While former mathematics instructor Chandler Davis filled his students' minds with variables and equations in the early 1950s, the University was trying to fire him for his alleged affiliation with the Communist Party.
Not long before the student protests of the 1960s gave the University its liberal reputation, the Ann Arbor campus was not a bastion of free speech.
Davis, an instructor at the University in 1953, remembers when the national wave of McCarthyism began to affect students and faculty.
"On occasion, the University would refuse to give permission to let speakers speak on campus because they were too radical," Davis said, recalling that in 1950, leftist speaker Herbert Phillips spoke in a local book store because the University would not give him permission to speak on campus.
Three years later, Sen. Joseph McCarthy's crusade against communism hit the University with full force and resulted in the investigation of three instructors - Davis, former tenured pharmacology Prof. Mark Nickerson and former zoology Prof. Clement Markert.
About 40 years later, in an effort to keep the event fresh in the minds of students and faculty, the Senate Assembly established an annual lectureship in honor of the three instructors who were interrogated during the anti-Communist investigation.
Last month celebrated the seventh annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom. Each year, the guest speakers address issues of academic freedom in higher education today.
The era of McCarthyism
Often called the "Red-Hunt" or "Red Scare," the national search for Communists began in the late 1940s and peaked in the early 1950s. Under McCarthy's direction, the House Subcommittee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) subpoenaed American citizens suspected of associating with the Communist Party. The committee's questioning and investigation led to the firings and imprisonment of hundreds of Americans.
As Communist investigations made their way into the government and the entertainment industry, University history Prof. Nicholas Steneck said it is not surprising that they seeped into higher education.
"There was a deep concern about the influence of communism on education at all levels," Steneck said. "If you're concerned that Communists are influencing the country, the first place you are going to look is the government and then you're going to look to education.
"(The University of Michigan) is a prominent University and we were looked to as a result (of that)," Steneck said.
The allegations made their way to the University in the fall of 1953 when former University Vice President and Dean of Faculties Marvin Niehuss was notified by HUAC that more than half a dozen University faculty members were going to be subpoenaed to testify before the committee.
Steneck said Niehuss traveled to Washington to negotiate with the committee to reduce the number of faculty subpoenaed.
"I told the FBI that I would cooperate with them if they had any evidence, but I certainly didn't want to ruin some of our best people by saying they were Communists," Niehuss said in a 1988 videotaped interview with former University student Adam Kulakow, who produced a video on the University's involvement with the investigations.
In November of 1953, Davis, Nickerson and Markert were subpoenaed to appear at a HUAC hearing in Lansing. Also subpoenaed were then-University graduate students Edward Shaffer and Myron Sharpe.
The five were questioned by U.S. Sen. Kit Clardy (R-Mich.) and other members of the committee in May 1954.
Markert, Nickerson, Sharpe and Shaffer all refused to answer questions about their political activity, pleading the Fifth Amendment, which protects individuals from testifying against themselves.
"I didn't want to talk about anything substantive before the Clardy committee because, in my view, the government is mine, represents me and has no right to ask me about my political opinions or actions, so I refused categorically to answer any of their questions, pleading the Fifth Amendment," Markert said in the 1988 videotaped interview with Kulakow.
Davis, taking a unique and somewhat risky stand, refused to answer questions about his political activity, claiming it was a violation of his First Amendment rights.
"My reason for not answering is not because of a blemish in my past," Davis told The Michigan Daily in 1953. "Not the answers, but the questions and the way they were asked were at fault."
Ellen Schrecker, a history professor at Yeshiva University in New York and the author of "No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the University," said many people thought that pleading the Fifth Amendment was a "safer" option for an answer because it often protected a person from being asked to name other people who were involved in the same activities. Schrecker used the University's situation as the central focus of her book.
"By 1950, most of the citizens who didn't want to cooperate with the committee used the Fifth," Schrecker said.
Schrecker said that between 1953 and 1954, people began to rethink what they were doing in front of the government committee, and some refused to answer the questions under protection of the First Amendment.
Schrecker said Davis was fully aware that pleading the First Amendment was risky because there was a greater chance of being found in contempt of Congress.
"He knew that he was risking jail ... he did it very consciously to become a test case," she said.
Shortly after the hearings, then-University President Harlan Hatcher issued a statement that called for the immediate suspension of the three instructors "without loss of pay from all duties and connections to the University."
"If you take such an amendment, you say to the public there is some reason why you have to do this, and that leaves the University with the question 'Do you ignore this or do you take notice with that,'" Hatcher said in the 1988 videotaped interview with Kulakow. "In the procedure that we had, this was something that we simply could not ignore."
Division of colleagues
Although the majority of the faculty kept their opinions of the suspensions to themselves, those who were vocal were divided on the issue.
Shortly after the suspensions, more than 200 University faculty members put their names on a paid advertisement in the Daily that stated their belief that "competence should be the criterion for ... evaluating personnel, and that personal beliefs, unless they are demonstrated to interfere with a man's ability to teach objectively, should not enter the evaluation."
Mathematics Prof. Emertis Wilfred Kaplan said the faculty was very sharply divided, citing that the majority of faculty members in the Literary College were opposed to the suspensions while those in the School of Medicine generally supported them.
"A great majority of members in (the math department) supported Davis and thought that it was quite inappropriate that they were asking him about his beliefs," Kaplan said.
