BY HANK REICHMAN

Juneteenth Celebration, 1900

As we today observe a Juneteenth holiday, celebrating the end of slavery in its final redoubt of Texas on June 19, 1865, a commemoration that has gained extra salience and expanded recognition in the context of the extraordinary and continuing cross-racial upsurge of the Black Lives Matter movement, those in higher education inevitably turn our thoughts to the role we have played in the country’s ongoing failure to fully grapple with systemic racism and the legacy of slavery.  In that context I came to think about what the AAUP has done in past crises, a subject I treated a bit in a 2018 blog post on the 150th anniversary of the birth of W.E.B. DuBois, “W.E.B. Du Bois, Higher Education, and the AAUP.”  Two historic documents come to mind, which reveal something of that history, and I thought it would be useful to excerpt and briefly discuss them here.

According to historian Joy Ann Williamson-Lott, author of Jim Crow Campus: Higher Education and the Struggle for a New Southern Social Order, “Between 1955 and 1965 the association became heavily involved in southern higher education by censuring institutions that fired faculty members who espoused support for racial equality, by issuing resolutions, and by publishing reports on the southern situation.”  One of those reports, “Academic Freedom in Mississippi: A Report of a Special Committee,” from 1965, examined several outstanding individual cases but also commented extensively on the condition of higher education in that state based on first-hand investigation.  It was in many ways an extraordinary document.  Here are some excerpts:

For several years there has been an increasing concern among members of the American Association of University Professors, particularly in Committee A, the Council, and the Washington Office, about conditions of academic freedom in Mississippi. A number of circumstances, some tangible and others not, have contributed to this concern. . . .

At the University of Mississippi, there was a bitter controversy involving a member of the law school faculty who resigned after having been subjected to long and severe pressure aroused by his persistently and publicly expressed belief that United States Supreme Court decisions, including the 1954 school desegregation order, were law and should be obeyed. A tenure case at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, which resulted in the censure of the Alcorn administration, was reported in the September, 1962, issue of the AAUP Bulletin. Many other circumstances, none of which came to the status of a “case,” indicated that a special problem existed. . . .

The most destructive conflict was the riot which accompanied the admission of James H. Meredith to the
University [of Mississippi].  . . .

The Washington Office of AAUP kept in close touch with faculty members and administrators at the University during the crisis period. A visit was made to the campus by Professor Richard P. Adams (English, Tulane University) on October 20-21, 1962, and reports were made by him and by Professor Tom J. Truss, Jr., (English, University of Mississippi) to the AAUP Council at its meeting on October 27, 1962.

Faculty members at the University had not been indifferent or idle. On October 3, two days after the riot,
the local AAUP chapter adopted a resolution, made public and widely reported, in which (1) allegations by Mississippi officials that the riot had been due to actions of the U. S. marshals were said to be “not only unfair and reprehensible but . . . almost completely false,” (2) news media within the state were accused of propagating misleading and inflammatory statements, and were urged to behave more responsibly, (3) all citizens were urged to obey the law as interpreted by the Supreme Court, and to refrain from violence, and (4) the hope was expressed that the University would be allowed to return peacefully to its proper business of education. In addition to being adopted by the chapter and signed by the three chapter officers, this statement was signed by some 61 individual faculty members. . . .

The question facing the Governor and the Legislature and the people of Mississippi, if they are as much in earnest as they seem to be about furthering the economic development of the state, is how to get the great increases which, as the Governor has so clearly and forcefully said, must be achieved in the amount and quality of research, and of educational activity generally, in the state and particularly in the state universities. A very large investment must be made to raise salaries, reduce loads, and provide research facilities. There must also be conditions of general freedom, so that creative people will want to live and raise children in Mississippi, and there must be conditions of academic freedom, so that they can do their work. . . .

In order to understand segregation as it operates in Mississippi, people living in other parts of the country and sharing other views must realize that it has very little reference to any physical separation of Negroes and whites. . . .  Doubtless, as people variously have argued, segregation is involved in complex ways with race, color, sex, and economic motives; but the basic proposition that runs through everything connected with it is the assumption of inequality, the assumption, to put it bluntly, that Negroes are not fully human. . . .

The AAUP Survey Committee

In April, 1963, Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American Association of University Professors voted to request authorization of a survey by a special AAUP committee to report on conditions of academic freedom in the state of Mississippi. This was an unprecedented action, prompted by the unusual circumstances which then obtained. The reason for it might perhaps best be summarized in a paradox. Although there was only one active case, the Alcorn case, in which violation of academic freedom or tenure had been alleged, it was very obvious that there was heavy pressure on academic institutions and faculties throughout Mississippi to make them conform to orthodox segregationist views. Members of Committee A, recognizing that they did not know how much this pressure amounted to, or exactly what its effects on the exercise of academic freedom in the various colleges and universities in Mississippi might be, were seeking means of obtaining information on which a reasonably sound objective judgment might be based.  . . .

