A point often raised regarding studies in this area is the limitation placed upon them by the American distrust of Communism which has expressed itself in many Congressional investigations as well as the public and private attempts to root out from the various important fields open or secret Communists or fellow-travellers. This point is raised by Professor James F. Clarke of the University of Indiana:[45] In more recent times a similar blind emotional reaction to Communism as well as partisan evaluations of the Soviet Union have constituted a threat to the free and rational expansion of East European studies. Today, college students, teachers, and administrators interested in the area dominated by Communism, while they may not yield to anti-Communist hysterics, must at the same time heed its potential effect on parents, taxpayers, legislators, trustees and employers. It is the opinion of the present writer that such arguments serve merely to cover the failure of the scholars to interpret the complications of the Soviet mode of thought to an American audience. The Aesopian language in which so much of the current Communist propaganda is couched, both for home and foreign consumption, and the belief that truth is what is best at the moment for the Communist Party, have laid a responsibility upon students of Eastern Europe, a burden not borne by the more established subjects where the sources are less subject to deliberate falsification. In addition to this, certain men who followed, during World War II, the tendency to gloss over the cruelties of the Soviet Union on behalf of mutual understanding and a misinterpreted liberalism now find it difficult to disavow some of their most tendentious writings. This by no means implies that they are either Communists or fellow-travellers but they deliberately closed their eyes to unpleasant situations, and now shrink from admitting the full truth. As we have noted above, few, if any, of the outstanding scholars of Slavic have accepted Communist ideas. The burden of Communist infiltration in the past, and in the present, has been in departments and subjects that might be considered most immune to them, especially some of the natural sciences which have only recently become subjects for international intrigue and spying. For this reason, the fears of being labeled a Communist are far less vital than the pressure that has been exerted at many different periods to present Communism as a liberal doctrine that is in harmony with American ideals. It is this misplaced liberalism that has been responsible for what the author of the article quoted calls “anti-Communist hysterics.”