Safeguards for Academic Freedom at Princeton

In the long development of democracy, legal safeguards for individuals are usually established only in times of crisis or after grave dissatisfaction with the procedure employed in a particular case. Fortunately, in either instance, when the safeguard is given legal sanction, it is likely to continue in effect so that a cumulative body of protections is established. And in some rather unusual cases, civil rights and liberties broadly construed are guaranteed by an act of prescience: our Bill of Rights is an admirable example of the value of forethought. During the past half century, Princeton University has established a substantial corpus of rules to protect academic freedom, twice because of dissatisfaction with the treatment of individual cases, once in response to crisis, once as an act of conscious foresight. The following brief report is submitted in the hope that some of Princeton's developments may serve as useful suggestions to its sister universities. Princeton University has been singularly though certainly not entirely free of periods of crisis and of important and distressing academic freedom cases for the last half century. Its tradition of academic freedom goes at least as far back as the latter years of the 19th Century, but its first formal adoption of a rule did not come until 1918. The year 1918 was a year of crisis. Across the face of the land, our universities and colleges reacted in a variety of ways, most frequently in the form of resolutions or rules that rested on a demand for full support of the prosecution of the war and that frequently led to exclusions and dismissals from faculty and student body. Princeton, too, was moved in this way and on June 5, 1918 the Faculty adopted such a resolution. Fortunately, Princeton also demonstrated another response to the crisis, of a very different character, and with permanent rather than ephemeral effect.