Write an article about The freedom struggle at Harvard began over a century ago .Organize the content with appropriate headings and subheadings (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6), Retain any existing tags from
Over the past century, whenever America’s leading universities came under attack by the federal government, they almost always caved in. Defying this dismal record, Harvard president Alan M Garber is taking an exceptionally bold stand in the face of threats to cut off research funds and bar international students – threats far more menacing than those made during earlier conflicts. But Garber cannot defend US higher education alone. He needs allies.
Yes, over 220 university presidents and heads of academic associations have signed a statement in support of Harvard, but are those signatories prepared to resist attacks by President Donald Trump on their own institutions? Will they rise up to fight alongside Harvard? Or will they remain silent or actively collaborate, as so many did in earlier times?
Ours is an ignoble history. In 1917, after the US entered the Great War, Congress passed emergency laws, aimed primarily against pacifists, impinging on constitutionally protected rights.
At Columbia University, president Nicholas Murray Butler, a celebrated pacifist, declared: “There is and will be no place in Columbia University, either on the rolls of its faculties or on the rolls of its students for any person who opposes or who counsels opposition to the effective enforcement of the laws of the US, or who acts, speaks or writes treason.”
Over the summer, two pacifist professors, James McKeen Cattell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, defied the injunction and were summarily fired. The distinguished historian Charles A Beard resigned in protest. Even though he supported the war, “thousands of my countrymen do not share this view,” he wrote.
“Their opinions cannot be changed by curses and bludgeons. Arguments to their reason and understanding are our best hope.” Two years earlier, several Columbia faculty members, including John Dewey and Edwin RA Seligman, co-founded the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to defend academic freedom nationwide.
In response to the rising level of persecution, Beard joined a group of outspoken academics, journalists, and philanthropists who had decided to open a new academic institution that honoured freedom of expression.
While the planning committee was hard at work, mainstream academic institutions continued to capitulate, encouraged to do so by the AAUP, which concluded in 1918 that universities should censor speech during wartime. Three years after its founding, the AAUP now refused to defend pacifist professors who were losing their jobs for publicly expressing dissident views.
The repression continued after the war ended, but now the enemy was Communism. In this highly charged atmosphere, the New School for Social Research opened in February 1919, with a star-studded faculty, most of whom had ties to Columbia. A week later, newspapers launched a smear campaign against the school, and federal agents began sitting in on classes.
That year, US attorney-general A Mitchell Palmer authorised “raids” across the country to round up anarchists, communists and other so-called radicals, while New York State’s Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate Seditious Activities targeted the New School, among other institutions, accusing it of having ties to Communism.
Politically harassed and deeply in debt, the New School soldiered on. In 1922, Alvin Johnson, one of its founders, took over what had become a failing experiment and turned it into the country’s pre-eminent centre of continuing education; offering lectures by cutting-edge, often controversial figures in politics, economics, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, and in the performing, literary, and visual arts.
When Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933, Johnson created within the New School a university in exile, securing visas for refugee scholars and artists while operating on a shoestring budget at the height of the Great Depression, by which point the US had essentially closed its borders to immigrants.
Between 1933 and 1945, Johnson relied on private donors and philanthropies, especially the Rockefeller Foundation, to save nearly 200 scholars and artists from the Nazis. Indeed, the Rockefeller Foundation gave the New School much more money than it had intended, because with few exceptions (including the University of Chicago and America’s historically Black colleges), other academic institutions had turned their backs on scholars fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe (even though Rockefeller had offered to foot the bill).
The next wave of domestic repression began with the Cold War. In March 1947, president Harry Truman issued an executive order authorising the dismissal of “disloyal persons” from government jobs. This “loyalty programme” also called on the US attorney-general to identify “subversive organisations” across the country.
By 1948, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, later chaired by Joseph McCarthy, and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), established a decade earlier, had joined the campaign to weed out alleged communists. The following year, universities across the country, facing pressure from the federal government and state legislatures, started firing faculty members.
Few academic leaders resisted. In Illinois, however, when a special legislative committee accused members of the University of Chicago and Roosevelt University of belonging to “Communist-front” organisations, the university’s chancellor, Robert Hutchins, pushed back, and the committee dropped the case.
For the most part, universities and academic associations remained silent, including the AAUP, which turned its back on blacklisted professors who had appealed to it for help. The American Association of Universities (AAU) published a full-throated endorsement of HUAC in The Atlantic, signed by the presidents of 37 research universities.
Not every academic leader can match the courage of Beard, Johnson, and Hutchins. But their integrity and courage should be the standard against which we judge university leaders today. Garber meets that standard, as do a handful of others. May many more leaders rise to the occasion to defend the future of US higher education.
Judith Friedlander is emerita professor of anthropology at Hunter College.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.
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