Steneck said that in the 1950s, the University was generally more conservative than it is today.
"As far as the administration and probably a lot of the faculty, in the '50s, you would not have considered this a liberal University," Steneck said, citing examples such as Hatcher's close relationship with the Eisenhower administration and his strong support of military research.
Davis said the faculty treated him well during the hearings and after the suspension.
"There was nobody who tried to ostracize me or Markert as nasty Reds," Davis said. "People were nice to us and the press was pretty reasonable."
Reaction on campus
Although there were no massive student protests against the suspensions, Shaffer said he doesn't remember feeling unsupported by students.
"We generally had good support from the students," Shaffer said.
However, on May 20, 1954, the University's Student Legislature voted down a motion condemning the faculty suspensions.
History Prof. Sidney Fine said he remembers the campus being "pretty tame" at that time.
"The faculty may have been upset, but there was little in the way of student protest that I can recall," Fine said.
Davis agreed that the campus was "relatively silent."
"It was somewhat liberal, it's just that the number of people who were politically active was very small," Davis said. "The reason was because everyone knew the ax was going to fall."
Davis said that a group of students protested the suspension in the spring of 1954, but that the end of the school year diverted student attention away from the suspensions.
The aftermath
Hatcher, claiming the professors had raised serious doubts concerning their ability to serve as instructors by refusing to answer questions regarding their political activity, created an ad-hoc committee composed of University faculty to conduct University hearings of the three suspended instructors.
In early August 1954, prior to the hearings, Hatcher sent Davis a letter stating his intentions to remove the instructor from the University. Shortly after receiving the letter, Davis was indicted by the federal government for contempt of Congress.
During the ad-hoc committee investigations in mid-August, Davis refused to answer questions about his political history, while Markert and Nickerson discussed their political involvement.
"I discussed things about my lecturing and about my teaching and so forth and they didn't want to hear about them," Davis said. "They just wanted to know if I was a Red."
The committee recommended that the University fire Davis and retain Markert and Nickerson.
"The committee was somewhat reassured with their answers and they were quite angry with me," Davis said.
But Hatcher, with the urgings of then-pharmacology chair Maurice Seevers, decided to send both Davis and Nickerson before the faculty's Senate Advisory Committee's Subcommittee on Intellectual Freedom and Integrity. Hatcher ended Markert's suspension and Markert returned to the classroom the next fall.
The subcommittee voted to fire Davis and retain Nickerson. Once again, at the recommendation of Seevers, Hatcher decided to fire both Davis and Nickerson, pending approval by the University's Board of Regents.
The case went before the board at the end of August. The regents voted in agreement with Hatcher, and both Davis and Nickerson were fired from their positions at the University.
Davis unsuccessfully appealed the federal case and in 1960 spent six months in a federal correction institute in Connecticut for contempt of Congress. Davis said he was unofficially blacklisted in the United States and was unable to find a permanent job in higher education. He later moved to Canada where he has been a mathematics professor since 1962. Davis is now vice president of the American Mathematical Society.
Nickerson also moved to Canada, where he has taught and served as president of the Pharmacological Society of Canada and the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.
Markert left the University and accepted an offer to teach at Johns Hopkins University.
Schrecker said Markert's case was very rare.
"Usually someone who took the Fifth and didn't have tenure was let go," Schrecker said, noting that Markert was most likely retained because he had strong support from his department and was academically respected. "It's possible that the administration realized that there would be trouble if he were let go."
Remembering
The University's involvement in the Red Scare was recalled in 1989 when the University of Michigan Chapter of the American Association of University Professors endorsed a statement requesting a significant gesture of reconciliation for the three professors. The Senate Assembly endorsed it and presented it to the regents in the spring of 1990.
Davis said the senate proposed a weak agenda so the regents would "just think about it and that's all." Although it was put on the regent's agenda, the senate's proposal never made it to the table.
Former University Regent Thomas Roach said the proposal might have been recognized had it been raised in a different context.
"It really was the faculty who made the decision (in 1954)," Roach said. "The idea in 1990 that this was something that the regents had done (then) ... was completely contrary to the facts."
In 1990, the Senate Assembly established the Markert, Davis, Nickerson Lecture on Academic Freedom and Intellectual Freedom in honor of the three professors.
Steneck said he thinks the lecture series is an appropriate way to honor the professors.
"It isn't easy to decide what the correct course of action is regarding academic freedom when sensitive issues were involved," Steneck said.
Hatcher said he does not believe the University owes the professors an apology and he wouldn't change anything about how the University handled the investigations.
"We had a complete line of actions set out for this thing by the American Association of University Professors and I followed their program along with the regents' approval," Hatcher said.
Davis said he does not regret his actions during any of the hearings.
"I think it's rather ironic that these committees of my senior faculty members found me unfit to belong to their community on the basis that I might ... not be a friend of free speech because what they were essentially saying was that we will suppress you on the hypothesis that some other time ... you might suppress someone else," Davis said. "In other words, they were convicting me of doing, essentially, what they were doing themselves at that moment."
Kaplan still contends that the whole investigation was completely improper and that the lecture series only serves as a substitute for an apology.
"We keep hoping that the regents will someday change their mind and (apologize)," Kaplan said. "The purpose (of the lecture) is to keep it fresh in people's mind, but that doesn't solve it."