The action of Stanford University in firing a tenured professor, H. Bruce Franklin, has received nationwide publicity. Approving editorials appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. An article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine suggested that Franklin’s civil liberties had been infringed. The question of whether this is true, whether Professor Franklin was fired for his beliefs, merits an examination of the case from its beginning. Additional questions raised by the affair include: when and how does a university protect itself from coercion and violence by its faculty and students; what are the obligations, as well as the protections, of academic freedom; what are the limits of dissent on a university campus; under what circumstances does dissent become incitation?

Franklin was fired as a result of a decision reached by an elected board consisting of his equals on the faculty which found that he had intentionally incited students and others to engage in illegal acts on the university campus under circumstances in which he knew that his incitement would increase the risk of such conduct actually occurring. The process through which this tribunal held Franklin’s conduct to be deserving of the penalty of dismissal is revealed by the opinion they wrote. My account of the case, with the exception of the passages narrating events that took place before the charges were filed, is based on the Board’s opinion. I think that the faculty tribunal did the right thing and that the cause of free speech on campuses, of academic freedom, and of civil liberties was advanced by their action and by the quality of their concern for the values of constitutionally-protected speech.

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I

As for background, Bruce Franklin is a self-proclaimed revolutionary. He traces his views from Chairman Mao, thence from Stalin through Lenin, and ultimately to Marx. He stoutly maintained during the hearings that he was careful never to engage in any violent acts because the Movement needed his presence as a faculty member. He considers the distinction among thought, words, and action to be a bourgeois quibble. It is a nice irony that during the hearings he relied on this “bourgeois” quibble to save him. It is quite natural, too, that, holding these views, he was careless in maintaining the distinction between mere speech and incitement.

Franklin only recently became a convert to these views. He is a graduate of Amherst, a former navigator in the Air Force, a young scholar who took his Ph.D. at Stanford, which promptly hired him as an assistant professor. He was soon hired away from Stanford by another university which was attracted by his growing reputation as a Melville scholar. Stanford hired him back as an associate professor with tenure.

He describes himself as having been a Stevensonian Democrat who supported Lyndon Johnson for the Presidency in 1964. He spent a year in France during 1966-67 which apparently served to complete his political education. He then became convinced that revolution was a necessity. During his time abroad, he apparently met some young Vietnamese who were adherents of the Vietcong and was deeply influenced by them. On his return to Stanford, he began to put his changed views into practice. He recently changed the title of his principal course from “Hawthorne and Melville” (which some wit described as being “Ho-thorne and Mao-ville”) to “Melville and Marx.”

The years between 1967 and the present were a very bad time for Stanford as well as for other universities. The period can be characterized as something like a reign of terror. “Trashing” or window-breaking cost the university about a quarter of a million dollars. There were at least five sit-ins during the period, which disrupted the lives of the community. There were numerous incidents of arson, including destructive fires in which scholars lost irreplaceable papers. A staff member had his house fire-bombed. Another was shot at through the front window of his living room. The president’s office was destroyed by arson. On occasion, faculty, staff, and students stood round-the-clock fire watches. Throughout this period Franklin was in the forefront, accelerating the coercion and violence through his charisma as a tenured professor, and urging impressionable young people on to ever more activity.

By 1970 Franklin was a member of a group called Venceremos, which emerged as a result of a merger between the on-campus revolutionary group and an off-campus group consisting largely of Chicanos. Through his teaching and his charismatic speaking Franklin supplied Stanford students as recruits for Venceremos. It is far from clear, however, whether Franklin is really in charge of the group or is merely its captive.¹ It is probably closer to the truth to say that he became the captive of the ideas supporting the use of violence that he propounded and his teaching became indistinguishable from his ideology. Many people have observed that he should have been dismissed for incompetence as a teacher. His teaching, which was not at issue in the hearing that led to his dismissal, was bizarre. To mention just one example, he cited Edgar Snow as the leading prose writer in English of this century.

Two successive presidents apparently decided not to try to remove Franklin, which may have been a good thing, since removing him required the support of the faculty; and the faculty, of course, was deeply sensitive to issues of academic freedom. In the fall of 1970, Richard W. Lyman, the former Provost, was made President. Lyman is a historian specializing in recent British history; he has served as correspondent for the Economist on American affairs; he has been an active Democrat; during the early stages of our involvement in Vietnam, which he has consistently opposed, he helped to organize what may have been the first teach-in on the war. He is, moreover, a highly faculty-oriented president. As Franklin’s acts escalated, it fell to President Lyman to initiate action against Franklin. The incidents that caused the initiation of charges came early in 1971.

