The most important figure in the history of academic freedom seems little remembered today: Arthur Lovejoy, a man whose life story reminds us how difficult it can be to maintain a principled defense of free expression when we encounter causes we despise.

As co-founder of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) alongside his more famous friend John Dewey, Lovejoy was not only the driving force behind the founding of what was to become the leading organization to defend academic freedom. He also transformed the meaning and application of the very concept.

Yet Lovejoy marred his legacy with hypocrisy, openly embracing repression during World War I and calling for the firing of all Communist professors during the McCarthy Era.

Lovejoy’s interest in academic freedom began early in his career. As a young philosophy teacher at Stanford University, he was one of seven professors to quit in protest against the 1900 firing of economist Edward Ross at the command of Jane Stanford. Dale Keiger’s history tells us “Harvard’s philosophy department wanted [Lovejoy], but President A. Lawrence Lowell blackballed him as a troublemaker.” In 1910, Lovejoy finally found a home at Johns Hopkins University.

In 1913, Lovejoy chaired a committee appointed by the American Philosophical Association and the American Psychological Association to investigate John Mecklin’s forced resignation following objections to his teaching about evolution. The case and Lovejoy’s report inspired the AAUP’s creation.

Some mistakenly presume that the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles constituted the founding statement of AAUP values. In reality, the Declaration–of which Lovejoy served as the key author–came a year after the AAUP’s establishment and emerged in response to another key case.

During an April 1915 train trip to see some plays in New York, Lovejoy read a newspaper reference to University of Utah faculty resigning to protest academic freedom violations. Instead of attending the theater, he immediately went to the home of Dewey, then president of the newly organized AAUP, and persuaded Dewey to give him $300 to fund an inquiry.

The next day, Lovejoy was on the train to Utah, where he spent weeks personally conducting the first-ever AAUP investigation. Meticulously documenting attacks on the rights of professors, Lovejoy produced AAUP’s first official report on academic freedom, establishing the model the AAUP has followed for more than a century.

Having effectively created the impression of a free speech crisis requiring a strong, collective response from the professoriate, Lovejoy then drafted that response with two colleagues, penning what became known as the AAUP Declaration of Principles.

The Declaration represented a radical expansion of academic freedom. Under the older German concept of Lehrfreiheit (freedom to teach), academic freedom had been strictly limited to teaching and research within one’s academic expertise, with political freedom excluded. But Lovejoy added an essential third component—”extramural utterances”— to protect the right of professors to speak out publicly about their ideas, a right that was not “limited to questions falling within their own specialties.”

Joerg Tiede has noted that the Declaration’s approval by members “hung in the balance” for a time, as more conservative members objected to the focus on academic freedom. But for the next century, most cases considered by the AAUP dealt with the “extramural utterances” of professors punished for expressing controversial views.

Champions of liberty have a long history of hypocrisy.

Ironically, not long after this revolutionary leadership, in response to the First World War and at Lovejoy’s urging, the AAUP actively embraced repression for the first and last time. Lovejoy argued that colleges had to choose between being an “accomplice” in the “defeat and the dishonor of the republic” and refusing to “give countenance and aid” to war critics. Condemning conscientious objectors as “an unpleasantly parasitic part in the history of human progress,” he called for purging pacifists from academia, “whether or not they have already come within the reach of the law.”

With Lovejoy as chair of the AAUP”s Committee on Academic Freedom in Wartime, the organization’s 1918 report reflected his repressive views. The AAUP decreed that anti-war professors must “refrain from public discussion of the war” and in private “avoid all hostile or offensive expressions concerning the United States or its government.” Those opposed to the war were deemed “enemies of the state,” guilty of “treachery.”

Criticizing the AAUP report at the time as “a serious disappointment,” The Nation argued that “the committee, for the period of the war, hands over the keys of the castle to the enemy” and “jeopards the very conception of a university.”

Lovejoy replied angrily, justifying restrictions and making the startling declaration that academic freedom did not apply to communists: “The American college, if it maintained the kind of neutrality, with respect to the present struggle, which the Nation regards as essential to academic freedom, would, in fact, be not merely tolerating but facilitating the efforts of those who would repeat in America the achievement of the Lenines and the Trotzskys in Russia.”

Lovejoy reprised his argument three decades later in a 1949 American Scholar essay, outlining the “cogent reasons against admitting members of the Communist Party in America to university faculties.” Insisting that banning Communists was essential “to safeguard academic freedom,” Lovejoy called for all suspect professors to be interrogated, required to resign from the Communist Party USA, and forced to publicly denounce it for suppression of “academic and political freedom.”

The AAUP is often condemned for its inaction in the face of McCarthyism, but it never justified banning Communist professors, as Lovejoy himself advocated.

The greatest revolutionary theorists of free expression never imagined such concepts would apply to people they regarded as evil or inferior.

Lest we single-out Lovejoy, it’s important to remember that champions of liberty have a long history of hypocrisy. John Milton’s 1644 Areopagitica is a monument to free speech, yet Milton called for the repression of Catholics and even worked as a government censor. John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty that “barbarians” should be denied liberty and ruled by “despotism.” Thomas Jefferson never applied the Declaration of Independence to the people he enslaved.

The greatest revolutionary theorists of free expression never imagined such concepts would apply to people they regarded as evil or inferior. It’s up to those of us who follow in the footsteps of these thinkers to acknowledge and rectify that history–not to abandon brilliant expositions of freedom because of the flaws of their creators, but to bring principled consistency and universal application to their best arguments.

Article Image “Portrait of Arthur Lovejoy” by Courtney Jolliff (used with permission).