Source: Inside Higher Ed
4-19-11
Richard Ohmann is Benjamin Waite Professor of English Emeritus at Wesleyan University. This essay is adapted from a talk by the author this month at New York University's Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center. I'll sketch out a claim that academic freedom flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s, then consider why, then ask what may be learned from that time to help us understand and act in our time. My argument will not yield a happy ending, but maybe a bracing one.To clarify: opposition to the Vietnam War became noisy by 1965. Many professors had been critical of U.S. policy well before that year (Hans Morgenthau's articles in The New Republic and elsewhere were especially important to me.) A student movement, led by Students for a Democratic Society for a while, had made the war its main issue. Teach-ins began shortly after the bombing of North Vietnam, in 1965, and spread rapidly from campus to campus. These usually took the form of debates, but anti-war arguments drew the crowds and interest. Most of the anti-war speakers were faculty members. Many had tenure and reputation: Morganthau, Anatol Rapoport, William Appleman Williams, Eric Wolf, Stanley Hoffman, Herbert Marcuse, Seymour Melman -- a mix of establishment scholars and rebel professors. Some were untenured faculty members or grad students. Of these, some lost jobs (Staughton Lynd), some never became college teachers (Jerry Rubin), some became famous professors (Joan Wallach Scott). Opposition to the teach-ins was fierce. For an extreme example, in a letter to The New York Times, Richard Nixon accused Eugene Genovese of “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” (i.e., of treason, punishable by death) for saying, at the Rutgers University teach-in, that he would welcome a Viet Cong victory....Did anyone lose a tenured professorship for antiwar speech during this period? Not to my knowledge. Doubtless, activism against the war counted as at least an unspoken reason for refusing to tenure some junior faculty members, and to block initial job offers to others. Interestingly, of the "Boston 5" -- Benjamin Spock, Mitchell Goodman, Marcus Raskin, William Sloane Coffin, Michael Sperber -- charged with violating the Social Security Act in a kind of show trial, the only academic, Sperber, a grad student, eventually went on to a solid academic career. I mean this loose bundle of facts to show why I think academic freedom worked splendidly (better than the First Amendment) to protect speech and other kinds of protest against and resistance to a major war. Now, to broaden the claim....
