History of Duke University - Bassett Affair: 1903

Bassett Affair: 1903

In 1903, a controversy arose that would eventually lead to a significant event in the evolution of academic freedom in U.S. higher education. This series of events is known as the "Bassett Affair." Popular professor John Spencer Bassett published an article in the South Atlantic Quarterly entitled "Stirring Up the Fires of Race Antipathy" in October 1903. In the article, he spoke about improving race relations and gave praise to numerous African Americans. Near the end of the article, he wrote "...Booker T. Washington the greatest man, save General Lee, born in the South in a hundred years..." This led to an outpouring of anger from powerful Democratic party leaders as well as the media and public. Many demanded that Bassett be fired and encouraged parents to take their children out of the university. Resulting from immense public pressure, Bassett offered his resignation if the Board of Trustees requested that he do so. The Board of Trustees then held a meeting to decide the fate of Bassett. In the end, they voted 18-7 not to accept the resignation citing academic freedom. In their decision, they wrote, "We are particularly unwilling to lend ourselves to any tendency to destroy or limit academic liberty, a tendency which has, within recent years, manifested itself in some conspicuous instances, and which has created a feeling of uneasiness for the welfare of American colleges We cannot lend countenance to the degrading notion that professors in American colleges have not an equal liberty of thought and speech with all other Americans." In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt commended Trinity and Bassett's courageous stand for academic freedom while speaking to the university. He told the school, "You stand for Academic Freedom, for the right of private judgment, for a duty more incumbent upon the scholar than upon any other man, to tell the truth as he sees it, to claim for himself and to give to others the largest liberty in seeking after the truth."