BY MARJORIE HEINS
Harry Keyishian, the last surviving plaintiff in the most important Supreme Court academic freedom case of the twentieth century, died on April 4 at the age of 93. He was one of only five University of Buffalo professors who in 1964 refused to sign an anti-communist loyalty oath and was the first to be fired. The oath was a product of New York State’s 1949 Feinberg Law, which mandated investigations of every public school teacher for possibly “treasonable or seditious acts or utterances,” or past membership in an organization deemed sympathetic to communism. The state Board of Regents instituted the oath, or “Feinberg Certificate,” for university employees as a way of avoiding the administrative burden of having to conduct anti-subversive investigations into many thousands of people.
All five of the plaintiffs in the case that became known as Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967) could have easily signed the Feinberg Certificate because none had been communists, but they refused as a matter of conscientious objection to the offensiveness of the oath and the demand for political conformity that it imposed. Harry Keyishian was especially determined to take this stand despite the risk to his career because as a Queens College student in 1952 he had observed at first hand an inquisition against several of the best professors at the college by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee; they lost their jobs for refusing to answer the subcommittee’s questions. As Harry explained to Bill Moyers in a 1987 interview, his decision to challenge the oath and the Feinberg Law was his “revenge on the fifties.”
The five plaintiffs and their lawyer Richard Lipsitz faced an uphill battle because in 1952 the Supreme Court had upheld the Feinberg Law on the theory that since nobody has a right to be a teacher, the state can impose whatever political tests it chooses. Although the makeup of the Court had changed by 1964 when Harry Keyishian and his colleagues were faced with the Feinberg oath, and the anti-communist Red scare had abated, the Keyishian case was decided by a narrow 5 to 4 margin, with Justice William Brennan writing the majority opinion and an angry dissent by Justice Tom Clark on behalf of himself and three others. Justice Brennan’s opinion, finding the Feinberg Law unconstitutionally vague and overbroad in its incursions on the freedom to teach and speak, famously declared that “academic freedom is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned”; it is therefore “a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.”
After losing his job at Buffalo, Harry finished his PhD dissertation (on the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Dekker) and in 1965 joined the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he remained for the next 45 years, mentoring generations of students and winning the university’s Distinguished Faculty Award for Research. He was especially beloved for his Shakespeare seminars. He published several books, including The Shapes of Revenge: Victimization, Vengeance, and Vindictiveness in Shakespeare (1995) and Screening Politics: The Politician in American Movies, 1931-2001 (2003). He was a longtime member of the editorial board of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and served as director of the press until 2017, shepherding more than 1,000 books through to publication. Until his last years of life, he continued writing articles and giving talks on Shakespeare as well as politics, and in particular, on his recollections of the Keyishian case.
I interviewed Harry and three of his co-plaintiffs – English professors George Hochfield and Ralph Maud, and philosophy professor Newton Garver – in the course of researching my 2013 book on the anti-communist witch hunts against teachers and professors and the Supreme Court’s eventual recognition of the importance of academic freedom in response. (The fifth plaintiff, poet George Starbuck, had died in 1996.) Harry had kept a file of clippings from his Queens College days which he generously gave me to enrich my research – as well as this priceless photograph of him as a young instructor with his T.S. Eliot dartboard:
Harry was proud of his Armenian heritage and was a longtime editor of the quarterly journal Ararat. He told me during one of our interviews that his decision to challenge the Feinberg Law was especially difficult because his immigrant father had written him a “heartbreaking” letter, urging him not to “do anything to harm this country that gave him so much.” Harry decided that taking a stand was the best way to help, not harm, the country of his birth.
In addition to his many professional accomplishments, Harry played a mean second base on a senior men’s softball team; at a memorial service on April 9, virtually the entire team showed up to honor him. Harry and his wife Marjorie, a poet and teacher, raised four daughters: Elizabeth, Amy, Emily, and Sarah. He is survived by them, as well as seven grandchildren.
The Keyishian decision is more important than ever today, given the Trump Administration’s brazen attacks on university governance and curriculum decisions, and on individual professors’ freedom to speak, write, and teach. Substitute “anti-‘woke,’” “anti-Middle East Studies,” or “anti-DEI” for “anti-subversive” or “anti-communist,” and it’s clear that we need more First Amendment heroes like Harry Keyishian.
Marjorie Heins is the author of Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge (2013).
