BY HANK REICHMAN

Robert M. O’Neil

Yesterday the sad news arrived of the passing of Bob O’Neil, founder of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Free Expression, former president of the University of Virginia and of the University of Wisconsin system, and prominent First Amendment scholar.  Bob served three terms as general counsel of the AAUP and was chair of Committee A, among many other contributions to our association.  The AAUP has issued a brief statement; a fuller appreciation of Bob’s life will appear, I am told, in an upcoming issue of Academe.  The University of Virginia published a full obituary, with moving comments from colleagues, friends, and family.

I got to know Bob only late in life, when I was first elected to AAUP’s Executive Committee in 2010 and Bob was in his third stint as AAUP general counsel, although we both believed, but could not be certain, that our paths had previously crossed.  (I will explain this shortly.)  We quickly bonded over our common commitment to free speech and academic freedom but especially to our mutual friendships with two individuals whose passing a few years before we both deeply mourned — Reginald Zelnik and Judith Krug, to whose memories I have dedicated my forthcoming book on academic freedom..

Reggie Zelnik, a leading historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, was my teacher and mentor in graduate school at Berkeley.  As a first-year assistant professor in 1964 he emerged as the most prominent faculty supporter of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.  In, I believe, 1971 Reggie came up for tenure and there was considerable concern that regents appointed by Governor Ronald Reagan would deny his application because of his free speech and antiwar activism, despite the unanimous support he had received from colleagues and administrators.  I and other graduate students at the time were interviewed during the process and asked awkward — and I now know entirely inappropriate — questions about our teacher’s politics.  Bob was then a law professor at Berkeley and chair of the Academic Senate Committee on Academic Freedom.  When word got out that Reggie’s application had, unlike all others, not been forwarded to the Board of Regents, it fell to Bob to confront the chancellor.  As he later recounted to me, Bob was prepared for battle, but was comforted to learn that this had been a tactical move, as the chancellor explained that at the next meeting Reggie’s principal antagonist would be conveniently out of the country, allowing the appointment to a tenured position to sail through unopposed, which it did.

Judith Krug was the founding director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.  I worked as her assistant director for what turned out to be a life-transforming nine months in 1980-81 and for nearly four decades after that edited the office’s Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom (now the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy).  It was there that Bob and I thought we might have met.  At some time during that year the ALA sponsored an academic conference on First Amendment law with several prominent law professors and, as it turned out, future university presidents, including Mark Yudof, who would lead the University of California system, Lee Bollinger, currently president of Columbia University, and Bob.  Also present, if my memory serves, was former AAUP president William Van Alstyne.  Neither Bob nor I could recall much of the conference and Bob wasn’t really sure he was there, but we both did remember a rather raucous and lengthy celebratory dinner that followed in a private dining room at the top of what was then the John Hancock Tower in Chicago.

When, as Committee A chair, I had occasion to work on expanding and updating AAUP’s statement on Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications I relied a lot on Bob’s important book, Academic Freedom in the Wired World.  But this was not the first of Bob’s books that I had encountered.  His 1981 book, Classrooms in the Crossfire, was a pioneering study of library and school book and curriculum censorship that I enthusiastically reviewed for the Newsletter that I edited.  When Judith was dying of cancer in 2009 Bob was instrumental in making sure that she learned that she had won the Center’s prestigious William J. Brennan Jr. Award, as she passed away before the formal presentation, which became a moving memorial meeting and yet another place where Bob’s and my paths crossed.  Bob, of course, had clerked for Justice Brennan.  In 2010, the ALA’s Freedom to Read Foundation added Bob’s name to its Roll of Honor.

Bob O’Neil was truly a giant in higher education, the AAUP, and in the ranks of scholars of the First Amendment.  He was also one of the kindest and most decent individuals I have had the pleasure to know.  He will be missed.

Bob’s family has requested that donations in his memory be given to the AAUP or to the ACLU.  The AAUP Foundation accepts donations in Bob’s memory here.

UPDATE (11/13/18): Academe magazine has now published a full obituary by Rachel Levinson-Waldman, who as AAUP counsel worked closely with Bob from 2006-2011.  It can be found here.