Free Speech at Ohio State

ERIC SOLOMON

WHEN you go out into the real world, for God’s sake don’t start every second sentence with the words, ‘At Harvard, we —’” I think I did a pretty fair job of attending to this advice from the late Hyder Rollins when I took my first job in 1958, teaching English at the Ohio State University. And ten years of Harvard didn’t seem to incapacitate me for teaching in a state university. There were, certainly, some differences in discussing Mark Twain with a class in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Columbus, Ohio; in Cambridge, a rhetorical question as to who, in our world, has ever taken a raft down the Mississippi would not bring forth a complacent freshman raising his hand. But I taught my classes, published my articles, drank Jim Beam at faculty cocktail parties, received promotions, raises, tenure, research grants, administrative posts. I liked and admired my colleagues, was satisfied with the library, was more than satisfied with my chairman, lived inexpensively and well in the elm-shaded streets of Columbus. Nevertheless (sorry, Mr. Rollins), at Harvard, we had freedom of speech.

When I left Ohio State after six years, in the wake of almost one third of my department who had, for a variety of reasons, taken other appointments, and after I had helped to initiate a lawsuit against the president and board of trustees, I had learned that good salaries, light teaching loads, and air-conditioned offices are no substitutes for a full measure of academic freedom. During years of arguments about who should be free to speak on the campus, the university administration defiantly asserted that there existed no interference with an instructor’s freedom in the classroom. Yet for me, and for many of my colleagues, what we considered the necessity to spend incredible amounts of time in clandestine meetings, in preparing speeches, in responding to attacks — in politics, actually — meant that our classroom performances, the measure of our preparations, in fact, were being interfered with. When a community and a board of trustees seem to be forcing a teacher to his knees, even an English teacher realizes that the metaphor has gone astray: one can pray in that position, but one cannot teach.

I now think that the free speech battles at Ohio State in the early 1960s were, like those at Berkeley, symptoms of a more widespread disease affecting the academic body and the community. The tempests at Ohio State were inevitable, given the nature of the society in which we — those whom Governor DiSalle once told me the university president had described as a “few unfortunate appointments we made from Eastern schools" — found ourselves. First, Columbus is one of the three most reactionary cities in the United States. The John Birch Society seems middle-of-the-road in Franklin County, far outdistanced to the right by long-entrenched groups such as the Navy League or (my favorite) the Watch Washington Society. Second, Columbus is not really urban. Although it prides itself on its near 100 percent population of native-born Americans, the more than 600,000 citizens of greater Columbus form themselves into loosely connected groups of communities. There is little heavy industry, a weak trade union tradition, a large floating group of indigent Negroes on their way out of the Deep South. Third, Columbus has a very tightly controlled power structure consisting of a few families, a few banks, and one newspaper. Physically, there are two newspapers, the morning Scripps-Howard being the liberal one; its role is compromised by the fact that it uses the evening Dispatch advertising and printing departments. Fourth, Columbus is the state capital. And finally, it is the home of one of the largest educational institutions in the world.

When these social ingredients were joined by one new force after World War II, a much larger influx of students and faculty from outside Franklin County, from outside Ohio, even from outside the Midwest, some kind of conflict was preparing. The community was simply the wrong size and nature to assimilate what I think of as “creeping universitism,” the quiet and steady arrival of men whose backgrounds were wide-ranging, whose views were varied, and whose commitments were to the general sophisticated intellectual community as well as to the local campus. Had Columbus been as large as Chicago or Los Angeles, say, the university and its doings might have been lost in the multitude of public and private colleges; had the city been as small as Bloomington or Urbana, the university might have been able to dominate the community. But Columbus is in the middle range, and the legislature is directly on the scene.

When intellectuals from Harvard, Berkeley, Michigan, the Sorbonne settled into Franklin County, it was unavoidable that eventually they would question certain local codes and customs. So when I arrived in Columbus in 1958, the ink still wet on my Ph.D., I came to a city complacent in its great agricultural-cum-engineering institution that had turned out crushing Rose Bowl champions with awesome efficiency; but unbeknown to the bankers and boosters, “their” university had for years been steadily attracting humanists and scientists who did not consider themselves only state employees — similar to elevator operators, as a Dispatch editorial once put it. I came to Ohio State to teach; I remained to spend much too much time in politics.

