Senate Panel Cancels Vote on 2 Nominees

A Senate committee canceled a vote today on two of President Reagan’s nominees to the National Council on the Humanities, with its staff director saying the panel lacked time to investigate allegations against them.

“The committee has made no judgment” on the nominations of Charles A. Moser and Anthony T. Bouscaren, said Hayden Bryan, staff director of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee.

“There’ve been some questions raised, and we haven’t had time to consider them,” Bryan said. “We just don’t have a chance to delve into it.”

He said it would be “hard to say” whether the committee has effectively killed the nominations. These nominations will die unless Reagan resubmits them to the new Congress next year.

Plagiarism, Censorship

The Senate panel had been scheduled to act today on the nominations of Bouscaren, accused of plagiarism, and Moser, alleged to be a censorship advocate. The National Council on the Humanities reviews grant applications to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Bouscaren, a political science professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., interviewed after learning that he apparently would not be considered for the post, said the allegation of plagiarism “just absolutely dumbfounds me.”

“There was an extensive FBI investigation in which all allegations about me were looked into and refuted,” Bouscaren said. “It’s extraordinary. It’s sort of McCarthyism in reverse.”

Moser, the Administration nominee whom critics accuse of advocating censorship, said, “It’s clear that the whole thing is political.”

‘Political Views’

Moser, a Slavic languages professor at George Washington University here, said, “I have political views on education that a large number of members of the committee do not agree with.”

The furor arose Tuesday when senators received a letter from People for the American Way, a civil liberties group founded by liberal television producer Norman Lear.

The group said the committee should postpone action on Bouscaren and Moser, charging that they “possess neither objectivity nor fair-mindedness. . . . The nominees have demonstrated a hostility and intolerance toward diversity in scholarship, ideas and interests, that is central to the work of NEH.”