On Bowles, Friedman, and the Loyalty Oath

In March of 1966 the economist Sam Bowles was threatened with dismissal by Harvard University for refusing to sign the following oath of allegiance:

The oath had been required of all teachers in the state since 1935, including those employed at private institutions.

I understand from conversations with Sam that he had no particular objection to the text of the oath, but believed that the requirement to sign it was unconstitutional. As a result, he risked losing a job that he had begun just a few month earlier, at the age of twenty-six. He was married with two children at the time.

Sam was not the first to refuse to sign the oath, but he was among the last. The requirement was indeed judged unconstitutional in April 1967 following a challenge by Joseph Pedlosky, then an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at MIT. As it happens, the ruling in Pedlosky v. Massachusetts Institute of Technology was based not on freedom of speech concerns, but rather on the vagueness of the pledge to discharge one’s duties to the best of one’s ability:

The courts are exposed to the very real possibility of being asked to determine the degree of skill and faithfulness with which the plaintiff discharges the duties of his private position in teaching mathematics and perhaps to compare that degree with that of the best of his ability. This evaluation process is altogether too vague a standard to enforce judicially. It is not a reasonable regulation in the public interest.

While Sam was able to keep his position in the end, there was a period of time during which the outcome was far from certain. During this period, I understand from Sam that he was contacted by the University of Chicago with an offer of employment, and that this offer was supported by Milton Friedman.

This is interesting because Friedman and Bowles were about as ideologically far apart as it was possible to be in the profession at the time.

Four years later, Gottfried Haberler came to hear of Friedman’s support for the offer, and was appalled. He wrote a brief letter to Friedman asking for confirmation, and got the following reply:

Some years back I had occasion to read some of the work which Bowles had done in connection with our consideration of him at that time. I was very favorably impressed indeed by the intellectual quality of the work and the command that it displayed of analytical economics. At that time I was very much in accord with our decision to make him an offer of a position. He turned us down to stay at Harvard.

I have very vague recollections about what has happened this year. I do not know for certain whether or not we did make an offer to him this year. We may have done so; and if so, I would not have objected since the only consideration I would have considered relevant would have been his intellectual qualities.

This speaks well of Friedman, of course. But it also had a deep and lasting effect on Sam, who recalls and occasionally recounts this tale.

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Update: Sam, via email, says

It is a story worth recounting in this highly polarized world. Universities sometimes act like, well, universities.

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Update #2: Sam Bowles and Milton Friedman both sought to influence public opinion and policy, and relished debate. This clip from a debate between the two in 1990 (also featuring Linda Chavez and Gary Becker) is worth a look.