Columbia University Fires Two “Disloyal” Faculty
Columbia University on this day fired two faculty members, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana and James McKeen Cattell, for alleged “disloyalty” regarding U.S. involvement in World War I. Both were vocal opponents of the war. There were, of course, no hearings regarding their views.
Catttell was a formidable figure in American academia. He was the first chairperson of the first Psychology Department in the U.S., and held many prominent positions. Dana was the grandson of the noted American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Cattell’s son Owen was a Columbia University student in 1917, and became a leader of the Collegiate Anti-Militarism League. He and two other students were arrested for distributing anti-draft leaflets. His father supported him, and that was one factor in his being fired.
To protest their firing, the distinguished historian Charles Beard resigned his position at Columbia on October 9, 1917. Beard supported the war and resigned in protest of the violation of academic freedom.
Professor Dana went on to a long career involved in various civil liberties issues. He also continued his academic research and was the author or editor of many books, including The Six Centuries Since Dante (1926) and Handbook on Soviet Drama (1938).
When the U.S. entered World War I, on April 6, 1917, a wave of patriotic fervor swept the country, and colleges and universities were not exempt. Faculty members at other universities were fired because of their opposition to the war. Columbia University was particularly notable with regard to the repression of dissent, in part because of the belligerent attitude of its president, Nicholas Murray Butler, who had a famous hostility to freedom of expression when it involved ideas he did not like. (On May 6, 1941, for example, he used his influence to deny novelist Ernest Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize in Literature for his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, because he did not like the author’s views on the Spanish Civil War.) The Columbia University events received more publicity for the simple reason that it is located in New York City.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) reached an agreement on academic freedom of tenure on November 11, 1940. The agreement remains the governing document on academic freedom today.
Read about the hysteria of the World War I and Red Scare years: Christopher M. Finan, From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America (2007)
Learn more: Paul Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (1979)
Read about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana here
Learn more about academic freedom today at the AAUP web site.