Twentieth Alexander Meiklejohn Award

Dr. Danforth comes from a distinguished and prominent family in St Louis, and he established himself as a tenured faculty member in one of this country's major schools of medicine. But he has done far more than that. As his brother, former senator John Danforth, once described it, "Public service was expected of us. A very important part of our upbringing was the idea of having a purpose beyond grabbing things for ourselves." Bill Danforth set out on a career based on study, teaching, and service in academic medicine. His accession to the presidency of a major research university was neither sought nor automatically awarded, but his gifts were recognized by Chancellor Eliot in his quiet involvement in the selection of Dr. Danforth to succeed him.

During more than twenty years, when his university grew and prospered, he fostered the values of the academy. His own commitment was never in doubt and gave strength to the faculty in its involvement in governance. It is for his quiet yet demonstrated and deeply held faith in the value of academic freedom that we are privileged to nominate William H. Danforth for this great award.

Danforth Response

I appreciate very much this honor. There are three reasons why it has special meaning for me. First, in 1959 the Meiklejohn Award was given to one of my heroes, Ethan A. H. Shepley, at that time chancellor of Washington University. He was honored for his behavior during the McCarthy era, when the radical right in Congress and in the press loosed their guns on those whose ideas they labeled subversive. Ethan stood firm defending the right of faculty to express themselves. He was responsible for bringing Edward U. Condon, who was then under attack by congressional committees, to the university as chair of the Department of Physics. Ethan Shepley was a generation older than I, but I had the good fortune to spend time with him and to see him defend the university and then-chancellor Thomas H. Eliot when academic freedom again came under attack in the late 1960s, this time from the left. When this award went to Ethan, a cartoon appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch showing the signature towers of Washington University bearing a flag reading "The Blessings of Liberty." I kept a copy of that cartoon on the wall of my office lest I or anyone should ever forget his example. Given Ethan's courage, it would have been unthinkable for me to go soft on academic freedom.

Second, this award means a lot because my name was put forward by my friends in the Washington University chapter of the AAUP. Their dedication to academic freedom, their persistence, their hard work and good sense, and their balanced judgments kept academic freedom always alive and well at Washington University. It is they who did the real work, the day-to-day, nitty-gritty work. It is they who should be honored tonight. One of those special people is here with us, Michael Friedlander, a long-time leader of the AAUP at both the local and national levels. Living up to the traditions of academic freedom is not always simple. The wise course is not always clear cut. How do you deal most effectively with a violation of fair treatment that arises out of a personality clash between a faculty member and his or her department head? How do you craft a solution that really works so that those two individuals can go on working productively together? How do you deal with the question of whether someone is defacing property or exercising free speech? What about the professor whose research does not fit the agenda of the department, and, in fact, seems inappropriate to many? What about the professor who uses his or her class to push a political agenda, or the professor who claims that she has been denied tenure unfairly because she and her friends are the only ones capable of judging her work, or the student who submits a work of art showing gays being mutilated? At what point does the right to protest trample on free speech?