The Thirteen Alexander Meiklejohn AwardAuthor(s): Alastair ReidSource: AAUP Bulletin, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Jun., 1973), pp. 162-164Published by: American Association of University ProfessorsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40239764 .

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The Thirteenth Alexander Meiklejohn Award

President Thomas E. O'Connell, President of Berkshire

Community College, received the Thirteenth Alexander

Meiklejohn Award at the Fifty-ninth Annual Meeting of the Association in St. Louis, Missouri.

The Alexander Meiklejohn Award is presented each

year to an American college or university administrator or trustee, or to a board of trustees as a group, in recog- nition of an outstanding contribution to academic free- dom, preferably in the preceding year. In 1 958, President Eldon L. Johnson and the Board of Trustees of the Uni-

versity of New Hampshire were given the award; in 1959, Chancellor Ethan A. H. Shepley of Washington Uni-

versity (St. Louis); in 1960, Dean Guerdon David Nichols of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences of the University of Arkansas; in 1961, Dr. Robert W. Mance, a trustee of Allen University; in 1962, President Arthur S. Flemming of the University of Oregon; in 1963, Mr.

Henry L. Bowden, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Emory University; in 1964, President Clark Kerr and the Board of Regents of the University of California; in 1965, President Willis M. Tate of Southern Methodist

University; in 1966, President Mason W. Gross and the Board of Governors of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; in 1968, President J. W. Maucker of the

University of Northern Iowa; in 1969, President George W. Starcher of the University of North Dakota; and in 1970, Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., President of the University of Notre Dame.

The award was presented to President O'Connell by Professor William W. Van Alstyne, Chairman of the Association's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, with this citation:

The Alexander Meiklejohn Award for Academic Free- dom was established fifteen years ago through the gen- erosity of Professor Meiklejohn's former students and faculty colleagues. The Award is to honor a college ad- ministrator or trustee, in recognition of an outstanding contribution to academic freedom. As Chairman of the Committee on Academic Freedom, it is my very great pleasure to present the award at this time - the first

William Van Alstyne and Thomas E. O'Connell

occasion we have had during the past three years. Last year, in our report leading to a recommendation

that censure be imposed on a major university, we noted with regret the harsh manner in which the president of that university summarily terminated the appointments of three faculty members for refusing to sign a loyalty oath which they were in the very process even then of

challenging in the federal courts on constitutional grounds. The president insisted that he could not himself resist the directive of a state statute requiring immediate dis-

charge. The AAUP responded that it could not agree "that state legislation, or any administrative action taken pursuant to such legislation, can authorize summary or automatic discharge of a faculty member without af- fording him due process." Most especially is that so where, as here, the oath conscientiously resisted by the faculty member was even then in legitimate dispute before the Supreme Court of the United States, and where such

162 AAUP BULLETIN

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peremptory action must operate with sudden cruelty upon the livelihood and academic freedom of the faculty members.

It is a chance of fate, perhaps, that the recipient of the Alexander Meiklejohn Award this year is a college president with the very same name, faced with nearly identical circumstances in a community college 1,000 miles from the university, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In- deed, the case was an even more difficult one in the particular respect that the loyalty oath in question had

already been sustained in a closely divided decision of the United States Supreme Court as not unconstitutional, albeit the reasoning of the majority of the Court was strange indeed: the majority of the Supreme Court (whose personnel had changed since the Court's earlier decisions on loyalty oaths) seemed to reason that the very vagueness of that part of the oath which had been challenged saved it from unconstitutionality, i.e., that it really did not con- template any particular conduct at all on the part of those required to subscribe to it, and thus they could have no real objection to having to sign it as a condition of holding any employment with the State of Massachusetts!

Even so, several faculty members of Berkshire Com- munity College, alone among all others in the State, resisted the easier course of genuflecting to that oath. In doing so, they declared - even in language reminiscent of that which one may find in the writings of Alexander Meiklejohn and those of Mr. Justice Black, a statement which includes this paragraph:

Loyalty oaths contradict the best and highest tradition of this country. Many people, both before and after the American revolution, came to this land because they could no longer endure various forms of human subservience. To reinstitute on the very eve of the bicentenary of these United States a practice reminiscent of those shunned by our fathers is at best outdated and at worst a demeaning repudiation of what all of us and our ancestors have lived through together.

Nonetheless, the Massachusetts Board of Regional Com-

munity Colleges, noting that the oath had been sustained in the Supreme Court of the United States, directed immediate compliance. Its Director of Fiscal Affairs sent a memorandum to the community college presidents ad-

vising them that failure to sign would at once cause removal of the offending faculty from the payroll. Suit was at once filed in state court to restrain that threat, and on October 11, 1972, President Thomas O'Connell re- leased his memorandum that no terminations would be

made, no action taken against the faculty at all, pending the outcome of that litigation on the merits which involved several issues not considered earlier by the United States

Supreme Court. On October 12th, moreover, President O'Connell's views were reported in the Berkshire Eagle as follows:

The Berkshire Community College employees protesting the state-required oath of loyalty to the United States are acting from conscience and have every right to do so - "I respect the views of my colleagues who feel it is at best a silly question and at worst a tool which has previously been used to suppress freedom."

