Academic Freedom - Controversies - Specific Cases

Specific Cases

While some controversies of academic freedom are reflected in proposed laws that would affect large numbers of students through entire regions, many cases involve individual academicians that express unpopular opinions or share politically unfavorable information. These individual cases may receive widespread attention and periodically test the limits of, and support for, academic freedom.

• The Bassett Affair at Duke University in North Carolina in the early 20th century was an important event in the history of academic freedom. In October 1903, Professor John Bassett publicly praised Booker T. Washington and drew attention to the racism and white supremacist behavior of the Democratic party (the Republican Party was the most liberal and progressive of the two at that time), to the disgust of powerful white Southerners. Many media reports castigated Bassett, and many major newspapers published opinion pieces attacking him and demanding his termination. On December 1, 1903, the entire faculty of the college threatened to resign en masse if the board gave into political pressures and asked Bassett to resign. President Teddy Roosevelt later praised Bassett for his willingness to express the truth as he saw it.
• In 1929, Experimental Psychology Professor Max Friedrich Meyer and Sociology Assistant Professor Harmon O. DeGraff were dismissed from their positions at the University of Missouri for advising student Orval Hobart Mowrer regarding distribution of a questionnaire which inquired about attitudes towards divorce, "living together", and sex. The university was subsequently censured by the American Association of University Professors in an early case regarding academic freedom due a tenured professor.
• William Shockley was concerned about relatively high reproductive rates among people of African descent, because he believed that genetics doomed black people to be intellectually inferior to white people. He was strongly criticized for this stand, which raised some concerns about whether criticism of unpopular views of racial differences suppressed academic freedom.
• In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, some public statements made by some university faculty were criticized. Most prominent among these were these comments made in January 2005 by University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill. He published an essay in which he asserted that the attack on the United States, while unjustified, were provoked by American foreign policy. On news and talk programs, he was criticized for describing the World Trade Center victims as "little Eichmanns", a reference to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. The university fired Churchill in 2007. Churchill successfully filed a law suit for unlawful termination of employment.
• At the beginning of the 21st century, Lawrence Summers, while president of Harvard University, led a discussion that was intended to identify the reasons why fewer women chose to study science and mathematics at advanced levels. He suggested that the possibility of intrinsic gender differences in terms of talent for science and mathematics should be explored. He became the target of considerable public backlash. His critics were, in turn, accused of attempting to suppress academic freedom.
• The 2006 scandal in which several members of the Duke Lacrosse team were falsely accused of rape raised serious criticisms against exploitation of academic freedom by the university and its faculty to press judgement and deny due process to the three players accused.
• In 2006 trade union leader and sociologist Fazel Khan was fired from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa after taking a leadership role in a strike. In 2008 international concern was also expressed at attempts to discipline two other academics at the same university - Nithiya Chetty and John van der Berg - for expressing concern about academic freedom at the university.
• J. Michael Bailey wrote a popular science-style book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, which promotes Ray Blanchard's theory that transwomen are motivated by sexuality, and dismisses the "woman trapped in a man's body" concept of transsexuality . Blanchard's theory divides transwomen into two groups (autogynephilics and homosexual transsexuals) according to their sexual orientation. In an effort to discredit his book, some trans activists filed formal complaints with Northwestern University accusing Bailey of conducting regulated human research by talking informally to transwomen without first obtaining written proof of informed consent. They also filed a complaint with Illinois state regulators, requesting that they investigate Bailey for practicing psychology without a license. Bailey, who was not licensed to practice clinical psychology in Illinois, had provided some transwomen with free case evaluation letters, saying that he believed they were good candidates for sex-reassignment surgery. Regulators dismissed the complaint. Andrea James, a Los Angeles-based transgender activist, posted photographs of Bailey's children, taken when they were in middle and elementary school, with sexually explicit captions that she provided.
• Thio Li-ann withdrew from an appointment at New York University School of Law after controversy erupted about some anti-gay remarks she had made, prompting a discussion of academic freedom within the law school.
• In 2009 the University of California at Santa Barbara charged William I. Robinson with anti-Semitism after he circulated an email to his class containing more than two dozen photographs of Jewish victims of the Nazis, including those of dead children, juxtaposed with nearly identical images from the Gaza Strip. It also included an article critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and a note from Robinson stating "Gaza is Israel's Warsaw -- a vast concentration camp that confined and blockaded Palestinians," the professor wrote. "We are witness to a slow-motion process of genocide."., The charges were dropped after a world wide campaign against the management of the university.
• The University of the Philippines at Diliman affair where controversy erupted after Professor Gerardo A. Agulto of the College of Business Administration was sued by MBA graduate student Chanda R. Shahani for a nominal amount in damages for failing him several times in the Strategic Management portion of the Comprehensive Examination. Agulto refused to give a detailed basis for his grades and instead invoked Academic Freedom while Shahani argued in court that Academic Freedom could not be invoked without a rational basis in grading a student.
• During the interwar years (cir. 1919-1939) Canadian academics were informally expected to be apolitical, lest they bring trouble to their respective universities who, at the time, were very much dependent upon provincial government grants. As well, many Canadian academics of the time considered their position to be remote from the world of politics and felt they had no place getting involved in political issues. However, with the increase of socialist activity in Canada during the Great Depression, due to the rise of social gospel ideology, some left-wing academics began taking active part in contemporary political issues outside of the university. Thus, individuals such as Frank H. Underhill at the University of Toronto and other members or affiliates with the League for Social Reconstruction or the socialist movement in Canada who held academic positions began to find themselves in precarious positions with their university employers. Frank H. Underhill, for example, faced criticism from within and without academia and near expulsion from his university position for his public political comments and his involvement with the League for Social Reconstruction and the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation. According to Michiel Horn this era marked, “…a relaxation of the unwritten controls under which many Canadian professors had previously worked. The nature of the institutions, natural caution and professional pre-occupation had before the Depression inhibited the professoriate. None of these conditions changed quickly, but even at the provincial universities there were brave souls in the 1930s who claimed, with varying success, the right publicly to discuss controversial subjects and express opinions about them.”