By refusing to answer questions about their political associations in 1954, three U-M faculty members brought attention to the importance of academic and intellectual freedom as fundamental values for a university in a free society.
Chandler Davis, Clement Markert and Mark Nickerson invoked their constitutional rights when called to testify before a House Un-American Activities Committee. All three were suspended from the university. Markert subsequently was reinstated, and Davis and Nickerson were dismissed.
In 1990, the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs passed a resolution regretting its role in the case. It established the University of Michigan Senate’s Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom.
This year the Academic Freedom Lecture Fund will conduct a symposium titled “Fragility of Our Freedoms” celebrating its 25th year of bringing speakers to discuss issues related to academic freedom as it affects colleges and universities in the U.S.
“Those issues have not changed over the last 25 years. The lecture series is to remind and engage faculty, students and the community at large, wherever they might find themselves, of their responsibility to protect these values,” said AFLF President Peggie Hollingsworth.
Chandler Davis, the only survivor from the trio, agreed.
Joan Wallach Scott
“The subject of academic freedom is still important today and should be discussed every year,” he said.
The next lecture is at 4 p.m. Oct. 8 in the Honigman Auditorium, Room 100 in the Law School’s Hutchins Hall. The keynote speakers are Natalie Zemon Davis, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, and Joan Wallach Scott, professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Scott, the former chair and current member of the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American Association of University Professors, will discuss “Civility, Affect and Academic Freedom,” examining the increasing use of the notion of civility not only to deride unruly behavior, but to deem certain scholars, their scholarship and their opinions unacceptable.
She will look at the recent case of Steven Salaita, whose firing was attributed by the chancellor of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to his “uncivil” tweets on Twitter about the Gaza War in the summer of 2014, and other instances in which incivility became the grounds for censure of faculty.
Her talk will examine the ways in which civility has been associated with the security, safety and, above all, the comfort of students.
Davis, who is also an adjunct professor of history at the University of Toronto, will discuss “Experiencing Exclusion: Scholarship after Inquisition.” She will describe the impact on her scholarship as a young historian of the withdrawal of her passport and the attack on her husband — Chandler Davis — during the Red Hunt of the 1950s.
She will consider the same issue in regard to two other historians who suffered during the Red Hunt, and also give an example from the 17th century.
The lecture is sponsored by the Academic Freedom Lecture Fund, American Association of University Professors University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Chapter and Michigan Conference, U-M Office of the President, Office of the Provost, Office of the Vice President for Government Relations, Law School, Medical School, Women’s Studies, SACUA and an anonymous donor.