A classic example of how community-university relations worked in Columbus occurred when the faculty council, the elected representative body for the entire faculty, voted not to send the football team to the Rose Bowl even if they won the Big Ten championship as was their wont. The issues involved were complex, but basically, those opposed to the Rose Bowl game argued that it was detrimental to the main job of the university, education, because too many students traveled to California and returned late to classes. Also it was felt that the game was purely a business venture. The main thrust against the Rose Bowl came from arts and sciences faculty plus a few administrators primarily concerned with curriculum. I stress this lineup because during the later troubles, essentially the same lines would be drawn. In favor of the Rose Bowl as a necessary and deserved reward for line young athletes were the board of trustees, the top administration, including the president, Novice G. Fawcett, and faculty drawn largely from agriculture, medicine, and engineering.

What fascinated those of us new to Ohio State was not the closeness of the vote, or the rioting students who smashed the doors of the faculty club, but the community response, a wild bellow of rage that these upstart employees of the state (the faculty) should presume to attack the city’s most beloved and prestigious institution. Those faculty members most prominent as anti-Rose Bowl received the traditional all-night obscenephone-call treatment. The Dispatch assisted in this process by telephoning each member of the council, asking how he voted, and then on the first night after the vote, printing on the front page the name, address, and phone number of all those who had either admitted to voting against the Rose Bowl or who had not informed the newspaper how they voted. On the second evening appeared names, addresses, phone numbers, and salaries. On the third night, names and so forth, plus amount of money spent by each dissenting professor on outof-state travel — relevant since these men denied the athletes their trip. The frustration of the newspapers was particularly intense because only BigTen rules regarding faculty control of athletics kept the administration from overturning the vote. It was shortly overturned anyway, but the team has not been winning.

Telephone violence was a fairly normal part of Columbus living. When I was chairman of the Central Ohio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (I’d never even heard of the ACLU before coming to Columbus; for me, as for others, the community was a great teacher of civil liberties), I learned to anticipate and hang up on the first curse. To be fair to Columbus, I recall only one genuine threat of violence to a faculty member, and this was understandable because his wife had come out publicly in favor of peace and the United Nations. After a group attacked his house, cut his phone wires, and smeared his windows with horse manure (rural values prevail), my colleague was rather disturbed for his family’s safety, particularly as one of the right-wing radio stations continued to broadcast his wife’s name and address and call her organization “Communist.” Because the police were uninterested, for five nights a group of faculty guarded his house armed with baseball bats and cameras. Odd weapons, but our defense was organized by a former Union official who insisted that we get our assailants’ photos; fortunately we were disturbed only by a few mysterious cars.

As in the Rose Bowl case, “unfortunate” faculty appointments continued to plague the community and the university in all sorts of unexpected places. A few socialists formed a Dissent Forum; another group sprang up, Students for Liberal Action. The Student Senate Human Relations committee blew the whistle on the university’s involvement in segregated off-campus housing; some law school professors joined this one, and the dean of students was outspoken in his opposition to faculty meddling. We were disconcerted by the sense of interlocking directorates: a university president on the same bank board of directors as the newspaper owner and the chairman of the trustees; a dean of students active in the real estate profession.

It was foreseeable, then, that when a major clash came, it would be over the issue of free speech, of the rights of students and faculty to invite into the community, onto the campus — property which is tax-supported by the very people whose values would be threatened — speakers from outside Columbus who might, almost assuredly would, question the accepted local way of life, and by doing so, influence for the worse the receptive, tender minds of the future citizens of the community, the students.

OHIO STATE had an ugly history of free speech contradictions during the 1950s. A notorious “gag rule,” which denied access to the campus to any speaker not acceptable to the administration, was finally — or so most faculty and students thought — done away with, and student organizations, with faculty advisers’ consent, were given the right to invite a speaker to address a group.

That the rule was still vague, confusing, and open to contradictory interpretations became clear in the spring of 1961, when a California-based scholar of Soviet contemporary history, William Mandel, was barred from the campus. He was invited to speak by a young faculty member who had enjoyed his refutations of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in the film Operation Abolition. On a technicality, since the inviter was only an assistant instructor, the invitation was held to be invalid. When a student organization then stepped into the breach and invited Mandel, a monumental brouhaha took place over whether the faculty adviser had to want the speaker or simply agree that his talk might be educational.

The rule was sufficiently unclear so that two law professors, of differing political persuasions, could in good faith come up with opposite interpretations. The administration chose the reading it preferred. Mandel spoke in Columbus, but in the muddy backyard of his original sponsor. (An ironic sidelight to this affair was that while Ohio State did not punish the instructor, the receipt of a number of hostile Dispatch articles in reference to his activities in this case led a Nebraska state college to revoke his contract for the following year; the AAUP has since blacklisted the college for its conduct. Although there were some objections in high places, Ohio State did give the man an additional year of teaching in place of the withdrawn job.)

