An Affair to Remember, continued

For months, Penn’s administration and trustees tried to ignore the furor, making little attempt to explain their decision beyond the refrain that it was in the “best interests of the University.” Finally, on October 2, 1915, the semester’s first issue of Old Penn led off with “A Letter on the Nearing Case,” subtitled: “A Letter from an Alumnus to His Fellow Alumni.” The author was Dr. J. William White M1871, a famously feisty Penn trustee. The letter was 17 magazine pages long.

White vigorously denied that Nearing’s dismissal “was part of a so-called plan to carry out a reactionary policy against free academic discussion and freedom of individual speech.” Rather, he said, “soberminded, sensible persons had received from Dr. Nearing the strong impression that he advocated the ruthless redistribution of property, that he believed in the personal iniquity of those who lived on incomes derived even from their own savings, that he thought the alternative of work or starvation should be presented even to the old, the feeble, and the diseased.”

While that impression may have been “misunderstood” by White’s “senior friends,” he acknowledged, “the fact that they had been given the opportunity to do so made me still more doubtful of his fitness to represent the University before the [people] as one of its chosen expounders of the principles of Economics.” After repeated complaints, White said, he realized it was his “duty as a Trustee to consider whether his influence on the whole was helpful or prejudicial.”

On October 16, Old Penn’s cover story was “A Statement of Principles by the Board of Trustees of the University.” Noting that a university should help students “acquire knowledge of information heretofore gathered,” investigate “every department of human knowledge without restriction,” and publish the findings “both within and without the University,” the trustees adopted “as an adequate expression of their views and purpose” a statement made by the rector of Aberdeen University in 1874: “Universities should be places in which thought is free from all fetters, and in which all sources of knowledge and all aids of learning should be accessible to all comers, without distinction of creed or country, riches or poverty.”

But they still defended their action. “When an individual teacher’s methods, language and temperament provoke continued and widespread criticism alike from parents of students and from the general public who know him only by his public utterances, the freedom of choice in selection of some other person is a right equally as inherent in the Board of Trustees … as is the right of freedom of opinion and thought, and teaching in the faculties. And this duty must be exercised for the good of the University as a whole.”

“The Nearing case was at best a tissue of mistakes and misjudgments,” wrote the late Edward Potts Cheyney, professor of history, in his History of the University of Pennsylvania 1740-1940. “It is not at all certain that Dr. Nearing should have been reappointed to a position in the University,” he added, “but neither he nor any other teacher should be abruptly separated from it without notice or discussion. Teachers are appointees, not employees of the Board.”

After the whole mess was over, Cheyney noted, Provost Smith persuaded the trustees to make a series of changes in the by-laws that provided “a more orderly procedure in short appointments and placed the responsibility for removals in the case of full professors, except for the very last step, on the Faculties, where it belonged.” Since 1915, he added, there had been “no instance of removal without the approving judgment of the Faculty.” And there have been none since he wrote those words in 1940.

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