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ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN AMERICA: GILDED AGE BEGINNINGS AND WORLD WAR I LEGACIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2018

Charlotte A. Lerg
Charlotte A. Lerg*
Affiliation:
Ludwig-Maximilian University
*
Email: Charlotte.Lerg@lmu.de
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Abstract

The early decades of the twentieth century proved pivotal for defining academic freedom in America. The challenges of World War I ultimately strengthened the use and understanding of the concept specifically for the U.S. context. During the last third of the nineteenth century, a number of developments in higher learning had converged, bringing academic independence urgently to the forefront. Growth and professionalization meant a new role for universities in American society; big-business philanthropy saw sciences flourish, but it also introduced a new market-orientated organization to college administration. Gilded Age and Progressive Era debates over individual rights, social responsibilities, and public and political capital caused much controversy on campuses across the country. German academic institutions, long cherished models in U.S.-reform-rhetoric, had begun to lose their appeal, and by 1914, they were fully discredited. Hence, even before the United States entered into the conflict, World War I forced the academic community to define their position between society, government, and professional ethos. During this process, two very different notions of academic freedom emerged: one favoring individual liberties, the other one prioritizing institutional integrity. These distinctive and potentially adverse interpretations continued to function as the basis for legal and public arguments as the twentieth century progressed.

Type
Special Issue: Americans and WWI: 100 Years Later
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , October 2018 , pp. 691 - 703
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2018 

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References

NOTES

The author would like to thank Axel Jansen, Manfred Berg, and the anonymous peer reviewers whose helpful comments were much appreciated, as were the remarks by numerous colleagues on an earlier version of this paper at the DGfA history conference at Heidelberg in 2017. Moreover, thank you to Heather Ellis for the opportunity to discuss the broader context of this topic at the History of Education Seminar at Sheffield University in May 2017.

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26 The transatlantic (mis-)understanding of the Arons case would deserve a more detailed examination. In Germany the issue was decidedly not one of personal academic freedom but rather one of administrative autonomy. Arons did not lose a chair or a professorship but his status as Privatdozent, which was a privilege to teach traditionally granted by the discretion of the university alone. The Privatdozent, therefore, was not a state employee but academics with socialist sympathies (or from a Jewish background) had particularly benefited from this as they were barred from state service in Wilhelmine Germany. Few American observers grasped the intricate complexities of the case. For them Leo Arons had lost his job because he was a socialist. Interestingly, the fact that he was Jewish (which had indirectly also featured in Germany) was rarely mentioned in the United States where anti-Semitism was also quite prevalent in higher education. On the Arons case, see, e.g., Rebenich, Stefan, Theodor Mommsen und Adolf Harnack. Wissenschaft und Politik im Berlin des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts. (Berlin: deGruyter, 1997), 471Google Scholar; Ringer, Die Gelehrten, 132. On anti-Semitism in U.S. higher education, see, e.g., Karabel, Jerome, The Chosen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005)Google Scholar.

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36 Ibid., 15.

37 Parker, Alton, “The Rights of Donors” in Educational Review 16:21 (1902)Google Scholar quoted in Finkin and Post, For the Common Good, 25; “Shall Professors Have Free Speech. Or Are They to Mirror the Views of University Trustees?” in New York Tribune, June 27, 1915, III:2.

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50 Woodrow Wilson, Message to Congress, Aug. 19, 1914, 63. Congress, Session II. No. 566 Congressional Records (1914), 3.

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52 Lowell to C. N. Chaffee, Sept. 9, 1914, box 64, folder 231, Records of the President of Harvard University, Abbott Lawrence Lowell UAI 5.160, Harvard University Archives.

53 Lowell to Richard H. Dana III, 08.03.1916, box 64, folder 321a, Records of the President.

54 Lawrence Lowell, Annual Report 1916–1917, Reports of the President and Treasurer of Harvard College [digital] http://hul.harvard.edu/lib/archives/refshelf/AnnualReportsSearch.htm (accessed Aug. 12, 2017). Comments appeared, for example, in The New Republic, The New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, and School and Society.

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57 Meiklejohn, Alexander, “Freedom of the College” in Atlantic Monthly 71 (1918), 83–89Google Scholar.

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59 James Melvin Lee, president of the American Association of Teachers of Journalism to Lowell, Feb. 25, 1918, box 27, folder 1803: Academic Freedom, Records of the President.

60 Lowell also suggested that the university was obligated to ensure that students’ “social sensibilities” were not offended. In 1917, when campus populations were still rather homogeneous, this issue merited little more than a paragraph in Lowell's definition, but today's debates over trigger warnings and safes spaces have rendered this caveat strangely current. Lowell, Annual Report 1916–1917, 19. On the current debate, see e.g., Slate, Tom, ed., Unsafe Space. The Crisis of Free Speech on Campus (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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