There should be gratefulness in academic circles for the clarity with which President Lowell has now spoken out on the ever-vexed issue of freedom of speech in the University. On the one hand he has shown what is the new disadvantage that must fall on a college which seeks to exert an actual censorship of the opinions publicly expressed by its professors. Assuming authority to delete what it considers undesirable material, the college becomes incidentally and with fresh weight responsible for the material which it allows to remain. In this way the college loses the right, which it may now justly claim, to insist that the utterances of its many professors are in their essence expressions of personal and not of official opinion. The justice of this position, as it obtains in colleges which have not sought to establish a censorship, is one of the chief points emphasized by President Meiklejohn of Amherst in his recent paper on "Freedom in the College."

On the other hand, within this place for public expression of personal opinion which President Lowell leaves open to the professors, he does not fail to define with all clarity the nature of the obligations which such freedom imposes upon those who would avail themselves of it. It must be used in full and unerring recognition of the responsibility attaching to them as members of a teaching faculty, and never for mere personal ends. In other words, the restraint is moral and ethical. It is because it is moral that it can neither be disregarded with impunity nor enforced by a mere codification of rules for a censorship. --Boston Transcript.