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II

The charges against Professor Franklin were based by President Lyman on a provision in the Statement of Policy on Appointment and Tenure (hereafter Tenure Statement) at Stanford which states that a faculty member has the right not to be dismissed without a finding of “substantial and manifest neglect of duty” or “personal conduct substantially impairing the individual’s performance of his appropriate functions within the University community.” The Tenure Statement was drafted by an elected faculty committee, ratified by a unanimous vote of the Stanford faculty, and put into effect by the Board of Trustees on September 21, 1967. The specific charges against Franklin which required findings of fact by a tribunal were:

1. On January 11, 1971, Professor Franklin intentionally participated in, and significantly contributed to the disruption of a scheduled speech by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. Such conduct prevented Ambassador Lodge from speaking, forced cancellation of the meeting, and denied to others their rights to hear and be heard.
2. On February 10, 1971, a war-protest rally was held in White Plaza. At that rally Professor Franklin urged the audience away from tactics aimed at influencing government policy off-campus. Instead he urged and incited students and others to disrupt University functions by shutting down the Computation Center. Subsequently a shutdown was effected by an unlawful occupation of the Center.
3. Following the unlawful occupation of the Computation Center, Professor Franklin significantly interfered with orderly dispersal in response to police orders by intentionally urging and inciting students and others to disobey the orders to disperse.
4. Following these events, during an evening rally in the Old Union Courtyard Professor Franklin intentionally urged and incited students and others to engage in disruptive conduct which threatened injury to individuals and property. Acts of violence followed.

The hearings on Professor Franklin were held by a tribunal consisting of seven tenured faculty members, who had been elected by vote of all the faculty of the University. The Advisory Board, which was designated by the Tenure Statement to hear cases in which a faculty member desires to have a hearing before he can be subjected to sanctions, is a group that advises the President on matters concerning the faculty. Specifically, the Board is required to pass on all appointments and promotions before they are made. Membership on the Advisory Board is perhaps the highest honor that can be bestowed on a faculty member by his colleagues. The members of the Advisory Board that heard the Franklin case were: Donald Kennedy, Chairman of the Board, Chairman of the Department of Biology; David A. Hamburg, Vice Chairman of the Board, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry; G. L. Bach, Frank E. Buck Professor in the Graduate School of Business and Professor of Economics; Robert M. Brown, Professor of Religion; Sanford M. Dornbusch, Professor of Sociology; David M. Mason, Chairman of the Department of Chemical Engineering; and Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, Director and Professor, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

This group includes two men who, along with other faculty members, had earlier in 1971 manned a picket line outside a draft board to protest against the Vietnam war. Others have been active in the anti-war movement. One of the other members, a distinguished scientist, a former member of the President’s Science Advisory Commission, was an influential opponent of President Nixon’s anti-ballistic missile. All are distinguished scholars. This group held hearings which consumed the entire afternoons of thirty-three days; they listened to the testimony of 111 witnesses who were called by the University or by Professor Franklin. They heard about one million words of testimony and argument, which are contained in a transcript that runs to well over five thousand pages. The hearings were conducted in an auditorium that was open to the public, telecast into other public hearing rooms, and broadcast over the Stanford radio station. The hearings were a model of judicious care.

As provided for by the Tenure Statement, both the University and Professor Franklin were entitled to representation by counsel. The University was represented during the hearings by a young lawyer from Los Angeles who was a graduate of the Stanford Law School. Professor Franklin was represented before the hearing by a San Francisco law firm. He chose during the hearing to conduct his own defense. He was, however, aided by a number of persons, principally by a recent graduate of the Harvard Law School. The Advisory Board had as its counsel a professor of law at Berkeley, who was particularly helpful in connection with rulings that the chairman, Professor Kennedy, had to make on objections and motions during the hearings.

Franklin’s original Answer to Charges, filed before the hearings began, relied in part on defenses based on the Nuremberg Principles and on the doctrine of necessity. The argument apparently was that since Henry Cabot Lodge was a “war criminal,” Franklin had the right to prevent him from speaking; as to the other charges, Franklin had the right to take action against the University’s “complicity in the Vietnam war.” But Franklin apparently changed his strategy, for these defenses, which many people sympathetic to Franklin thought were the gist of the case, were not advanced in the final arguments.

