The persecution of Edward Rozek

National Review, Feb 22, 1985 by E.H. McParland

ON APRIL 14, 1983, Edward Rozek, a University of Colorado professor, was charged with 22 felony counts, including theft, embezzlement, forgery, and charitable fraud. The special prosecutor asked the judge to impose a $10,000 bond. Rozek was then handcuffed and taken to jail, where he was fingerprinted and imprisoned for the second time in his life.

The first imprisonment was more than forty years ago, when the young Polish freedom-fighter was caught by the Nazis. This second time was in the United States, in Boulder County, Colorado. Rozek wasn't at all surprised by the first imprisonment. But the second left a scar that won't go away.

Born and reared in Poland, Rozek was about to go to college when the Nazi and Soviet armies invaded his country. Badly wounded during a German attack, Rozek lived for some time in Soviet-occupied Poland before attempting his escape. On his way to the West he was captured by the Nazis and thrown into a concentration camp where he lived for three months in a dungeon four floors underground. Again he managed to escape and this time made his way to England, where he became a reconnaissance officer in the Polish Black Brigade that spear-headed Montgomery's army. He fought from Normandy to the Rhine, winning the Cross of Valor three times before being blinded in an anti-tank explosion. After ten months in the hospital, and a series of operations, he regained his sight. During his stay in the hospital he resolved to begin a new life.

Since his homeland was now under Communist rule, Rozek decided to move to the United States. He arrived in February 1948, without any money, any family, or any profession. He worked his way through Harvard, earning his BA (magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) in 1951. He got his MA from Harvard in 1953 and his PhD in Soviet studies in 1956; that year he arrived at the University of Colorado.

Sweet and Sour

AT FIRST Rozek, a passionate anti-Nazi, was highly appreciated by the University of Colorado's liberal academic community. His first assignment was teaching comparative government, and he was an immediate success. Students flocked to him. His book Allied Wartime Diplomacy was well received by his peers--Walt Rostow called it a "major contribution to modern diplomatic history and a morality tale whose lesson is still to be learned by Americans"--and it won him the National Book Foundation Award. The university couldn't do enough for him and gave him the largest salary increase in his department the first two years he was there.

Things began to sour for Rozek not too long after this, when it became clear that he wasn't only an anti-Nazi but also an anti-Communist. In 1958, Rozek defended an anti-Communist colleague, Associate Professor of Sociology William Peterson, who had been dismissed because of his political views. Although Peterson won reinstatement, the experience persuaded him to leave the university. Rozek, however, remained and bore the brunt of his colleagues' fury.

But Rozek was undeterred. He stirred up a campus long dominated by liberal dogma by exposing it to other ideas. In 1957 he founded the W. F. Dyde Forum, in 1964 the Institute for the Study of Comparative Politics and Ideologies, and in 1974 the Center for Science, Technology, and Political Thought. Under the auspices of these organizations, Rozek brought to the campus distinguished scholars and Nobel Laureates to counterbalance people such as Alger Hiss, Michael Straight, and Noam Chomsky. But unlike the guests of the Left, those invited by Rozek had to endure far more than warm applause.

In 1962, Rozek invited Senator Barry Goldwater to the campus and was severely reprimanded by university officials because he had chastised some Young Socialists who had disrupted Goldwater's speech. In 1969, the university reprimanded Rozek for inviting the linguist S. I. Hayakawa to the campus. Though the SDS and Black Panthers made it impossible for Hayakawa to speak, Rozek was the one blamed for the incident.

By the Seventies the animosity toward Rozek had become institutionalized. He saw his promotions delayed, some of his courses abolished, his salary increases kept to a minimum. He became the subject of slander campaigns waged in the faculty rumor mills and in the student newspaper. But the anti-Rozek campaign got its biggest boost, not from the liberal faculty or the student newspaper, but from Doris Buffett, his ex-wife.

Rozek married Doris Buffett shortly after the sudden death of his wife of 25 years. The marriage lasted less than a year and ended bitterly. In 1980, a short while after their divorce, she went to the University of Colorado Regents and charged Rozek with using the programs he ran to embazzle university money. The university responded to her charges by conducting a comprehensive investigation of Rozek's entire university career. But the Regents could find no improprieties and cleared Rozek of any wrongdoing.

After the university's verdict, Miss Buffett passed documents that she had stolen from Rozek's office to the student newspaper. Spurred by the subsequent articles, the Boulder County District Attorney launched an investigation into "the activities of Edward J. Rozek and Doris Buffett . . . for evidence of the commission of criminal offenses." Boulder County Judge Rex Scott appointed Deputy District Attorney John A. Topolnicki to conduct the investigation.