Abstract
In delivering his 1916 annual report, American Association of University Professors (AAUP) president and Northwestern University Law School dean John H. Wigmore noted of academic freedom: “This is a world-old theme. …[It] is not a problem to be solved in a year or in ten years by this Association or by any other.”1 Wigmore knew well that the AAUP’s recent claim for academic freedom, though an important step, was part of a much longer struggle that had played itself out in the battles over sectarian control of colleges, debates about slavery and abolition, divides over economics and politics, and disagreements about disinterested research and political advocacy. The founding of Wigmore’s association and the concurrent beginnings of other educational and voluntary associations marked a new and vital era in the understandings and experience of faculty work, but the longer history of conflict over faculty rights and responsibilities set the stage for these modern conditions while highlighting their contested nature. With no unifying themes and few published statements on issues that would later be thought of as involving academic freedom—itself a term that did not appear until the late nineteenth century—much of this early development can be understood in terms of key and illustrative cases that cumulatively affected nascent ideas of academic freedom but also reveal complex understandings and perspectives.2
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Notes
John H. Wigmore, “President’s Report for 1916,” Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 2 (November 1916): 9–52, 14. In ensuing references to the journal, including to those after its name was changed to the American Association of University Professors Bulletin, the association’s name is shortened to AAUP.
Although Hofstadter and Metzger appropriately cautioned that emphasizing cases can create a martyrology of faculty whose freedoms were violated, cases still offer some of the best evidence of key ideas in development. Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), ix–x.
Richard Hofstadter, Academic Freedom in the Age of the College (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 3.
Ibid. See also Ralph F. Fuchs, “Academic Freedom—Its Basic Philosophy, Function, and History,” Law and Contemporary Problems 28 (Summer 1963): 431–46, 431.
The extent to which freedom existed in medieval universities remains contested. See Fuchs, “Academic Freedom”; William J. Courtenay, “Inquiry and Inquisition: Academic Freedom in Medieval Universities,” Church History 58 (June 1989): 168–81;
Charles Homer Haskins, The Rise of Universities (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957), 51, 54;
Hofstadter, Academic Freedom, 12; Russell Kirk, Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition (Chicago: Regnery, 1955), 13–18.
Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636–1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 19; Hofstadter, Academic Freedom, 86–91.
Hofstadter, Academic Freedom, 178; William J. Hoye, “The Religious Roots of Academic Freedom,” Theological Studies 58 (September 1997): 409–28, 410–14.
Roger L. Geiger, “Introduction to the Transaction Edition,” in Academic Freedom in the Age of the College, ed. Richard Hofstadter (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1996), vii–xxiv;
Roger L. Geiger, ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000);
James McLachlan, “The American College in the Nineteenth Century: Toward a Reappraisal,” Teachers College Record 80 (December 1978): 287–306.
Thomas Jefferson to Mr. Roscoe, 27 December 1829, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson 7, ed. Henry A. Washington (Washington, DC: Taylor & Maury, 1854), 195–97, 196.
Wayne Hamilton Wiley, “Academic Freedom at the University of Virginia: The First Hundred Years—From Jefferson through Alderman” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1973), 99–106;
Gordon E. Baker, “Thomas Jefferson on Academic Freedom,” Bulletin of the AAUP 39 (Autumn 1953): 377–87; Hofstadter, Academic Freedom, 240–41.
Thomas Jefferson to General Robert Taylor, 16 May 1820, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson 15–16, ed. Albert Ellery Bergh, Andrew Adgate Lipscomb, and Richard Holland Johnston (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1905), 252–56, 256.
Michael Sugrue, “‘We Desired Our Future Rulers to Be Educated Men’: South Carolina College, the Defense of Slavery, and the Development of Secessionist Politics,” History of Higher Education Annual 14 (1994): 39–72, 52.
Kirk, Academic Freedom, 21–22; Christopher J. Lucas, American Higher Education: A History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 304–5;
Erving E. Beauregard, History of Academic Freedom in Ohio: Case Studies in Higher Education, 1808–1976 (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 19–29;
Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 222; Hofstadter, Academic Freedom, 260. Known controversies existed at Bowdoin College, Centre College, Dartmouth College, Denison University, Dickinson College, Franklin College, the University of Georgia, Harvard University, the University of Iowa, Jefferson College of Mississippi, Kenyon College, Lane Theological Seminary, Miami University, the University of North Carolina, Oberlin College, the College of South Carolina, and Western Reserve College.
