Academic freedom addressed

Many students don't stop to think about who writes their textbooks. That labor unions, big businesses and private money may play a part in this and other aspects of University life has implications that some may see as a threat to academic freedom.

David Hollinger, chancellor's professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, delivered the ninth annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic Freedom yesterday, addressing the dilemma of control over intellectual autonomy.

JESSICA JOHNSON/Daily David Hollinger, chancellor's professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley gave a lecture on

The lecture is named for three University faculty members - H. Chandler Davis, Clement Markert and Mark Nickerson - who were called before the Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities in 1954. All refused to testify about their political beliefs and were suspended from the University.

Markert was later reinstated, but Nickerson and Davis were denounced by the Michigan Faculty Senate and then dismissed from the University.

Hollinger addressed a packed auditorium yesterday that included Davis, Markert, University President Lee Bollinger, Provost Nancy Cantor and various University professors.

Speaking to the danger that the structure of universities poses to academic freedom, Hollinger discussed the link between former Sen. Joseph McCarthy's national probe into "unamerican" activities in the 1950s and current times.

"Hollinger is a model for me in many ways," Bollinger said following the event. "He is one of the most serious creative minds I know engaged in intellectual issues of our time. I admire him deeply for his commitment to bringing his work to the public."

The office of the president, for the first time in nine years, sponsored the lecture, together with several University departments. Bollinger said sponsorship by the president's office "represents the University's recognition that this is a University wide event; that the spirit of the lecture is something that the University wants to affirm."

Hollinger said the increasing attempts to make universities instruments of special interest has been taken for granted. The threat to universities, Hollinger said, is that "the problem of political autonomy will disappear because there will be nothing left to be autonomous about."

In 1954, Davis, a former University mathematics professor, was cited for contempt of Congress and convicted then in 1957 following his dismissal from the University. His refusal to saturate his political beliefs cost him his University position and four years of freedom in a federal prison.

After the event, Davis said of the University professors who reviewed him, "they were better than those stooges, better than those in Washington. They shouldn't have gotten involved in that. What hurt most of all was that my colleagues turned against me."

Davis has attended each of the nine lectures in his honor.

During the speech, Hollinger cited various individuals who saw university faculty as a barricade to advancement of universities.

Frank Turner, a former Provost of Yale University once said that "Universities have too much freedom" and advocated a "call to the moneyed classes to save the universities from their faculties."

In 1971, Louis Powell, a prominent Virginia lawyer who would later be appointed to Justice of the Supreme Court under President Richard Nixon, advocated private finance by big businesses to finance a system to influence university faculties.

Seven years later, Powell would author the Supreme Court's decision in University of California Regents v. Bakke, which established the constitutionality of what is now known as affirmative action, stating the need for a wide range of ideas and beliefs.

"In so far as students have an interest in maintaining and enriching the quality at universities, they share with the faculty a reason to worry about all of the pressures being brought to bear on universities these days," Hollinger said.

Daily Staff Reporter Nick Falzone contributed to this report.

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