What is “academic freedom,” and why should it deserve special protection? These questions underpin Heins's history of the efforts to police the politics of schoolteachers and university professors. As the title suggests, Heins endorses Justice Felix Frankfurter's assertion that teachers are “priests” of America's democracy, requiring exceptional freedoms to exchange ideas because of their special responsibility to foster “those habits of open-mindedness and critical inquiry which alone make for responsible citizens” (vii). The book shows how this assertion, and the body of case law underpinning it, emerged in the mid-twentieth century in response to efforts by anticommunists to control the classroom. It examines lawyers, activists and individual citizens who challenged the establishment. Their commitment is contrasted with the more piecemeal activities of several professional associations, which often acquiesced in the purge; as well as liberal anticommunists who tried, and in Heins's view largely failed, to develop a more rational approach to managing the relationship between education and politics.
The book ranges from interwar efforts to introduce loyalty oaths in schools to the wartime Rapp–Coudert Committee, which looked into communism in the New York university system; the McCarthy-era assault on the Teachers’ Union; and on into the post-McCarthy era, where the primary threat to academic freedom seemingly shifted from government to university authorities. However, the book focusses primarily on mid-century efforts to harass educators whose radical politics were supposedly corrupting the youth of America. In a left-tinged sector, there were more than a few to be found, and it may be that some indeed used their position to introduce young Americans to unconventional ideas. (Indeed, given the racial, class and gender conformity of the time this might have been no bad thing.) Nevertheless, authorities generally failed to show that radical views equated to propagandistic teaching, a lack of analytical rigour, or other forms of vocational negligence. As a result, they typically fell back on smears based on presumptions of guilt by association.
Moreover, the investigatory mechanism was open to widespread abuse. As elsewhere, loyalty oaths and calls to name names produced moral dilemmas for individuals irrespective of their association with international communism. A refusal to comply could then be used as grounds for sacking – for bringing the discipline into disrepute – without any broader case of subversion being made, much in the way that disturbing the peace was used by police forces to harass radical activists in public spaces. As a result, rather than boisterous lefties, teachers and professors in this account come across as a vulnerable class of intellectual workers.
Heins covers a broad subject with precision and accuracy, and is particularly good in summarizing the legal arguments of the time. However, not much new ground is opened: most of the subjects have been explored in published form elsewhere. The discussion of political repression in the schoolroom is primarily focussed on New York, and it would have been fascinating to see how that story compares to educational repression in other regions, especially given the strong anti-Semitic tinge of McCarthyite politics in the Empire State. Other chapters offer largely synthetic accounts of the Supreme Court's response to political repression in the McCarthy era. And Ellen Schrecker has covered much of the history of anticommunism in the universities in No Ivory Tower.
Nor is there a particularly novel theoretical framework here. The underlying question – whether teachers are indeed “priests of our democracy” – is not engaged with as fully as it might have been. As Heins points out, claims of academic freedom emerged in indirect response to Supreme Court Justice Holmes's ruling that, while an American had a right to speak politics, he had no “constitutional right to be a policeman,” and could thus be fired on effectively political grounds if his politics could be seen to conflict with his employment practices (3). The concept of academic freedom was a localized response to this broader assertion of the power of corporate bodies over employees. Academic freedom thus asserts special rights for educators on the basis of a dubious status claim that other groups lack. Indeed, the idea of having a priestly role in supporting a modern civic religion can be put to repressive as well as protective purposes. The idea of a special educational responsibility was as central to the arguments produced by anticommunists in favour of excluding radicals as it was for those seeking additional protections, on the basis that no defender of Stalin could be said to be fostering “habits of open-mindedness and critical enquiry” (vii).
The concept of academic freedom may perhaps be better understood as part of a patchwork-quilt approach to twentieth-century First Amendment law, whereby the quality of freedom of political speech ends up not as a universal standard, but as one that is variable and conditioned by status. Is it really in keeping with the Bill of Rights that its protections should apply discriminatively? What, after all, is the point in preserving the schoolroom or the university as a free realm of inquiry and inculcating open habits in the minds of students if similar freedoms are not defended equally well elsewhere? Heins, while endorsing a broad view of the rights of private political belief and membership, suggests that, “obviously, academic freedom has its limits” (7). But what these limits are, and who is to determine them, are left unclear.