Eaton, Freedom-of-Thought Struggle, 228–29. On the history of textbook struggles, see Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003);
Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Monty Woodall Cox, “Freedom During the Fremont Campaign: The Fate of One North Carolina Republican in 1856,” North Carolina Historical Review 45 (October 1968): 357–83;
Michael Thomas Smith, A Traitor and a Scoundrel: Benjamin Hedrick and the Cost of Dissent (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 63–87;
C[ornelia] P. Spencer, “Old Times in Chapel Hill, No. XVII: Prof. Hedrick’s Case,” North Carolina University Magazine n.s. 10, no. 1 (1890): 43–56.
Kemp P. Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, vol. 1, From Its Beginning to the Death of President Swain, 1780–1868 (Raleigh, NC: Edwards & Broughton, 1907), 655.
Laurence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965);
Walter P. Metzger, Academic Freedom in the Age of the University (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 4–133;
Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Robert L. Adams, “Conflict over Charges of Heresy in American Protestant Seminaries,” Social Compass 17 (April 1970): 243–59;
Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 67–73; W. P. Metzger, Academic Freedom, 46–92.
Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York: Appleton, 1896), 1:ix. See also, W. P. Metzger, Academic Freedom, 53n26; Ronald L. Numbers, “Science and Religion,” Osiris, 2nd ser., 1, Historical Writing on American Science (1985): 59–80.
Mary Engel, “A Chapter in the History of Academic Freedom: The Case of Alexander Winchell,” History of Education Journal 7 (Summer 1956): 157–64; “Alexander Winchell: An Editorial Tribute,” American Geologist 9 (February 1892): 71–148, 109–11;
Paul K. Conkin, Gone with the Ivy: A Biography of Vanderbilt University (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985): 60–63; A. D. White, History of the Warfare, 313–16.
A. D. White, History of the Warfare, 316–18; Clement Eaton, “Professor James Woodrow and the Freedom of Teaching in the South,” Journal of Southern History 28 (February 1962): 3–17.
Ronald L. Numbers and Lester D. Stephens, “Darwinism in the American South,” in Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender, ed. Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 123–44.
Carol Gruber made a similar point in relation to World War I. Carol S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), 174.
Kent Sagendorph, Michigan: The Story of the University (New York: Dutton, 1948), 93;
Jeffrey P. Bouman, “Nonsectarian, not Secular: Students’ Curricular and Co-curricular Experience with Christian Faith at Brown University, the University of Michigan, and Cornell University, 1850–1920” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2004), 109–10.
That there were extreme restrictions based on sex and race is, of course, true. The professoriate was overwhelmingly white, male, and Protestant well into the twentieth century. Patricia Albjerg Graham, “Expansion and Exclusion: A History of Women in American Higher Education,” Signs 3 (Summer 1978): 759–73; James D. Anderson, “Race, Meritocracy, and the American Academy during the Immediate Post-World War II Era,” History of Education Quarterly 33 (Summer 1993): 151–75.
Hugh Hawkins, Pioneer: The History of the Johns Hopkins University, 1874–1889 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 69–72, 189.
Morris Bishop, A History of Cornell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), 192–93; Bouman, “Nonsectarian, not Secular”; W. P. Metzger, Academic Freedom, 66.
Porter to Sumner, 6 December 1879, in Harris E. Starr, William Graham Sumner (New York: Holt, 1925), 346–47, 346.
Ibid., 357–66; W. P. Metzger, Academic Freedom, 61–64. Historical treatments have generally lauded Sumner to the neglect of Porter. For arguments more supportive of Porter, see George Levesque, “Noah Porter Revisited,” Perspectives on the History of Higher Education 26 (2007): 29–66; George M. Marsden, Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 123–33.
Charles W. Pearson, “Open Inspiration Versus a Closed Canon and Infallible Bible,” Open Court 16 (March 1902): 175–81, 175.