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III

The first charge against Franklin was based on the so-called Lodge incident. Former Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was invited by the conservatively administered Hoover Institution, an affiliate of the University, to deliver a lecture on January 11, 1971, in the University’s Dinkelspiel Auditorium. Many persons sympathetic to Venceremos, including Franklin, were present. Because of the chanting, clapping, and shouting from the audience, Lodge could not deliver his speech. The director of the Hoover Institution, Glenn Campbell, stated from the platform that he was terminating the program because of the disruption. Subsequently, President Lyman informed Professor Franklin that he was preferring charges against him in connection with the Lodge incident and his alleged central role in it. The President indicated his intention of seeking Franklin’s suspension. Franklin seized this charge as an opportunity to demonstrate the University’s complicity in the Vietnam war. Answering the President’s charge, he said:

I do not deny demanding that Lodge and the two representatives of the Hoover Institution answer to the massacre of the men, women, and children of My Lai, the fire bomb and herbicide raids on the countryside of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the pretense that China is an island in the Pacific Ocean, the invasion and destruction of Korea, and the brutalization and murder of American men sent to die for the profits of the Lodges, the Packards, and your other masters. I would agree that whatever I and others did on January 11th constitutes inappropriate behavior. The appropriate response to war criminals is not heckling, but what was done to them at Nuremberg; they should be locked up or executed. . . .

Subsequently, the President added the other charges to the one based on the Lodge incident and sought Franklin’s dismissal. The Tenure Statement did not specify a standard of proof. The Advisory Board held, however, that the University must prove its case “by strongly persuasive” evidence.

During the hearing, Franklin and his witnesses contended that he had not joined in the chanting and rhythmic clapping, but had only spoken aloud a few times, each occasion being distinguishable on the tape of the event. The Advisory Board held unanimously that, because of conflict in testimony, the University had failed to prove the charge based on the Lodge incident.

The remaining three charges were all based on incidents that occurred on Wednesday, February 10. On Sunday, February 7 the invasion of Laos by South Vietnamese troops aided by Americans was announced. A rally at the University that night to protest the invasion demanded that the University end its complicity in the war, which, in this case, translates in part as “nothing [should be allowed] on campus that can be connected with the war.” After the rally, about one hundred windows on campus were broken. On Monday and Tuesday following the invasion the campus was in an uproar. The central demand of the radicals was to close down the Computation Center where, it was said, a war-related program was being run off. This gave the radicals an opportunity to capitalize on the University’s alleged complicity in the war.

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On the evening of February 9, a meeting dominated by members of Venceremos was held in Dinkelspiel Auditorium. During this meeting, a number of speakers talked about the desirability of “shutting down” the Computation Center, which was a symbol of Stanford’s alleged complicity in the war. Although some speakers favored off-campus activity, Franklin lent his prestige to those who wished to “take some very effective action here on the University.” The meeting closed with a consensus in favor of shutting down the Computation Center; this was to take place after a noon rally the next day to muster support for the tactic.

The activity of the following day, Wednesday, February 10, began with the noon rally in White Plaza (Stanford’s Hyde Park). This rally gave rise to the second charge against Franklin. The Board held unanimously that Franklin had incited students and others forcibly to shut down the Computation Center. This finding focused on a speech that Franklin made during the White Plaza rally immediately after which the crowd moved over to the Computation Center. He ended this speech by saying:

See, now, what we’re asking is for people to make that little tiny gesture to show that we’re willing to inconvenience ourselves a little bit and to begin to shut down the most obvious machinery of war, such as, and I think it is a good target, that Computation Center. [Applause and shouts of “Right on. . . .”]

The Board concluded that this speech had had a significant effect in moving the crowd to shut down the Computation Center. The Board found that Franklin’s use of the words “strike” and “shut down” in his speeches was not intended to carry the normal meaning of those terms, as they are used in labor relations. Rather, they unanimously found that his use of the word “strike” was “disingenuous” and that he used the labor context “as a flag in which to wrap a much broader range of conduct.” The Board concluded that Franklin “must reasonably have expected that his advocacy of ‘shut down’ would be interpreted by at least a substantial portion of the audience as calling for forceful disruption of the operation of the Center.”

