A

ACADEMIC FREEDOM

A Contested Issue

In the 1940s the principle of academic freedom—that university teachers should be free to teach whatever their training and conscience command them to teach—was challenged. Several sensational academic freedom cases developed, signifying increasing political pressure on academia. Some cases were directly related to the volatile politics of the time, especially the anti-Communist hysteria of the late 1940s, but other cases reflected long-standing public suspicions of academia and of intellectuals, especially in terms of their sexual restraint and racial attitudes.

The Bertrand Russell Case

As the decade opened, the Bertrand Russell case was the most sensational academic freedom dispute. Russell was an acclaimed British philosopher and mathematician scheduled to teach classes in logic and mathematics at the City College of New York. A vocal advocate of socialism and sexual permissiveness, Russell became a lightning rod for conservatives. Conservative newspapers denounced him as an "anarchist and moral nihilist," and Catholic theologians mounted a vigorous opposition to him as a "propagandist against religion and morality." Although the New York Board of Education certified him to teach at City College, opponents filed suit in the state supreme court to block the appointment on the grounds of Russell's purported sexual immorality. The conservative judge John McGeehan forbade Russell's appointment, partially on the ludicrous grounds that Russell, one of the world's foremost logicians, was unqualified to teach at the college. The decision was a significant blow to academic freedom, a denial of the right of academics to judge and certify the work of their peers. American academics moved to appeal the Russell case, but their efforts were rendered moot when Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, fearing the political fallout of the case, withdrew the salary for the position from the City College budget. John Dewey, in the past often Russell's philosophical opponent, deplored the decision. "As Americans," he said, "we can only blush with shame for this scar on our repute for fair play."

The Nation Case

A similar instance of political figures sacrificing academic freedom by bowing to conservative pressure groups occurred in the Newark and New York schools in 1948. At issue was a banning of the political journal the Nation from school libraries. The Nation had printed articles highly critical of Roman Catholic authorities in the New York City area. When Catholic authorities protested, the journal was pulled from many public schools. A group of more than one hundred educators and intellectuals, including President Isaiah Bowman of Johns Hopkins University, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the German author Thomas Mann, protested the ban as "a violation of the most fundamental principles of American equality." Political figures from Catholic districts, however, upheld the ban.

Coercive Authority

Other academic freedom cases in the 1940s concerned the independence of college faculty from coercive administrators. In 1941-1942 academics at the University of Georgia had to fend off an attack by Gov. Eugene Talmadge, who sought to integrate the school into a political patronage system. At the University of Chicago in 1944, the faculty senate protested a plan submitted by UC president Robert M. Hutchins to reorganize the campus and abolish academic rank. More than half the members of the faculty senate signed a protest to Chicago's board of trustees, and the case was given wide publicity in the nation's press. Hutchins abandoned the reorganization plan.

Communism and the Schools

The most pressing academic freedom issue throughout the decade, however, was the question of whether professed Communists should be allowed to teach in the nation's schools. The answer was, for the most part, a resounding no. Although Communist teachers, especially in New York, had proven themselves no better or worse than teachers of any other political persuasion, many Americans feared that teachers would use their influence with students to indoctrinate them subtly with Communist ideology. As early as 1941 the American Federation of Teachers withdrew the charters of two teachers' unions in New York for Communist activities. Nonetheless, conservatives feared the presence of hidden Communists in the schools, and feared as well that liberal and progressive educators undermined the moral fiber of students, leaving them easy marks for Communist recruitment. As Allen Zoll, one of the most vitriolic anti-Communist critics put it, "so called progressive education…has had a very deleterious effect upon the original character of American education."

Investigations

Throughout the decade, investigations of the schools were constant. In 1941 the New York assembly appointed the Rapp-Coudert Committee to ferret out Fascist influence in the state's schools, but they quickly turned to Red hunting. Although no evidence of Communist indoctrination in the classroom was ever produced, twenty instructors were fired and eleven more resigned as a result of the Rapp-Coudert investigation. A similar committee in California, led by anti-Communist zealot Jack Tenney, raised charges of Communist subversion in the schools in 1946 and 1947; unlike the cases in New York, no dismissals followed. As in most Communist cases, no evidence existed to confirm suspicions of Communist conspiracies. Nonetheless, private organizations such as the Anti-Communist League of America and the National Council for American Education, led by Zoll, continued to maintain that Communists and Communist sympathizers had infiltrated American schools. Their pressure was such that in 1947 the Truman administration's Office of Education began a program termed "Zeal for American Democracy," designed to instill the proper anti-Communist mentality into the minds of students. In 1949 the House Un-American Activities Committee announced they would begin inspecting text-books for evidence of Communist subversion. The National Education Association voted to ban Communist members in 1949. By 1951 thirty-six states required loyalty oaths of its teachers, requiring that they disavow membership in the Communist Party.

Communism and the Universities

The anti-Communist hysteria did not reach American universities until 1947-1948, but its impact on academic freedom was just as pronounced as it was in the nation's secondary schools. Despite the fact that its president, James B. Conant, had been a leader in the nation's national security apparatus and had coordinated the building of the atomic bomb, Harvard University was a favorite target for anti-Communists, less because there were actual Communist Party members on the faculty than for the fact that there were vocal, leftist professors on the campus who made life miserable for conservatives. Many charged with being Communists were supporters of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party 1948 presidential campaign, including literary critic F. O. Matthiessen, astronomer Harlow Shapley, and historian H. Stuart Hughes. The Asian specialist John K. Fairbank was accused of communism because he accurately forecast that the Communists were gaining support in China. Harvard's prestige generally protected faculty from the more onerous consequences of the Red hunt, and this was also the case at the University of Chicago, where Hutchins successfully parried an anti-Communist attack in 1949. Academic prestige failed to protect faculty at the University of Washington. In 1948 several were expelled from the university for refusing to cooperate with anti-Communist investigators. Western Illinois State College fired two "liberalists" as a result of anti-Communist pressures. Oklahoma began a loyalty oath for university instructors in 1949. A similar measure passed in California in 1949, leading to the dismissals of thirty-one professors the following year. Such cases did far more than ruin the careers of academics; they cast a pall over free thought and academic innovation in education generally and prepared the way for the gray conformism of American education in the 1950s.