President Thomas E. O'Connell

Subsequently, the issue now having been illuminated in this public fashion by the resistance and statements of the

dissenting Berkshire faculty, the loyalty, oath statute came under review in the Massachusetts legislature for possible repeal. It would be more seemingly satisfying if the end of this story were to have been that the legislature, en-

lightened at last by academic opinion on the historical and chauvinistic perniciousness of test oaths, had at once

overwhelmingly repealed that test oath law. It was not to be so, however, as the test oath law was retained by a vote of 143 to 84 in the Massachusetts House. The view of some who voted for its retention was reported in the Berkshire Eagle as holding that "those who don't want to take the loyalty oath can leave public employment or

'get out of the country.' "

Yet, there is this to the story that brings us to the

Meiklejohn Award. The process of education and the

ways of academic freedom are neither easy, nor expedient, nor without cost. Eighty-four members of the Massa- chusetts house were moved to vote to strike out this law,

forty-eight more than when it had last been considered (in 1966), and this we think is itself of great educational

significance. And with respect to the position of President Thomas E. O'Connell, now to receive this plaque and medallion bearing the likeness of Alexander Meiklejohn, the faculty which nominated him for this award appro- priately observed:

He was alone among the presidents of all the community colleges, the state colleges and the University of Massa- chusetts in his perception of a president's role in a question

SUMMER 1973 163

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of this kind. He was alone in treating his colleagues at the college as human beings whose opinions deserve respect and as persons of integrity and conscience. No other head of a public institution of higher education in the Common- wealth has of this date uttered a single word of doubt regarding the oath statute or of support for those who are attempting to overturn the statute through both the courts and the legislative process. Thus, while it is hoped that President O'Connell will indeed receive the Alexander Meiklejohn Award, it is also hoped that he will do so not because of any heroic action but rather because he acted just as a human being should act. In that action, may he be emulated by his administrative colleagues throughout this country.

Professor Meiklejohn whom we honor in this award would

unquestionably have been well pleased in the reasoning of our colleagues at Berkshire Community College, and it is thus a very special honor for me to present the Meikle- john Award to President Thomas O'Connell. May he, indeed, "be emulated by his administrative colleagues throughout the country.1'

President O'Connell, it gives me great pleasure to pre- sent you with the Alexander Meiklejohn Award for 1973.

President O'Connell responded as follows: Fellow Students: I accept your award with pride. What I did to earn it

seemed to me at the time relatively simple and undis-

tinguished. But that doesn't mean I'm not glad you see it otherwise. We have a group of about thirty cats at Berkshire Community College who felt they should not in conscience sign a State loyalty oath and who wanted some time to consider how to avoid doing so - by taking the matter to court, for example. What I did was to try to see to it that they had a fair amount of time to make their decisions and to prepare the way for the court action which they subsequently initiated. The matter seemed to me to be a test of the hospitality of my college to ideas - ideas which were unpopular with some and which were not simply abstract ideas but ideas resulting in action.

At the time, I met with my full faculty, and here's part of what I said to them:

Our colleagues who are protesting against the signing of the loyalty oath are acting from conscience, and they have every right to do so. I signed my own loyalty oath card without hesitation, but I respect the views of my colleagues who feel that it is, at best, a silly answer to a silly question and, at worst, a tool which has previously been used to suppress freedom.

You may wonder about my use of the term "cats" to describe my colleagues. I describe them as "cats" not just because that's the current vernacular, but because what I

really want to do is read a brief poem which is on the

subject of cats. It seems to me to capture the spirit of the behavior of my recalcitrant colleagues at Berkshire

Community College who are willing to put their jobs on the line for a principle. It also captures the spirit of this Association at its historical best. I'll leave it up to you to

judge how appropriate it is for the AAUP today. I read the poem because I like it and because it seems

apropos, but I also read it because it seems to me to be

appropriately off-beat and maybe even funky for the administrator honored today by the professoriate to re- spond by reading a poem.

So here's the poem "Curiosity" by Alastair Reid -

Curiosity*

may have killed the cat. More likely, the cat was just unlucky, or else curious to see what death was like, having no cause to go on licking paws, or fathering litter on litter of kittens, predictably.

Nevertheless, to be curious is dangerous enough. To distrust what is always said, what seems, to ask odd questions, interfere in dreams, leave home, smell rats, have hunches, will not endear cats to those doggy circles where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches are the order of things, and where prevails much wagging of incurious heads and tails.

Face it. Curiosity will not cause us to die -

only lack of it will. Never to want to see the other side of the hill or some improbable country where living is an idyll (although a probable hell) would kill us all.

Only the curious have, if they live, a tale worth telling at all.

Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible, are changeable, marry too many wives, desert their children, chill all dinner tables with tales of their nine lives. Well, they are lucky. Let them be nine-lived and contradictory, curious enough to change, prepared to pay the cat-price, which is to die and die again and again, each time with no less pain. A cat-minority of one is all that can be counted on to tell the truth. And what cats have to tell on each return from hell is this: that dying is what the living do, that dying is what the loving do, and that dead dogs are those who never know that dying is what, to live, each has to do.

Alastair Reid

* This is a revised version of a poem originally published in The New Yorker magazine of November 14, 1959 and is printed here by permission of the author.

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