The University Record, February 11, 1997
Wilkins to give Academic and Intellectual Freedom Lecture
Roger Wood Wilkins, the Clarence J. Robinson Professor of History and American Culture at George Mason University, will present the Seventh Annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom at 4 p.m. March 17 in Rackham Amphitheater. He will discuss “Race and Academic Integrity.”
A lawyer, author and scholar, Wilkins served as assistant attorney general during the Johnson administration, and has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Washington Star. He earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for Watergate coverage.
Wilkins received his undergraduate and law degrees from the U-M, where he petitioned the Regents on behalf of the three professors for whom the lecture is named.
A past chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, he currently serves as chair of the Board of Trustees of the African American Institute and is a member of the board of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
The annual lecture is named for three U-M faculty members—Chandler Davis, Clement Markert and Mark Nickerson—who in 1954 were called to testify before a Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities. All invoked constitutional rights and refused to answer questions about their political associations.
The three were suspended from the University, with subsequent hearings and committee actions resulting in the reinstatement of Markert and the dismissal of Davis and Nickerson, who held tenured positions.
The lecture is sponsored by the Academic Freedom Lecture Fund, the U-M Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs, and the Martin Luther King Jr.-Cesar Chavez-Rosa Parks Visiting Professors Program.
For information, contact the Faculty Senate Office, 764-0303.
