H. Bruce Franklin - Life

Life

Born in Brooklyn in February 1934, Franklin graduated from Amherst College in 1955, and served in the US Air Force from 1956 to 1959.

After serving three years as a navigator and intelligence officer in the Strategic Air Command, Franklin got his doctorate at Stanford University in 1961 and then became an associate professor of English there. He spent the 1966-1967 school year at Stanford's campus in Paris, France, where he and his wife Jane read Marxist theory, met Vietnamese communist students and helped to organize the Free University of Paris. On his return to the US he became a prominent activist in the movement against the Vietnam War. In the late 1960s, he was one of the founders of the Revolutionary Union, a Maoist organization, but in 1971 he split, along with about half the membership of the RU, to join the revolutionary Venceremos Organization. Venceremos and Franklin were specifically targeted by the FBI COINTELPRO effort. Franklin's political views and actions during that period were public, including his sympathetic assessment of Joseph Stalin (see 'The Essential Stalin', published by Croom Helm, 1973, edited and introduced by Franklin), and continued despite being targeted by the FBI's COINTELPRO, which used disinformation, agents provocateurs, and violent acts to discredit leftist organizations. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show many attempts by the FBI to "neutralize" Franklin.

Stanford fired Franklin in 1972, even though he had academic tenure, for leading a group of students to occupy the computer center and urging students and faculty to strike in protest against the invasion of Laos and Stanford's involvement in the war. Firing a tenured professor was quite a feat: the University's rules provided for due process. A tenure-review committee was chosen, from professors outside Franklin's department, composed of associate or full professors who had hopes of advancement: two of them expected to become President of Stanford some day, and one of them actually did—Donald Kennedy. A medium-sized Physics Department lecture hall was converted into a courtroom, with the usual furniture and paraphernalia. A Los Angeles attorney, Paul Valentine, was retained to plead the University's case. Franklin defended himself, with advice from a law student and a well-known constitutional lawyer. Evidence was heard for each side, witnesses were cross-examined, and summations given, and the panel left the room to consider its verdict, which was guilty of violating the university's Disruption Policy, punishable by revocation of tenure and termination with prejudice.

Franklin was blacklisted and without regular employment for three years (although he had brief visiting faculty positions at Wesleyan University and Yale). In 1975 he was hired as a (tenured) full professor at Rutgers, where he has since been named the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies, and has received numerous awards for teaching and scholarship.