Nov 28, 2019 3 min read

Some of the best evidence that the Constitutional Convention may have been wise in providing for mandatory retirement of judges at 70 could have been produced in the college community of Clarion last week.

Judge Lloyd F. Weaver of Clarion County is 75 and he will be unable to run for another term when his present term expires. Judge Weaver was also the central figure in a little drama which developed when a girl student editor of the Clarion State College newspaper wrote an editorial condemning conditions at the Clarion County jail.

Judge Weaver, thereupon, convened a hearing at which he called witnesses and interrogated them about the editorial. The witnesses included the girl student who was questioned at length by the Judge, himself, and told point blank that she didn’t know what she was writing about. Our own experience with county jails in rural counties leads us to suspect that the editorial was probably generally accurate.

But the question of whether the aged judge temporarily forgot the rigid constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press or whether he was in some kind of violation of judicial ethics is not the real story of the situation at Clarion.

The real story – a sad one – is that this incident was merely symptomatic of a deep rift between the 6,000 townspeople and 3,000 Clarion students. It is a clash between the conservatism of the community and the liberal attitudes of the students. It is the common rivalry between town and gown, between rural and urban, between the status quo and permissive behavior.

We cannot say that the town is wrong nor that the students are; only that it is a situation that requires much more in tolerance and understanding than either side is willing to put forth.

Even in our community where the town vastly outnumbers the student body of the college there are occasionally instances or incidents that are irksome to the citizens of the town or to the student body so that intense feeling between a town of 6,000 and a student body of 3,000 can be imagined.

The tragedy is that a county judge who must rank as a community leader should fall so short in understanding and tolerance and fail to recognize that he should lend the prestige of his office to healing the breach rather than widening it.

We care about the interference with the right of a free press and we are concerned about the ethical considerations. But most of all we grieve for Judge Weaver’s lack of common sense.