The committee made two visits, of several days each, to Mississippi, in January and March, 1964, traveling throughout the state from a base in Jackson, the capital, and interviewing administrators and faculty members at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, Mississippi State University at Starkville, Mississippi State College for Women at Columbus, the University of Southern Mississippi at Hattiesburg, and Millsaps College, the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson State College, Mississippi College, and Tougaloo Southern Christian College, all in or near Jackson. The committee also had interviews with Dr. E. R. Jobe, Executive Secretary of the Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning, and Mr. T. J. Tubb, then President of the Board, and with the Honorable Carroll Gartin, Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi, and Mr. Frank D. Barber, Special Assistant to Governor Johnson.

The only general statement that the committee can make with full confidence about conditions of academic freedom in Mississippi is that they vary greatly, both in the kind and in the amount of freedom there is, depending on the context in which the matter is examined. Freedom in the classroom is one thing; freedom of public utterance is quite another; freedom to bring outside speakers to the campus another still. There are wide variations among the different institutions. About some topics, professors are probably as free to express unorthodox opinions without fear of reprisal in Mississippi as they are in most other states; but there are several topics, connected in one way or another with the conflict over segregation, on which they are less free. . . .

A disturbing fact about the operation of state institutions in Mississippi is that all faculty members are
required to list annually the organizations to which they belong and those to which they contribute money, and that their statements are kept on file in the offices of the Board of Trustees, where they are accessible to state officials, including members of the Legislature. The committee found no evidence that any use had ever been made of these statements, but they have the look of a powder keg in the midst of a crowd of people some of whom have been known to toss matches.

Freedom in the Classroom

Everywhere the committee went in Mississippi, its members were told by faculty members, administrators, and state officials that there is no improper limitation or restriction placed on an instructor’s right to express his views in classroom lectures and discussions. Some faculty members admitted, when pressed, that they exercised a certain amount of self-restraint in avoiding statements or situations which they knew would stir up student’s emotions, but they generally said that this was a voluntary matter, and that they were not influenced by fear of administrative action. The committee is disposed to believe, on the basis of available evidence, that a fairly high degree of academic freedom has been maintained, often against considerable pressure, in the direct and formal relationship of the instructor to the student in the class.

The same is apparently true for the most part of the faculties’ selection of textbooks, library books, and other educational materials. The committee did, however, receive a report from a faculty member who had resigned from one of the state colleges because he had been persuaded, under administrative pressure, to withdraw a textbook he had chosen for one of his courses. The book was objected to on the ground that it contained some photographs showing Negro and white students together in the same classroom.

Another incident which may throw some light on the question of classroom freedom occurred at the University of Mississippi. During the summer of 1964, some officials of COFO and the NAACP visited the campus, with the cooperation of several faculty members, for purposes which the faculty members considered legitimately educational, and with a minimum of publicity. Two investigations followed, one by a committee of the state Board of Trustees and one by a committee of the Legislature. . . .

[In response, the board issued an order] to the effect that Negroes must be excluded from all public buildings on the campus of any state institution unless they were enrolled as students. The policy was enforced on September 9, when the parents of the two Negro students at the University of Mississippi were denied permission to eat in the University cafeteria. . . .

Freedom of Public Utterance

There was an almost total unanimity among faculty members, administrators, and state officials in the opinion that freedom of public utterance in Mississippi is severely hampered. The limitation is not, to any great extent, a matter of law or of official policy; it is primarily a matter of fear. The consequences of publicly expressing unpopular opinions on segregation are, or at any rate are universally thought to be, extremely dire. Faculty members who feel, as nearly all do, a strong sense of loyalty to their institutions are reluctant to say anything that might cause the Legislature, the churches, or the general public to withhold desperately needed support. Most are deterred also by the reluctance that any sensitive person feels about incurring the displeasure or the wrath of his neighbors in the community. This reluctance is encouraged by the fact that in Mississippi, more than in most places, the neighbors’ displeasure or wrath may take the form of abusive telephone calls, ostracism or bullying of children at school and in other community activities, police harassment, damage to property, and physical violence ranging up to and including murder. Several people observed to committee members that, in effect, a man has about as much freedom as he has guts. But not many faculty members want to risk being shot at in the night. . . .

It was clear from the committee’s interviews with a number of other administrators and with state officials, including the Lieutenant Governor, as well as with faculty members, that people in positions of administrative authority generally believe, and many feel very strongly, that a real and legitimate part of a faculty member’s responsibility is to avoid embarrassing the efforts of the administrators and politicians to gain the public and legislative support that is unquestionably needed to improve their institutions. Up to a certain point, this can be a very persuasive argument, and at present there are not many faculty members in Mississippi state institutions who insist on going beyond that point.