The third charge against Franklin was that he had incited the crowd to disregard a police order to disperse after the police had been summoned. When the White Plaza crowd had moved over to the Computation Center, the building was closed by the University administration. The demonstrators broke into the building and turned off the power for the IBM 360 computer, interrupting the work that was being done for University departments, the Stanford Hospital, and the many individuals whose research depends on the computer. The police were called and the building was cleared. A large crowd milled around outside the building and eventually the police ordered it to disperse. Franklin, who had not entered the building, urged the crowd which had started to disband to disregard the police dispersal order; part of the crowd failed to disperse; when the inevitable police charge came, several persons were injured and four were arrested. The Board held 5-2, with Professors Kennedy and Brown dissenting, that Franklin had incited the crowd to disregard the police order to disperse, knowing that he was substantially increasing the risk that injuries would occur.

The fourth charge concerned a speech given by Franklin during a rally held in the Old Union courtyard at 8 P.M. that night. Franklin made two speeches during the rally. In his first speech, he argued against a group of students who wished to limit the demands the demonstrators were discussing to “get the United States out of Vietnam.” He argued that it was important that the demands should include something concerning what was happening on the Stanford campus. His view prevailed. In his second speech, which formed the basis for the fourth charge, he urged the crowd to wage a “people’s war” against the “occupation army” of the police on the campus. He said that those at the rally should go back to the dorms, should organize into small groups, and should do their own thing, whatever they thought should be done, and to do it as late at night as possible. Although the Advisory Board declined to hear testimony on the events following Franklin’s speech, they held, again 5-2, with Professors Kennedy and Brown dissenting, that by his speech Franklin had incited students and others to perform acts of violence. In fact, a number of students hostile to Franklin were beaten up nearby right after the speech. Later in the evening, there were a number of windows broken, several instances of fires being started, and two young men were wounded by gunfire.

The two dissenters were not in strong disagreement with their colleagues; as to the factual situation regarding the third charge, they “find the call a close one either way”; as to the fourth charge, their view of the facts was, they conceded, “a little less plausible than those favored by the majority, but only a little less.” To assume that the findings were not justly and honestly arrived at would require a really elaborate conspiracy theory, a theory that would have to include the two Board members who dissented on two of the charges.

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IV

The findings, including the unanimous finding on Franklin’s speech at the White Plaza rally immediately before the closing down of the Computation Center, are probably not so important to the issues of academic freedom that have been raised about the Franklin case as are the Board’s statement on “Fundamental Issues and Standards” and its “Discussion of Sanctions,” which must be read together and which were unanimous.

The Board first deals with the general rules of University law relating to the conduct charged against Franklin. The Board identifies two sources of such law: first, the written law, including the Tenure Statement and the Policy on Campus Disruptions; second, the largely unwritten law governing the conduct of a faculty member, which the Board describes as “a web of largely unwritten rules as tough and living as the British constitution.” The Board expresses a preference for largely unwritten laws, on the ground that written rules can cut against the values protected by the constitutional guarantees of free speech. While the Board preferred unwritten rules, they found in the University’s written rules an expression covering the key conduct involved in the Franklin case. The Policy on Campus Disruptions specifically proscribes conduct

1. to prevent or disrupt the effective carrying out of a University function or approved activity such as lectures, meetings [and] public events. . . .
2. to obstruct the legitimate movement of any person about the campus or in any University building or facility.

The Board asks whether the University would be powerless to take action against a faculty member in the absence of such a written policy. They answer “no,” asserting that if there were no such written policy “the common understandings of appropriate faculty conduct” would be sufficient. The fact that nowhere in Campus Disruptions was the term “incitement” used does not prevent the University from forbidding “incitement” to conduct that the University has made illegal.

They next proceed to a close discussion of “incitement,” which they define as intentional advocacy of conduct which the University has made illegal and which the actor knows increases the risk that such conduct will occur, relying on Brandenburg v. Ohio—the most expansive interpretation of the First Amendment advanced by the Warren Court (1969)—which said that punishable advocacy must be “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action . . . and likely to produce such action.” In following Brandenburg the Board stated:

We believe the university’s prohibition of incitement, given the criteria of intent, risk, and imminence discussed above, is fully justified when speech threatens two central university interests: (1) protection of members of the university community and university facilities against risks of serious injury or damage; (2) protection against coercive intrusion on the intellectual transactions which the university seeks to foster.

The Board said: “We do . . . see every reason for taking care that the standard for incitement is carefully drawn, with due cognizance of those First Amendment protections that apply to the relation between state and citizen.” Thus they affirmed the necessity for preserving freedom of speech on the campus and for being very cautious about protecting the individual’s right to express his dissenting views.

