Illinois vs. Oliver
(National Review, 7 April 1964)
The trustees of the University of Illinois have voted not
to dismiss Professor Revilo Oliver for his (silly) article in American
Opinion on the assassination of President Kennedy. The whole episode, or
course, was a ritual, the principal purpose of which was to draw public
attention to the University’s repudiation of Professor Oliver’s views. There
never was any serious question of firing Professor Oliver, which after all would
have would have been not only to violate formally the kind of academic freedom
the University says it believes in, but to deprive students at the University of
Illinois of the services of one of the world’s most distinguished classicists,
who don’t grow on trees, you know. The University felt it had to do something
spectacular, and sure enough what it did was sufficiently spectacular to warrant
the New York Times’ sending a man out there to cover the entire
proceedings. The trustees issued a turgid and pompous report (they would have
been wise to enlist the syntactical services of Mr. Oliver to put their thoughts
into English), the net meaning of which was to create a sort of sub-species of
academic freedom. Leaving aside those passages in which the trustees praised
themselves, their courage, and their high-mindedness, what the report amounted
to was a vote of censure against Professor Oliver. So that a professor at
Illinois now has not a) freedom to write what he wants to without being censured
by the University of Illinois; but b) freedom to write what he wants to, subject
to censure by the University of Illinois. And what you and I are to suppose is
that there is no difference between a) and b).
It remains, of course, to be seen whether the New Academic
Freedom goes into hiding the next time a professor at the University of Illinois
joins a Communist front, or writes a Communist apologetic. In which case will
have seen not the birth of a significant distinction in the theoretical
formulation of academic freedom, but just a plain old Bill of Attainder against
Professor Revilo P. Oliver.