The fallacy in the argument is, of course, the assumption that a hermetic seal can be put on the classroom door, or that an educational institution can be operated as a kind of closed society within a closed society, separating what goes on inside from the “real world” of social, economic, political, and cultural activity on the outside. If that were true, there would be no use in having classrooms or educational institutions at all. . . .

By Way of Conclusion: Some General Observations

In a study of this kind there can be no real conclusion. The committee can say only that this report is
as accurate a reflection as it was possible to make of conditions of academic freedom in Mississippi, mainly as they appeared in the winter and spring of 1963-1964. The actual situation was and is and will continue to be vastly more complex than any picture the committee could draw. . . . Segregation itself is crumbling at every point. . . .

There is also, of course, as everyone expected, a very strong “backlash” against the changes that are moving Mississippi so rapidly in the direction of desegregation, and the state has been in a whirlwind of political turmoil internally as well as in its relations with the national government. . . .

In this atmosphere of intensely conflicting feelings, arising out of the encounter between a rapidly changing social situation and an almost pathological xenophobia concerning ideas which are believed to be subversive of the traditional way of life, conditions of academic freedom are precarious, and are likely to continue so for a time. How much, if any, they can be expected to improve in the very near future is anybody’s guess; the guess of the AAUP committee is that in the long run at least they probably will improve, if only because of the necessity imposed by Mississippi’s ambitious attempt at economic development, which will require expanded programs in all aspects of education, and especially in research.

Meanwhile, the defense of the academic freedom that now exists in Mississippi, and the careful and patient work that must be done to increase and improve it, will require the best, the most thoughtful, and the most diplomatic efforts of everyone concerned, both within the state and in any other places where there are links of relationship with the situation, or where such links can be established. In recent crises much good has been done by regional and national academic organizations and by faculty members in all parts of the country, with the aid of some rather expert tightrope walking on the part of Mississippi administrators and responsible public officials. With further exertion of these cooperative efforts, there is reason to hope and expect that academic freedom in Mississippi will not merely endure but that it will prevail.

There is much more in this lengthy and fascinating document, which was published in the AAUP Bulletin, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Sep., 1965), pp. 341-356.  It is available on JSTOR.

The second document worth recalling is the 1973 report to the AAUP Council on “Affirmative Action in Higher Education” by that body’s then-existing Committee on Discrimination, chaired by the prominent philosopher Marx Wartofsky and including in its ranks some of the AAUP’s most eminent leaders of the era. While the report on Mississippi from the ’60s reads today mainly as a window into a thankfully bygone (but not totally bygone) era, the report on affirmative action has extraordinary contemporary resonance.  It begins:

The Council Committee on Discrimination has been directed to formulate a position on the role of affirmative action in the elimination of discriminatory practices in academic recruiting, appointment, and advancement. In doing so, we begin with the premise that discrimination against women and minorities in higher education is both reprehensible and illegal, and reaffirm the emphatic condemnation of such practices by the AAUP.

More particularly, it is to the specific meaning and implications of affirmative action that our concern is
directed, and especially to the question of so-called “preferential” or “compensatory” treatment of women and minorities. Because the phrase “affirmative action” has been assigned such extraordinarily different meanings by different persons and agencies, however, we mean to set the tone for this Report at the beginning by stating our own position as to what it must mean consistent with the standards of the AAUP. It is that affirmative action in the improvement of professional opportunities for women and minorities must be (and readily can be) devised wholly consistent with the highest aspirations of universities and colleges for excellence and outstanding quality, and that affirmative action should in no way use the very instrument of racial or sexual discrimination which it deplores.

The plans which we commend are those which are entirely affirmative, i.e., plans in which “preference” and “compensation” are words of positive connotation rather than words of condescension or noblesse oblige – preference for the more highly valued candidate and compensation for past failures to reach the actual market of intellectual resources available to higher education. The Committee believes that the further improvement of quality in higher education and the elimination of discrimination due to race or sex are not at odds with each other, but at one. What is sought in the idea of affirmative action is essentially the revision of standards and practices to assure that institutions are in fact drawing from the largest marketplace of human resources in staffing their faculties, and a critical review of appointment and advancement criteria to insure that they do not inadvertently foreclose consideration of the best qualified persons by untested presuppositions which operate to exclude women and minorities. Further, faculties are asked to consider carefully whether they are requiring a higher standard and more conclusive evidence of accomplishment of those women and minorities who are considered for appointment and advancement. . . .  Indeed, there may be more reason for concern that affirmative action of this kind which is critical to the abatement of discrimination may fail to be pursued with vigor than that it may be pursued too zealously. At the present moment, the politics of reaction are a greater source for concern than the possibility that affirmative action might lend itself to heavy-handed bureaucratic misapplication. . . .

