I am introducing today a bill to eliminate the loyalty oath provision of the National Defense Education Act of 1958.
This provision, Subsection (F) of Section 1001, presently requires those scholars, scientists, teachers, mathematicians, and other students who apply for a loan or grant under this program to sign an oath of loyalty with an affidavit declaring that they do not believe in, belong to or support any subversive organization. This subsection received very little attention when the bill passed the Congress last year – it should receive more attention now.
No thought was given, to my knowledge, to the question of how this section would be enforced – who would investigate the veracity of these affidavits – who would determine whether students who did not belong to any subversive organization might have said something indicating 'support' – or where the Department of Health, Education and Welfare was going to find the money to police this provision.
Nor was there any discussion as to what danger to the nation was being avoided by this requirement – or why Congress was singling out recipients of Federal scholarships and student loans and not those who receive old age benefits, crop loans or other unrelated payments.
Card-carrying members of the Communist party, of course, have no hesitancy about perjuring themselves in such an affidavit. This provision will not keep them out of the program. But it may well keep out those who resent such a requirement, those who find it distasteful or humiliating, those who are over-apprehensive in their interpretation or who fear unnecessarily the government's interpretation of their views, or those who are conscientiously opposed to test oaths. To be sure, most of those thus excluded by this provision might be said to be non-conformists and dissenters – but surely, in our efforts to attract into scientific pursuits the best talents, the most inquiring minds of our nation, we do not wish to exclude the non-conformists and the dissenters. Those who are willing to sign such an affidavit are not always by that act necessarily proven to be either more loyal or more talented than those who do not sign.
The Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare is understandably concerned about how this provision is to be implemented and its implementation financed. The Presidents of our leading universities – including most recently the Presidents of Yale, Harvard, and Princeton – are understandably concerned about the effect of this provision on the program, on their students and on the academic freedom of their institutions – institutions which, in the words Jefferson prescribed for the University of Virginia, should be "based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind." And we in the Congress should be concerned, Mr. President, as to whether this unnecessary, futile gesture toward the memory of an earlier age will not defeat the very purposes of last year's bill. For, unlike the Soviets, we cannot take steps to keep our brightest minds in scientific careers – but we can take steps that keep them out. That is the great danger of this provision – and I hope this Congress will strike it.
Source: Papers of John F. Kennedy. Pre-Presidential Papers. Senate Files, Box 922, "13 January 1959 - 27 February 1959." John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.
