies that it is ever sufficiently reasonable for an educational policy towards Communist Party college teachers.

One would have imagined that an empiricist, before reaching conclusions about a reasonable policy in this connection, would have familiarized himself with the relevant evidence about the Communist Party, how it is organized and how it functions, instead of deducing a policy from general methodological considerations.

Our “subject-matter” is Communist Party members on college campuses and in research laboratories with “respect” to their reliability in fulfillment of their academic trust, in relation to “the purpose” of upholding intellectual integrity and preventing educational subversion.

The very way in which Mr. Lowe poses the question under discussion reveals that he disregards highly relevant evidence. The question about X, according to him, is whether “his membership, because of what we know about the Party’s attitude toward objective teaching and research, is sufficient ground for dismissing him without examining his performance as teacher and scholar.” This is inadequate. The form in which I have discussed it—which is presumably the target of his criticism—is this:

In virtue of what we know:

(a) about the Party’s official instructions secretly to indoctrinate, recruit, and propagandize,

(b) about the activities of members of the Communist Party on the campus, in laboratories, and the way they change their tune with every change in the party line,

(c) about the selective nature of Communist Party membership and the conditions of continued membership, and

(d) the probable disorganization of the academic community which would result from the attempt to check on classroom indoctrination and other Communist practices,

are we not justified in regarding members of the C.P. as bad educational risks, and proclaiming and enforcing by faculty action a policy of exclusion, without necessarily waiting until we have the evidence that individual members of the C.P. have actually carried out their instructions? . . .

I should now insert as (e) in the above argument what I had always taken for granted until I read Mr. Lowe’s reply, viz., that if members of the Communist Party were to succeed in their actions, they would be exercising harmful influence on the minds, moral character, and possibly the whole tenor of the lives of students whom they succeeded in enrolling or indoctrinating. . . .

I have italicized (c), which Mr. Lowe completely ignores, because it has an important bearing on the reliability of our judgments about the untrustworthiness of members of the Communist Party. For it is sometimes asked: What reason is there to believe, aside from instructions and past activities of Communists, that official instructions are carried out? The answer is largely provided by (c).

What, then, do we know about the selective nature of Communist Party membership and the conditions of continued membership? As I write I have before me a copy of Our School and the World, an anonymously published but widely distributed shop paper by a Communist Party cell issued a few years ago on the campus of a large eastern university. Under the rubric “Communist Literature for the Professor,” it asks its readers to judge the Communist Party not by what others say about it but by its own official literature. Let us turn to this literature. “In drawing professionals into the Party,” writes [W. Z.] Foster, the leader of the Party in its official organ, “care should be taken to select only those individuals who show by practical work that they definitely understand the Party line, are prepared to put it into effect, and especially display a thorough readiness to accept Party discipline.” What this means is made clear in a Resolution of the Ninth Convention of the C.P.U.S.A.: “All Communists must at all times take a position on every question that is in line with the policies of the party . . .” (my italics throughout).

We also know that the C.P. weeds its ranks carefully by purge and re-registration and other forms of control. Not everyone who applies for membership is selected. Not everyone is retained after he is selected. The C.P. is not a tea-drinking, merely dues-paying organization. Inactive members are excluded. “Bad” Communists are excluded. There exists a Central Control Commission whose task is to check on all members. In earlier years, before the practice became dangerous to the Party, lists of members dropped for violations of party discipline were published.

We therefore have excellent reasons to believe that “good” Communists follow the party line not because—as Lowe would say—“Ah! the type again,” but because of the verifiable fact that efficient mechanisms operate to exclude those who do not. . . .

So far, then, as “good” conduct of members of the Communist Party on the campus is concerned, we can not evaluate it as we do the conduct of other teachers because the presumption of good faith is lacking and empirical evidence of bad faith is present in virtue of the series of acts which constitute continuing membership. . . . Theoretically, if we had a vast amount of time and resources at our disposal, it would not be impossible to get to the bottom of things in each case and discover who has been deceiving whom, and will continue to deceive. But we haven’t the time and resources. And if we had, why should we?—since (i) the teacher is free to resign from the party with whose instructions he disagrees, and since (ii) the process of continued supervision of Communist Party teachers in the classroom, laboratories, and the quiet hours of library and office conferences Lowe writes about, and the necessarily close interrogation of students and colleagues to check up on such teachers, would be not only degrading but would poison the atmosphere of any decent academic community.

Source: Journal of Philosophy 49, no. 4 (February 14, 1952), 112–18.