Limits of Academic Freedom

With increasing zealotry, English Professor H. Bruce Franklin, 37, has sought to shatter the uneasy campus calm at Stanford University. In the process he appears to have reached the blurry outer limits of U.S. academic freedom and is in real danger of becoming the first tenured professor ever to be fired by a major American university for political actions that led to violence.

Once a quiet, respected expert on Melville and Hawthorne, Franklin has in recent years parlayed a long-bubbling political concern into a full-blown Communist analysis of literature as well as everything else. As a Maoist with newly developed Mau Mau disruptive instincts, he and 30 followers heckled Henry Cabot Lodge so ferociously during a January campus appearance that the former U.S. Ambassador to South Viet Nam was unable to deliver his speech until the next day.

Appropriate Response. Stanford has borne its share of dissenters, but President Richard Lyman, a longtime public foe of the Viet Nam War, felt that Franklin had gone too far. Charging that the heckling incident "strikes at the university's obligation to maintain itself as an open forum." Lyman recommended that the faculty advisory board suspend Franklin without pay for one academic quarter.

Franklin also thought the heckling had been inappropriate. As he saw it, "The appropriate response to Lodge would have been to toss a grenade at him." Last month, after the Laos invasion, with his suspension hearing still pending, the pugnacious professor exhorted a crowd to occupy the university computer center. They did, sparking hours of disturbances during which some student conservatives were beaten and two youths were wounded by gunfire. As a result, President Lyman suspended Franklin from all professorial duties (with pay, because of university regulations) and recommended that the advisory board dismiss him. The university also sought a court injunction barring the professor and certain of his followers from the campus.

New McCarthyism? Franklin's case arises just as new codes of professorial conduct are beginning to be developed. The radical activism of some faculty members, says Berkeley Law Professor Sanford Kadish, president of the American Association of University Professors, "seems to many of us in the profession to require that we, as professors, take cognizance of threats to academic freedom from within our ranks, as well as to deal with threats to academic freedom from the outside."

Berkeley, Kent State and Illinois State have each recently promulgated codes laying new emphasis upon responsibility. The American Association of State Colleges and Universities has also toughened its faculty responsibility requirements, suggesting that disruptive acts are "the antitheses of academic freedom." Next week the prestigious Carnegie Commission on Higher Education will recommend that standards similar to those of the First Amendment be applied to academic freedom. Such standards protect freedom of speech, belief and association--but not conduct that violates the rights of others.

At Stanford itself, a new set of rules for faculty self-regulation is under consideration. It lays out carefully fashioned guidelines for disciplinary action and provides that "no faculty member shall prevent, or directly exhort or incite anyone" to interfere with another "performing his duties within the university." Although the new rules would not retroactively affect the handling of Franklin's case, their spirit is likely to. Franklin sees his suspension and possible firing as part of "the wave of political repression, the new McCarthyism, now sweeping the campuses of the empire." But in fact his case squarely presents the question of how far one man's academic freedom entitles him to impinge on the academic freedom of others.

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