Hitch

To the Editors:

The National Endowment for the Humanities has informed me that after further checking with their civil-service experts they find that unpaid consultants need not sign the employment affidavits abandoning the rights to assert the right to strike and to advocate the “overthrow” of the government. (See my letter, New York Review, October 10, 1968.) For those who for one reason or another do not wish to be paid (e.g., Fellows of my Institute do not accept any fees from the United States Government), this may end or minimize the problem.

Paid consultantships do, however, require the affidavits. This has no doubt long worked quietly to keep the most outspoken and freeminded intellectuals out of government consultantships in the agencies that naturally do not want them—DOD, HEW, Peace Corps, etc.; but it seems especially obnoxious in agencies allegedly committed specifically to the free intellectual. Indeed, it raises the question whether even these agencies, having accepted the general Federal practice without a fuss, understand what free inquiry is.

Arthur I. Waskow

Resident Fellow

Institute for Policy Studies

Washington, D.C.