James McKeen Cattell, Nicholas Murray Butler, and Academic ...

88 SOKAL
actions threatened and even undermined his colleagues’ academic freedom much
more seriously than Columbia’s dismissal violated his.
Of course, the concept of academic freedom has itself evolved—initially from
German notions of Lehrfreiheit (freedom to teach) and Lernfreiheit (freedom to
study)—since it emerged in the United States at the same time as the American
university system in the late 19th century. 2 More than a century later, lawyers,
philosophers, and others continue to debate the notion’s epistemological roots and
to explicate its meaning. They have delineated individual and institutional forms
of academic freedom, have distinguished between its professional and its constitutional
definitions, and have offered (like relativity physicists) general theories
and special theories of the concept, and some even question whether the overarching
notion carries any weight in a postmodern world. 3
To focus on the past, however—and specifically on the years immediately
preceding Cattell’s dismissal—by 1915, as the American Association of University
Professors (AAUP) emerged, a consensus seemed to coalesce that academic
freedom “comprise[d] three elements: freedom of inquiry and research, freedom
of teaching within the university or college, and freedom of extramural utterance
and action.” 4 To secure these freedoms, the newly formed AAUP offered a
“Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure” that
included a set of “Practical Proposals.” These dealt primarily with grounds and
procedures for the orderly discipline and dismissal of professors, presented under
such headings as “Definitions of Tenure in Office,” “Formulation of Grounds for
Dismissal,” and “Judicial Hearings Before Dismissal.” 5 At least one late 20thcentury
critic has argued persuasively that the AAUP’s “Declaration” and the
Association’s later actions embodied—more than anything else—an attempt “to
gain compliance for procedural safeguards from university officials,” largely to
achieve “job security” for professors; 6 that is, primarily to avoid their arbitrary
dismissal. As this critic well demonstrates, early 20th-century professors throughout
the country—and not just at Columbia—had cause to fear such arbitrary
dismissal.
This article presents its analysis within the contemporaneous context of this
“Declaration” and its embodied primary goal and, in doing so, it certainly does not
seek to defend Butler, who had (as it will show) no qualms about dismissing from
Columbia’s faculty those who disagreed with him. 7 He also seemed almost to
enjoy harassing their academic freedom in other ways. Indeed, as this article will
show, from just about the start of Butler’s administration, many of his Columbia
contemporaries had good cause to criticize his (and the university’s trustees’)
notions of academic freedom, even (and perhaps especially) from an early
20th-century perspective.
That said, this article argues that Cattell’s actions—an account of which
makes up the bulk of the detailed narrative that follows—proved almost as
destructive of academic freedom at Columbia as Butler’s. Indeed, and perhaps
more importantly, it also argues that Cattell’s colleagues well recognized that he
actively (if probably inadvertently) sabotaged their self-proclaimed interests. In part,
Cattell’s actions undermined their academic freedom by increasing the Columbia
trustees’ vigilance of all faculty activity. That is, as New York newspapers highlighted
Cattell’s antics at Columbia, the trustees saw that he embarrassed the university before
the public and, especially, in the eyes of Columbia’s alumni. They gradually