The faculty council struggled during the autumn of 1961 to write a clear rule that both faculty and trustees would accept — a task that has not yet been satisfactorily accomplished — and a number of disturbed faculty members took to holding weekly dinners in order to discuss our fears about the direction in which the university seemed to be heading. We were mostly younger men and women, drawn primarily from the departments of English, history, philosophy, and psychology, as well as from the law school. There was no formal organization; we simply invited people worried about academic freedom who would bring their friends, and we exchanged horror stories. These little meetings had two rather important consequences, however. From them sprang the idea that the Student Senate sponsor a symposium on the Idea of a University, in order to persuade the administration that a free society called for an open campus. The students were enthusiastic; four of us wrote personal letters to friends in academic life, who literally fought their way through snowstorms to provide, under Cardinal Newman’s title, some brilliant defenses of the historical concepts of the university as an open forum. The administration and trustees managed to ignore the event, despite the contributions of such leaders of American intellectual life as Howard Mumford Jones, Stringfellow Barr, Fred Harvey Harrington, and Henry Steele Commager.

One other result of these dinners was that when the battle really opened in the spring of 1962, we had a nucleus; we were ready to start instantly the innumerable round of meetings, day and night, lunch and dinner, noon and midnight, at first in private houses, then as more and more senior and respected professors joined us, in empty law school classrooms, always seeking ways out, ways to respond to the encroachments upon our sense of academic freedom without simply withdrawing irresponsibly.

WHAT happened in 1962 was simple. A student group invited three speakers from the Emergency Civil Liberties Union, according to all the rules and with the full support of the faculty adviser. One of these men, a former OSU graduate student named Philip Luce, was particularly obnoxious to the administration, both personally and politically, while the other two, Clark Foreman and an undergraduate from Berkeley active in anti-HUAC activities, were not exactly welcome guests. But the students had followed the new rule. And, literally at the eleventh hour, while substantial crowds were milling around a locked law school auditorium, the president, unable to persuade the faculty adviser to rescind the invitation, ordered him to cancel the meeting. This was done; the men spoke in a police-covered backyard, this time the yard of a rooming house, whose boarders had named it Rosa Luxembourg House.

That night our dinner group, expanded by some faculty who had been withdrawn from politics since the McCarthy days, held an emergency meeting. The next day there were speeches and protests all over the campus. With two other professors, I spoke to a crowd of 500 students (off campus, on the steps of the Wesley Foundation). Resolutions were passed; the Dispatch hailed the president’s action; John Bricker for the board of trustees invited any professor who didn’t like the way things were run at Ohio State to move on. The AAUP met and condemned the president’s intransigence. One of the most moving aspects of this whole protest was the way more and more senior faculty members, high in rank, prestige, years of service, and love of the university, sprang to the defense of the ideals involved. They were doubly motivated; they sought to defend free speech and, equally important, to preserve Ohio State University, to make it a place where the younger faculty, lacking total commitment to the campus, would want to stay. They deplored, influenced, pressured, and stood up to be counted.

The climax of the faculty unrest was the calling of a faculty meeting, the whole faculty in its many (no one was quite sure how many) hundreds. There had been only one such meeting in a decade, but an antiquated rule, since changed, allowed forty faculty signatures (we gathered over 300) to call such a meeting. A number of students who were eager to demonstrate, picket, riot were restrained by their faculty friends’ passionate pleas to leave it in our hands; I shall never be sure whether, if we had not done so, the outcome might have been very different; the sit-in was not yet a commonplace, however. We were convinced that among the teaching faculty, we possessed the votes to censure President Novice G. Fawcett’s actions. What we did not know was who made up the official faculty of Ohio State University.

Although the exact figures were often disputed, it turned out that the faculties of arts and sciences, of law, of education, of engineering, and so forth, were in the minority in the university, where nearly 800 agricultural extension workers, county agents, and the like had faculty appointments, where hundreds of private M.D.’s who taught as little as one hour a week in a clinic — often to qualify for football seats, since the 83,000-seat stadium was always sold out — were voting faculty. The word went out; the campus was filled with strangers asking the way to the auditorium.

It was in many ways the most remarkable meeting I have ever attended, with more than 1500 faculty members on the floor, and the gallery packed with noisy students. The president presided, even though his actions were under consideration, and he insisted that each speech or motion be tape-recorded, a rather inhibiting move. (One of my students, majoring in radio-TV, I believe, ran the machine, and later bootlegged me a tape of the meeting in its entirety, the only one in existence outside the administration’s hands; I treasure it.) There were speeches in favor of the president’s action and attacking the private life of Philip Luce. The president recognized his own supporters first, and a motion to praise his action was on the floor: thus those who wished to censure him had to key their speeches to that motion, for, as we expected, only one vote would occur. A voice vote was taken, clearly in support of the president’s position. Out of some kind of hubris, perhaps a confidence that he had the support of the entire faculty and that the volume of the voices against him had come from the students, the president called for a head count.

