When Duke officials announced earlier this month that the University would permit a pro-Palestinian conference to rumble onto campus in the fall, they did so with a vigor that reached from the First Amendment to a modern moral conflict, that swept through the history of the institution and invoked the moral gravitas of higher education and that reestablished Duke’s bedrock of academic freedom.
“We recognize the topic of this conference will generate strong emotions and may spark protests, as it has elsewhere,” wrote John Burness, senior vice president for public affairs and government relations, in an Aug. 5 statement. “However, we believe the best antidote to speech that others find disagreeable is more speech, not less.”
Indeed, the collective voice of the University has come to unify and distinguish itself in the name of free speech ever since Dec. 2, 1903, when Trinity College stood fast in refusing to accept the resignation of professor John Spencer Bassett, who had written in an editorial that Booker T. Washington was “the greatest man, save General Lee, born in the South in a hundred years.” When Bassett crossed racial boundaries with his praise, he drew the ire of local and regional community members still entrenched in the legacy of slavery.
Despite the immediate threats the Bassett Affair prompted for the school—the entire faculty and President John Kilgo were all but set to step down in protest—the precedent the Board of Trustees set gave Duke the basis for deciding a multitude of other threats to academic freedom in the years to come.
Controversial speakers brought to campus have often prompted negative responses. During the week of the Bassett Affair’s 27th anniversary, Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas passed through with a grace of his own, accompanied by the poise of Duke President William Few.
First Few set forth the University’s support of the club-sponsored speech, but he was out of town for Thomas’s visit and returned to angry letters and an editorial in a local trade publication insinuating that certain Duke professors had used personal political motivation to lure Thomas to campus. So Few, underscorer that he was, used the opportunity to hearken back to Bassett, to Duke’s ability to maintain some freedom of religion, and to his personal contempt for opinions that turned a blind eye to freedom of speech in the name of lewd speech that was “the ruin of the Old South.”
But the New South still struggled to fully grasp a new wrinkle in political discourse in 1954 and 1955, when the Duke debate team was set tackle the question of whether the United States should recognize Communist China in international relations. A freshman debater sent a measly letter to his local congressman asking for advice. The politician was astonished that the team might even fathom a pro-Chinese position. “I have no personal acquaintances,” he went on to say, “either in Congress or elsewhere who have indicated favoring such recognition.”
When the debate team argued in favor of recognizing China, Duke President A. Hollis Edens remained relatively out of the spotlight for the group’s triumph, allowing the team to carry on in competition and encouraging its faculty advisor to be filmed for Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now.”
Edens had already been a champion of freedom three years earlier, when Senator Joseph McCarthy threatened legal action against the University. Sociology professor Hornell Hart had written a pamphlet criticizing McCarthy’s investigation of accused Communists in the U.S. State Department, and Edens responded to the senator’s repeated threats with a rock-solid response calling freedom of research “axiomatic in University circles.” An editorial in The Chronicle praised the school’s decision in the 50th anniversary year of the Bassett Affair to take academic freedom and make it “augmented and reemphasised [sic], rather than endangered.”
But well after the boon of dissent in the 1960s, when the University dealt with a state ban on speakers, not to mention Vietnam and integration, the University is again faced with being at the forefront of freedom of speech issues in higher education.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, and the ensuing war on terrorism, professors and community members alike have voiced concern about an increased crackdown on controversial thought in the realm of academia. The prime example was an invitation for Laura Whitehorn, convicted of planning a bombing in the U.S. Capitol, to speak about HIV to a race and gender class in March 2003. In typical Duke fashion, she came.
“Both governmental concern about security issues and conformity in our society and on our campus are sometimes at odds with academic freedom,” then-President Nan Keohane said on the 100th anniversary of the Bassett Affair. “Thus, we need to continue to express and uphold the central value of this defining aspect of academic life. It is as relevant today as it was in 1903.”
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