“Excellence” and “quality” are not shibboleths with which institutions of higher learning may turn away all
inquiry. Rather, they are aspirations of higher education which are thought to be served by seeking certain attributes and skills in those to be considered for academic positions. Some of these appear almost intuitively to be clearly related to certain standards customarily used by universities, others less obviously so but nonetheless determined by experience to “work,” and still others are not infrequently carried along largely by custom and presupposition. . . .

We cannot assume uncritically that present criteria of merit and procedures for their application have yielded the excellence intended; to the extent that the use of certain standards has resulted in the exclusion of women and minorities from professional positions in higher education, or their inclusion only in token proportions to their availability, the academy has denied itself access to the critical mass of intellectual vitality represented by these groups. We believe that such criteria must thus be considered deficient on the very grounds of excellence itself.

The rationale for professional advancement in American higher education has rested upon the theoretical assumption that there is no inherent conflict between the principles of intellectual and scholarly merit and of equality of access to the academic profession for all persons. In practice, this access has repeatedly been denied a significant number of persons on grounds related to their membership in a particular group. In part, this denial of access has resulted from unexamined presuppositions of professional fitness which have tended to exclude from consideration persons who do not fall within a particular definition of the acceptable academic person. This is in part, but only in part, a function of the procedures through which professional academics have been sought out and recognized within the academy. .  .

Where a particular criterion of merit, even while not discriminatory on its face or in intent, nonetheless operates to the disproportionate elimination of women and minority group persons, the burden upon the institution to defend it as an appropriate criterion rises in direct proportion to its exclusionary effect. Where criteria for appointment or promotion are unstated, or so vaguely framed as to permit their arbitrary and highly subjective application in individual cases, the institution’s ability to defend its actions is the less. . . .

The report then goes on to elaborate a set of six considerations for reviewing standards for appointment in ways that will help faculties “determine whether we have taken too much for granted in ways which have been harmful, to an extent that institutions themselves may not have known, and a consideration of alternatives which would be neither unreasonable nor unduly onerous in the avoidance of inadvertent discrimination and unwarranted exclusion.”  In this effort the authors write,

The argument to the special relevance of race and sex as qualifying characteristics draws its strength from a recognition of the richness which a variety of intellectual perspectives and life experiences can bring to the educational program. It is more than simply a matter of providing jobs for persons from groups which have in the past been unfairly excluded from an opportunity to compete for them; it is a matter of reorganizing the academic institution to fulfill its basic commitment to those who are seriously concerned to maintain the academic enterprise as a vital social force [emphasis added]. The law now requires the elimination of discriminatory practices and equality of access for all persons regardless of race or sex; moral justice requires an end to prejudice and an increase of opportunities for those who have been denied them in the past by prejudice; enlightened self-interest requires that an institution reexamine its priorities where standards of merit are concerned, to revitalize the intellectual life of the community through the utilization of heretofore untapped resources. Most important, insofar as the university aspires to discover, preserve, and transmit knowledge and experience not for one group or selected groups, but for all people, to that extent it must broaden its perception of who shall be responsible for this discovery, preservation, and transmission. In so doing, it broadens the base of intellectual inquiry and lays the foundation of more human social practices. . . .

The report continues in some detail, but its concluding paragraph is of great significance since, in retrospect, it stands today, nearly fifty years after it was written, as at best a signpost of a job unfinished, at worst a damning indictment of our profession’s and our nation’s continuing failure to address racial and gender inequities:

Finally, we think it important to note again the point, purpose, and relationships of the several parts of an
affirmative action plan. It is a plan which is well designed to improve both quality and equal opportunity, but it is a plan which makes an assumption. It assumes that institutions of higher education are what they claim they are – and that all of us as teachers and professors are also what we say we are; that we mean to be fair, that our concern with excellence is not a subterfuge, that we are concerned to be just in the civil rights of all persons in the conduct of our profession. If the assumption is a false one, then it will quickly appear that affirmative action plans can go the way of other proposals which are intellectually sound but which so frequently fail in their assumptions about the nature of people. For without doubt, the temptation will appear to the indifferent and the cynical to distinguish between the appearance and the substance of such a plan and to opt for the appearance alone: the token production of “adequate” numbers of women and blacks to avoid the likelihood of contract suspensions or HEW inquiry, even while disparaging their presence and assigning the “blame” to the government. We do not doubt in this respect that institutions of higher learning will thus reveal more about themselves in the manner in which they respond to the call for affirmative action, however, than what their response may reveal about the consistency of such plans with excellence and fairness in higher education [emphasis added]. For its own part, the Committee on Discrimination believes that plans reflected in the body of this Report are entirely sound and congenial to the standards of the AAUP, and we commend them for the opportunity they provide for the further improvement of higher education as well as for their contribution to the field of civil rights.

This report was published and can be read in full in the AAUP Bulletin, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Jun., 1973), pp. 178-183.  It is available on JSTOR.