Robert E. Bisbee, “An Echo of the Inquisition,” Arena 27 (June 1902): 592–603. See also Marsden, Soul of the American University, 280.
W. P. Metzger, Academic Freedom, 93–138; Walter P. Metzger, “The German Contribution to the American Theory of Academic Freedom,” Bulletin of the AAUP 41 (Summer 1955): 214–30.
Charles Franklin Thwing, The American and the German University: One Hundred Years of History (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 144.
Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 15;
Clyde W. Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894–1928 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 187; W. P. Metzger, Academic Freedom.
Andrew F. West, “What Is Academic Freedom?” North American Review 140 (May 1885): 432–44.
See also Henry W. Farnam, “Academic Freedom in Germany,” New Englander and Yale Review 46 (January 1887): 67–71;
N. S. Shaler, “The Problem of Discipline in Higher Education,” Atlantic Monthly 64 (July 1889): 24–37, 30;
Albion Small, “Academic Freedom,” Arena 22 (October 1899): 463–72;
Walter P. Metzger, “Essay II,” in Freedom and Order in the University, ed. Samuel Gorovitz (Cleveland, OH: Press of Western Reserve University, 1967), 59–71, 63; W. P. Metzger, Academic Freedom, 123–24.
Schrecker, No Ivory Tower, 15; Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of the Social Sciences (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975), 127.
Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity, 127–42; A. W. Coats, “Henry Carter Adams: A Case Study in the Emergence of the Social Sciences in the United States, 1850–1900,” Journal of American Studies 2 (October 1968): 177–97;
Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 171–73; “Sibley College Lectures—XI,” Scientific American Supplement 555 (August 21, 1886): 8861–63; “Sibley College Lectures—XI,” Scientific American Supplement 556 (August 28, 1886): 8877–80.
H. C. Adams to J. B. Angell, 15 March 1887, as cited by Joseph Dorfman in “Introductory Essay: Henry Carter Adams, the Harmonizer of Liberty and Reform,” in Henry Carter Adams, Relation of the State to Industrial Action and Economics and Jurisprudence: Two Essays, ed. Joseph Dorfman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 1–55, 38.
Arthur G. Beach, A Pioneer College: The Story of Marietta (Chicago: Privately printed, 1935), 226–27; Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity, 222–28; W. P. Metzger, Academic Freedom, 149–51; Beauregard, History of Academic Freedom, 36–40.
W. P. Metzger, Academic Freedom, 162–71; Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity, 229–57. See also Howard Bromberg, “Revising History,” Stanford Magazine (March–April 1996): 116; Warren J. Samuels, “The Firing of E. A. Ross from Stanford University: Injustice Compounded by Deception?” Journal of Economic Education 22 (Spring 1991): 183–90.
Ralph E. Reed Jr., “Emory College and the Sledd Affair of 1902: A Case Study in Southern Honor and Racial Attitudes,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 72 (Fall 1988): 463–92, 471. On Felton, see John Erwin Talmadge, Rebecca Latimer Felton (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1960).
Reed, “Emory College”; Henry Y. Warnock, “Andrew Sledd, Southern Methodists, and the Negro: A Case Study,” Journal of Southern History 31 (August 1965): 251–71;
Terry L. Matthews, “The Voice of a Prophet: Andrew Sledd Revisited,” Journal of Southern Religion 6 (December 2003): 1–13; Matthews, “Emergence of a Prophet,” 162–79.
J. C. Kilgo to W. A Candler, 14 August 1902, in Earl W. Porter, Trinity and Duke, 1892–1924 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1964), 100–101, 100.
Porter, Trinity and Duke, 96–139; W. P. Metzger, Academic Freedom, 172–77. See also Earl W. Porter, “The Bassett Affair: Something to Remember,” South Atlantic Quarterly 72 (Autumn 1973): 451–60.
Joseph L. Morrison, “Josephus Daniels and the Bassett Academic Freedom Case,” Journalism Quarterly 39 (Spring 1962): 187–95; Porter, Trinity and Duke, 79–84, 104–5, 131–32, 135.
Bruce Clayton, The Savage Ideal: Intolerance and Intellectual Leadership in the South, 1890–1914 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972): 127–28.
