You are free except to be restricted

Al Filreis

In 1949, Raymond B. Allen (pictured at left), then president of the University of Washington at Seattle, published an article titled “Communists Should Not Teach in American Colleges.” (It appeared in a magazine called Educational Forum in May of that year.)

Allen did not mean that people actively involved in plots to overthrow the American government by violence should be banned from teaching at American colleges and universities. He would have meant it had that been an issue, but it wasn’t. No, he meant those whose beliefs are determined (by him or by a panel of administrator and faculty) to be communist should be pulled from the classroom. Since bona fide members of the CPUSA in those Cold War days were not typically open about their membership, this wasn’t simply a matter of ascertaining membership. Real communists might not even be formal members. So beliefs (what they did, what they said, whom they met with) could be used to determine such status.

Anyway, surely the most interesting sentence in this essay is this one:

The University’s insistence upon academic freedom goes beyond the traditionally held concept that academic freedom can be abridged only by the institution and asserts that members of the faculty must likewise be free from other restraints that may restrict their freedom.

It means that faculty are free in the usual way that academic freedom guarantees but, at the same time, that faculty must be free from “other restraints.” Must be. Those other restraints are ideologies that tend to make one unfree in one’s thinking. So, having academic freedom, you are not free to engage in a way of thinking that limits your thinking. Of course this was a vague way of referring to communist ideology. A faculty member, Allen thought, could proceed intellectually and pedagogically under any set of principles or ideas, even those — let’s say one’s Catholicism even if one is a biologist exploring conception — that otherwise limit one’s exploration of research topics … any set of principles except this one (communism).

In other words, academic freedom is the granting of freedom but it is also a demand that one must be free from an unfree worldview determined by the university to be such.

My position that Communists are not qualified to be teachers, Allen also wrote, grows out of my belief that freedom has little meaning apart from the integrity of the men and women who enjoy that freedom … The Communist Party, with its concealed aims and objectives, with its clandestine methods and techniques, with its consistent failure to put its full face forward, is a serious reflection upon the integrity of educational institutions that employ its members and upon a whole educational system that has failed to take the Communist issue seriously … The classroom has been called “the chapel of democracy.” As the priests of the temple of education, members of the teaching profession have a sacred duty to remove from their ranks the false and robot prophets of Communism …

Here’s to whole article from ’49.

The photograph of Allen above at left was printed in the Washington Post on March 27, 1949.

February 3, 2009

< previous post next post >

RSS feed | subscribe by email

DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.