Although there was disagreement about the sanction in the Franklin case, the Board was unanimous in stating, in balancing the rights of the individual faculty member, the rights of the other members of the academic community, and the rights of the institution:

While it is the consensus within the university that it should have room for the widest possible range of perceptions and expression, the university says in fact to its members: “You may preach and also practice . . . but only up to a certain point.”

The latter edict is not aimed exclusively at those on the far political left, who often complain that they are the only ones being discriminated against when told that a theoretical espousal of their position is permitted so long as it does not spill over into action. It is also applied at many other points along the socio-politico-economic spectrum within the academic community. For instance, the university protects the right of a professor to espouse views that suggest a demeaning relationship between racial background and intelligence, but it would not permit him to organize a forcible attempt to prevent the Admissions Office from accepting black applicants. It would allow a fascist professor to advocate abolition of democratic processes, but would not let him interfere with the conduct of university exercises dedicated toward the exposition of democratic institutions. Common to these examples is the institutional decision that while those further toward the center of the political spectrum may practice what they preach, those at its extremes may preach but are limited in their practice. From Professor Franklin’s viewpoint, this is an unfair asymmetry. The majority of the comunity would point out that in any even-handed balancing of rights, the encouragement of violence constitutes an infringement; to Professor Franklin the balancing of rights appears insufficiently global. Because he makes the need for incitement a political credo, a prosecution for the advocacy of imminent lawless action becomes to him a political persecution.

These descriptions do not solve the problem; they only help to identify it. We cannot simultaneously rededicate the university to a specific political goal—by using force or violence if necessary—and at the same time preserve it as an institution in which independent initiative from many quarters can have the widest possible play. A choice must be made and we choose the latter. Yet having made this choice, the university can contemplate punishment of action—and most especially, of speech—only when the rights claimed by the dissidents seriously infringe those of other groups or individuals within the university.

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V

Perhaps the most heavily criticized aspect of the case was the Board’s decision that Franklin should be dismissed. This aspect evoked the strong dissent of Professors Kennedy and Brown, although they agreed that some sanction was called for. The majority pinned the sanction of dismissal on the concept of deterrence. They rejected retaliation on the presumably unstated ground that good utilitarians have no truck with that concept. They rejected rehabilitation on the ground that Franklin had testified that he would in any event continue to act just as he had in the past. The Board had unanimously ruled out probation and a very lengthy suspension as impracticable. A long suspension—say for two years—forces the faculty member, who must be assumed to be economically vulnerable, into “irreversible economic alternatives.” The only other sanctions that deserve serious consideration are Professor Brown’s suggestion of one quarter’s suspension without pay and Professor Kennedy’s proposal of, in effect, a half year’s suspension without pay. The case for a short-term suspension was justified by Professor Brown on the ground that:

I believe very strongly that, however much I and many of my colleagues may disagree with what Professor Franklin says or how he says it, Stanford University will be less a true university without him and more of a true university with him. I fear that we may do untold harm to ourselves and to the cause of higher education unless by imposing a penalty short of dismissal, we seek to keep him as a very uncomfortable but very important part of what this University, or any university, is meant to be.

The majority of the Board had to weigh that consideration against the damage that Franklin had caused to the institution and the damage that would presumably be caused by his reinstatement and his continued role in inciting students to use violence and coercion against the institution. As the majority said: “Tolerance of such attacks on the freedom of others, under the guise of protecting Professor Franklin’s freedom to act as he wishes, would be subversion, not support, of true academic freedom and individual rights.”

It may be interesting that Franklin’s reaction on learning of the decision was, in answering a question, that violence was the only appropriate response. He went on to say that if he were a student he would “join with two or three of my friends and I would go into Sandy Dornbusch’s class and disrupt that class.” He advocated disrupting the classes of all Advisory Board members who voted for his dismissal.

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VI

Since the decision, a number of dissenting views have been expressed. A group of faculty members called the Faculty Political Action Group (FPAG) has asserted at various times that the Advisory Board has no jurisdiction, that it is a tool of the administration, and that nothing should be punished on campus other than the commission of crime. That last view seems untenable: for if the University is barred from relying on its own policies, duly adopted and ratified, then it has automatically rendered itself incapable of enforcing discipline in large areas of conduct. Plagiarism, discriminating in grades against a student because of race, failure to show up for classes are all examples of the untenability of the FPAG view. The best response to the FPAG argument is the Board’s statement: “It is inappropriate to tie tenure proceedings to the criminal process” since a criminal proceeding may take several years to resolve and it may terminate favorably to the accused “for reasons which have nothing to do with a faculty member’s fitness to retain his position.” And they observed that the vagaries of the criminal process did not reflect “a sensitive judgment of university interests as a central concern.” The FPAG view amounts to saying that faculty members are privileged to do anything at all with impunity; this strikes me as a manifestation of the very elitism that its proponents habitually denounce within the University.

