BERKELEY, Calif. -- James Cherville was embarking on a teaching career at Berkeley in the chill of the Cold War when the edict came down: Sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath or get out.
He refused to sign, but not before some soul-searching -- "I had a wife and kids."Teaching assistant Ralph Giesey also refused the oath and was fired. When he was offered a second contract, he felt he had no choice but to sign.
"For the TAs, there wasn't much choice. Even the assistant professors who did not have tenure -- it was quite a peril to lose the job," he said.
Giesey and his colleagues would work under the oath for three years before the California Supreme Court in 1952 ordered that those who had refused to sign be reinstated, and it would take years afterward for the fear and mistrust that had spawned similar loyalty oaths across the nation to begin to dissipate.
Cherville, Giesey and dozens of other loyalty oath veterans gathered on the Berkeley campus last week -- half a century after being forced to chose between pay and principles -- to reminisce about the days the Cold War wrapped chilly tentacles around the academic towers of the University of California system.
"One of the great mysteries of the University of California is this," said former UC President Clark Kerr, then a junior faculty member who signed the oath but went on to champion non-signers. "How could it be that the . . . university could have been so triumphant academically and also been convulsed by academic turmoil?"
The turmoil began when UC regents, acting on a proposal by UC President Robert Gordon Sproul, demanded that employees sign an oath disavowing any party advocating the overthrow of the government.
That was later revised to an oath denying membership in the Communist Party.
In 1950, regents fired 31 faculty members who refused to sign -- not because they were Communists, but because they believed it infringed on academic independence.
Among those axed was UCLA physicist David Saxon.
"In 1949, the first Russian atomic bomb was tested, and in 1949 we had the University of California loyalty oath," Saxon said at the Berkley symposium last week.
"On that scale, the University of California loyalty oath was pretty small potatoes, but it was nonetheless an important event, and it was a very disruptive event."
Saxon, who was later reinstated and in 1975 became UC president, said he wasn't motivated to rebel against the oath because of ideology but because he saw a breakdown in university government. Sproul may have had good intentions, he said, but he failed to "follow his solemn responsibility to shield the university from external forces and pressure."
The dispute over the loyalty oath ended legally in 1952 after some non-signers sued and the state Supreme Court ruled they should be reinstated.
The regents rescinded the loyalty oath, but for several years afterward, UC employees were required to sign a state oath declaring they did not belong to any organization advocating the overthrow of the United States and listing any such groups to which they had belonged in the previous five years.
State and federal courts later ruled it violated the freedom of speech and association.
Even after 50 years, the loyalty oath affair still casts a shadow -- it has been invoked recently by scientists fighting a proposal to require widespread polygraph testing at the nuclear weapons labs UC manages.
For those who were on campus in 1949, the struggle changed their views of government and their lives.
Cherville, now 79, had planned to start a career teaching at Berkeley's extension branch when he was confronted with the oath.
He had worked with German prisoners of war while in the Army and was "very suspicious" of government-mandated oaths, he said, so he refused to sign.
"I just felt hypocritical after dealing with that kind of situation," he said last week.
Things worked out for Cherville. He was hired by the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, taught at San Francisco State University and became an English professor at Brown University.
But he remembers vividly the year when his future seemed to hang on a signature.
"It was a very tough decision, but one I felt I had to make," he said.