The Right to Be Wrong
Newsweek 30 March 1964
The University of Illinois has a flexible definition of academic freedom. Four years ago, the university summarily fired Prof. Leo F. Koch for having publicly preached sexual license. But last week, in an 8-1 decision, the university trustees said they had no “adequate grounds” for dismissing Prof. Revilo P. Oliver, a radical rightist who excoriated the late President Kennedy (“So long as there are Americans, his memory will be cherished with distaste”) in a vitriolic post-assassination article in the John Birch Society magazine. The one dissenter, Irving Dillard, the retired and respected St. Louis newsman, said a scholar has the duty “to back up his conclusions with weighed and tested facts.” But the majority, while deploring Oliver’s bad taste, upheld his right to be “ungloriously wrong.” Evidently at Illinois it doesn’t matter so much whether a professor is right or wrong, but what he is wrong about.