A possibly more serious criticism is the one expressed by Alan Dershowitz in various forums since the decision was announced. Mr. Dershowitz is on the faculty at Harvard Law School and is a visitor this year not to Stanford but to the adjacent think-tank (Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences). He has asserted that the decision “will clearly have a chilling and deterrent effect on what professors think they can say to mass audiences in situations that may be inflammatory. In general, it’s going to make professors think twice before speaking out. For Stanford, that could be a disaster because they aren’t accustomed to speaking out anyway.” One person commented that Dershowitz “has been sent from Harvard to save us from sin.”

Mr. Dershowitz’s criticism is based on a prediction of how people will react to the decision. Mr. Dershowitz is well known professionally for his skepticism, which I share, about predictions of anti-social behavior, as, for example, in laws regarding preventive detention. That kind of skepticism seems equally appropriate to his prediction about the consequences of the Franklin decision. The greatest danger of a “chilling and deterrent effect” comes from people who fail to consider the Advisory Board’s careful emphasis on plainly punishable incitement to immediate illegal conduct and who see in the Franklin case only a reflection of their own fearful fantasies.

As for the future of free speech at Stanford, Mr. Dershowitz should rest easy. Even a casual reading of the guest columns in the Stanford Daily in the weeks that have elapsed since the decision was announced reveals that expressions of dissent at Stanford have flourished. A number of faculty members have made White Plaza orations, fomenting if not inciting further disruptions.

It must be elsewhere than Stanford that Mr. Dershowitz looks to validate his prediction. Where it is I have no idea. President Lyman responded to the point that institutions other than Stanford might suffer from the decision:

. . . the most useful thing that we can do is to follow our own policies, as they were thoughtfully (albeit not perfectly) framed before this case ever arose, and set a decent example of seeking a sound judgment based on these policies.

The only effect that the decision could conceivably have would be to make faculty members think a bit before they encourage their students to use coercion and violence. I see no conflict between that and what the American Association of University Professors said in late 1970:

Because academic freedom has traditionally included the instructor’s full freedom as a citizen, most faculty members face no insoluble conflicts between the claims of politics, social action, and conscience, on the one hand, and the claims and expectation of their students, colleagues, and institutions, on the other. If such conflicts become acute, and the instructor’s attention to his obligations as a citizen and moral agent precludes the fulfillment of substantial academic obligations, he cannot escape the responsibility of that choice, but should either request a leave of absence or resign his academic position.

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* * * * * *

[T] here is a need for the faculty to assume a more positive role as guardian of academic values against unjustified assaults from its own members. The traditional faculty function in disciplinary proceedings has been to assure academic due process and meaningful faculty participation in the imposition of discipline by the administration. While this function should be maintained, faculties should recognize their stake in promoting adherence to norms essential to the academic enterprise. (Emphasis added.)

The Franklin era at Stanford is over. The apologist for violence at the University is gone, and it is to be hoped that the mob has disappeared also. The memory of that era, with its trashing, its arson, and its physical injury will remain in the minds of Stanford faculty members. One would not want to wish those memories on the minds of people who did not experience the pain of those years. However, the Franklin era was one that people everywhere should abhor.

Academic freedom is alive and well at Stanford. One form of intimidation has been ruled out. There is now an insistence on rational discourse. Free inquiry and the other values of academic life have been affirmed. The price of freedom at Stanford, as at other universities, continues to be a constant questioning of premises, free from coercion and violence.

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¹ See, in connection with Venceremos, the description by an observer sympathetic to Franklin, Kenneth Lamott, “In the Matter of H. Bruce Franklin,” the New York Times Magazine, January 23, 1972. “Franklin keeps a Remington 12-gauge automatic shotgun ‘very available’ in his house and has carried it when meeting policemen at the front door. ‘We often have extra armed security in the house,’ he told me. (By ‘extra armed security’ he meant other members of Venceremos, who are called together by an alert system when the police threaten them.)”