On Kilgo, see Joseph M. Stetar, “In Search of a Direction: Southern Higher Education after the Civil War,” History of Education Quarterly 25 (Autumn 1985): 341–67.
Porter, Trinity and Duke, 122–31; Clayton, Savage Ideal, 84–99; Fred Arthur Bailey, William Edward Dodd: The South’s Yeoman Scholar (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 38–39.
Theodore Roosevelt, “At Durham, N. C., October 19, 1905,” in Presidential Addresses and State Papers of Theodore Roosevelt 4 (New York: Collier & Sons, [1905]), 478–81, 479.
William E. Dodd, “Some Difficulties of the History Teacher in the South,” South Atlantic Quarterly 3 (April 1904): 117–22. Bassett, a close friend, offered his support for Dodd in an editorial, arguing that critics inherently challenge conservatism and threaten those who benefit from the status quo but that they should be praised for generating conversation and prompting change. John Spencer Bassett, “The Task of the Critic,” South Atlantic Quarterly 3 (October 1904): 297–301.
William E. Dodd, “Freedom of Speech in the South,” Nation 84 (April 25, 1907): 383–84, 383.
Enoch Marvin Banks, “A Semi-Centennial View of Secession,” Independent 70 (February 9, 1911): 299–303. Sledd used his settlement money from Emory to complete his doctorate at Yale University and then taught for a year at Southern University in Greensboro, Alabama, prior to his appointment at Florida. In 1909, he was removed as part of a larger political struggle that also included concerns over his efforts to raise academic standards. Sledd then served as president of Southern before Candler, in his role as chancellor, brought him back to Emory.
On Sledd at Florida, see Carl Van Ness, “Florida’s Sledd Affair: Andrew Sledd and the Fight for Higher Education in Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 87 (Winter 2009): 319–51.
Fred Arthur Bailey, “Free Speech at the University of Florida: The Enoch Marvin Banks Case,” Florida Historical Quarterly 71 (July 1992): 1–17.
See also Seth Weitz, “Defending the Old South: The Myth of the Lost Cause and Political Immorality in Florida, 1865–1968,” Historian 71 (Spring 2009): 79–92.
Andrew Sledd, “The Dismissal of Professor Banks,” Independent 70 (May 25, 1911): 1113.
Eric Anderson and Alfred Moss, Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902–1930 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 44–45.
Warren A. Candler, Dangerous Donations and Degrading Doles, or A Vast Scheme for Capturing and Controlling the Colleges and Universities of the Country ([Atlanta?]: Author, 1909), 12.
The landmark work in the field is James D. Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
E. Anderson and Moss, in Dangerous Donations, have viewed the philanthropists in a more favorable light. See also Marybeth Gasman, “Education in Black and White: New Perspectives on the History of Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” Teachers College Record, Date Published: January 25, 2006, http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 12302.
Elmer Ellsworth Brown, “Academic Freedom,” Educational Review 19 (March 1900): 209–31;
Thomas Elmer Will, “A Menace to Freedom: The College Trust,” Arena 26 (September 1901): 244–57, reprinted in The American Concept of Academic Freedom in Formation: A Collection of Essays and Reports, ed. Walter P. Metzger (New York: Arno Press, 1977).
John Dewey, “Academic Freedom,” Educational Review 23 (January 1902): 1–14.
Charles F. Thwing, College Administration (New York: Century, 1900), 92.
Charles W. Eliot, “Academic Freedom,” Science n.s. 36 (July 5, 1907): 1–12, 6;
Nicholas Murray Butler, “Academic Freedom,” Educational Review 47 (March 1914): 291–94, 291.
Andrew F. West, “The Changing Conception of ‘The Faculty’ in American Universities,” Association of American Universities, Proceedings of the Annual Conference 7 (1906): 65–73, 66.
Ibid.; Karen Christine Nelson, “Historical Origins of the Linkage of Academic Freedom and Faculty Tenure” (PhD diss., University of Denver, 1984), 40;
Edward T. Silva and Sheila A. Slaughter, Serving Power: The Making of the Academic Social Science Expert (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 276.
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© 2012 Timothy Reese Cain
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Cain, T.R. (2012). Academic Freedom in Development. In: Establishing Academic Freedom. Higher Education and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137009548_1
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