Abbott Lawrence Lowell - Academic Freedom

Academic Freedom

During World War I, when American universities were under great pressure to demonstrate their unambiguous commitment to the American war effort, Harvard under Lowell established a distinguished record of independence. The New York Times later wrote that Lowell "steadfastly refused to accede to the demands of the hysterically patriotic that German subjects be dropped from the curriculum." When a Harvard alumnus threatened to withdraw a ten-million-dollar bequest unless a certain pro-German professor was dismissed, the Harvard Corporation refused to submit to his demand. Lowell's uncompromising statement in support of academic freedom was a landmark event at a time when other universities were demanding compliant behavior from their faculty.

He similarly defended a student's anti-German poem with a statement of principle in defense of free speech within the academic community. In 1915, Kuno Meyer a professor at the University of Berlin who was considering a temporary Harvard appointment, protested the publication of an undergraduate's satirical poem in a college magazine. Lowell replied that freedom of speech played a different role in American universities than in their German counterparts. "We have endeavored to maintain the right of all members of the university to express themselves freely, without censorship or supervision by the authorities of the university, and have applied this rule impartially to those who favor Germany and those who favor the Allies—to the former in the face of a pretty violent agitation for muzzling professors by alumni of the university and outsiders."

During the Boston police strike of 1919, Lowell called upon Harvard's students "to help in any way...to maintain order and support the laws of the Commonwealth" by providing security in place of the strikers. Harold Laski, a tutor in political science of socialist views and still too young to have a scholarly reputation, supported the strikers. Members of the University's Board of Overseers began to talk of dismissing Laski, which provoked a threat from Lowell: "If the Overseer's ask for Laski's resignation they will get mine!"

Harvard's Professor Zechariah Chafee paid tribute to Lowell's defense of Harvard's teachers and students by dedicating his 1920 study Free Speech in the United States to Lowell, "whose wisdom and courage in the face of uneasy fears and stormy criticism made it unmistakably plain that so long as he was president no one could breathe the air of Harvard and not be free."