BY JOAN W. SCOTT

Chandler Davis

In the annals of academic freedom, Chandler Davis (Chan, as he was known to family and friends), who died last month, was a towering figure.  His principled refusal to comply (on First Amendment grounds) with a HUAC investigation of communism at the University of Michigan, led to his dismissal from the university in 1954 and a contempt of congress citation that landed him in prison for six months in 1960.  He told a faculty panel hearing his case that “In the final analysis, I reserve the right to follow my own thinking as to what is important to me and how much I care about it, and political liberty is one of the things about which I care a lot more than my job at the University of Michigan.”

Prison did not subdue this mathematician and writer of occasional science fiction and poetry; his entire life was marked by an uncompromised, even stubborn, commitment to combining scholarship with principled political advocacy.  One of his last acts, from a hospital bed weeks before he died, was to organize and speak at a protest against the imprisonment of a young Russian mathematician for his opposition to Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Ellen Shrecker, who devotes a long section of her No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986) to the Davis case at Michigan, characterized him this way: “Davis was the quintessential anti-authoritarian personality.  Principled, tenacious, and fiercely independent, he had an almost innate predisposition for political dissent.  It may have been hereditary, for Davis came from a long line of rebels and civil disobedients.”  Schrecker cites Davis’s own words to HUAC to capture a sense of this man who would not compromise with attacks on freedom of speech. He was not, he explained, “refusing to cooperate with the Government.  I am cooperating with the Government to the best of my ability as a citizen in attempting to restrain Government officers who I believe are exceeding the authority of their office.”

Black-listed at universities in the U.S., Chan moved to the University of Toronto, where he taught until his retirement.  Retirement ended neither his engagement in mathematics nor in politics.  The obituary in the Toronto Globe and Mail gives a sense of the range of his continued activism in both areas.

Those of us on his email lists could count on being reminded of important petition and letter-writing campaigns.  He rarely failed to attend the Academic Freedom Conferences established by the University of Michigan Senate in the 1990s, as a recognition of its own complicity in the denial of academic freedom to Chan and the two colleagues let go along with him.

Chan is survived by three children and the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, his partner for all of these years and, like him, a critical thinker and fighter and, to many of us, an inspirational figure as well.

Alan Wald, who holds the H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professorship at the University of Michigan (the institution’s attempt at reparation for the harm they’d done in firing him years before), put it beautifully in a published appreciation of Chan’s life:  “The death of this endlessly resilient, lifelong radical at the age of ninety-six on September 24 in Toronto seems like the passing of an emissary from a world of the socialist Left that no longer exists. Despite errors of political judgment, which Chan was the first to acknowledge, he was for many of us a moral touchstone in our own decades of political upheaval and unpredictability.”

Joan W. Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and a former member and chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.