More than 1000 men stood in favor of the president. But the 500 who stood to oppose his action, while the students cheered, included nearly the entire heart of the teaching faculty, many chairmen, even some deans, and the entire English department, for example. As I watched the smile fade from President Fawcett’s face, I realized the meaning of the term “poleaxed” for the first time. The rest of the meeting — of the year, of the academic-freedom battle, really — was anticlimax. A swift vote to adjourn passed by a similar 2 to 1 margin.

Some of the younger faculty, while disturbed by the rather cynical conduct of the meeting, could accept this as, after all, power politics. But the attitude of a few of our senior colleagues was disheartening. They had been clobbered ruthlessly, and yet they were wildly exultant in the size of the vote against the president. I felt then that these men, some of whom I still admire as much as any in the profession, were punchy from too many defeats over the years; a technical knockout seemed scarcely distinguishable from a victory. Of course, the vote negated any possibility of national AAUP interest, for the faculty will had been heard. The year dribbled to an end with more speeches, consultations, promises of negotiations for a new rule. “Free Speech Now” badges appeared. Some students conceived a fine plan for an airplane to circle around the graduation ceremonies while hauling a free speech banner. Money was raised, the plane hired, and many of us who had never attended a graduation sweated in the hot sun of the stadium, waiting for the plane that never appeared. The speaker was Curtis LeMay; the CAB grounded the airplane.

During the next year, while faculty advisory committees strove to devise a speaker rule that would avoid the administration’s new demands that a room be applied for well in advance, that the prospective speaker’s name be given, and that he be required to sign a loyalty oath before being officially invited, there were some interesting academic innovations. One event was the formation of a group effort unique, as far as I know, in the history of American education: the Committee for the Study of Alternatives. The inspiration behind this organization came from the same faculty that had ruefully dined out the preceding year, our ranks greatly strengthened by professors appalled by the administration’s steamroller tactics. The idea was simple: since Columbus was a onenewspaper town, where even national television programs had to pass through local selectors, since speakers representing alternative viewpoints were to be barred from the campus, and since as busy teachers we could not really start our own newspaper, we would raise money and place a full-page advertisement in the student newspaper regularly every two weeks presenting alternative answers to the questions then being answered in only one manner. Two or three faculty members would prepare an ad, sometimes drawing from the locally feared New York Times a reported speech or quoting from a published book, sometimes writing an original statement, in order to present alternatives on various issues: free speech, Columbus’ tax structure, or nuclear disarmament, for example. The academic community was pleased or angered, according to its politics, but some discussion seeped onto the campus. The Dispatch, in its report on the formation of Alternatives, inadvertently got its front-page typesetting mixed, and ran the story, without even a comma in separation, directly into a report of the Attorney General’s calling a New York group a Communist front.

Much time was spent in the search for a formula to knit together a campus becoming progressively split along left-right lines. Lunch at the faculty club was in the nature of a conspiracy, with people looking on. remarking on who sat with whom and why. Some teachers, men prominent enough to receive yearly job offers, were saying to hell with all these activities, who needs Ohio State? And they took Senator Bricker’s advice. The administration was bland: thirty or forty professors didn’t make much difference to a faculty of nearly 2000. And so President Fawcett barred Frank Wilkinson, a vigorous foe of HUAC, from speaking on the campus — after a good many speakers representing the opposite viewpoint had appeared.

More meetings, protests, wails, and another fascinating novelty, a lawsuit. This suit, which is still in the courts, accuses the president, the board, and a dean of denying the members of the student group who issued the invitation and the barred speaker their constitutional rights under the First Amendment, arguing that freedom of speech involves the right to listen. When finally decided, this case may ensure that state campuses should be as free as is other public property.

For more than four years the question of free speech has been argued at Ohio State. But the administrative line has been held. Last spring, students dramatized the continued restrictions on free speech at Ohio State by inviting the Marxist historian, Herbert Aptheker, to stand silently on a stage while a large crowd applauded the nonspeaker whom the university had forbidden to speak. After his departure, a professor read from Aptheker’s books, borrowed from the university library. Protest marches and satiric broadsides keep this conflict alive; but even a compromise on this issue cannot relieve the academic community’s sense of alienation.

I think I reflect the feelings of many of my former colleagues — now at Duke, Stanford, Riverside, La Jolla, Buffalo, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Indiana — when I express my own sense of loss and nostalgia as well as anger. Certainly, such administrative stupidity still moves me to rage; but I learned a great deal from my years in Columbus, and I know what to look for in a college, and what to fight for.