USF hasn't learned from its past

DYCKMAN E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times
published January 21, 2002

Another atrocity in Israel: A Palestinian gunman shoots up a bat mitzvah celebration, killing six people, injuring 30. When Sami Al-Arian infamously shouted, "Death to Israel!," was that the sort of thing he had in mind? Though the suspended University of South Florida professor insists he meant it merely as a political metaphor, many people are understandably unpersuaded.

All the same, USF has no intellectually honest grounds for firing him in the wake of his controversial late September appearance on a Fox News Channel program where a more sensible person would have known not to go. He is being dismissed not for the indiscretion but for the angry public reaction to it. To keep him would cost the university more than it cares to lose in financial and political support.

But something beyond price is also at stake. As trustee Connie Mack, the former senator, worried aloud before voting the wrong way, what happens the next time some professor says something unpopular?

Of all the universities in the United States, USF should be the most sensitive to that. It was nearly strangled in its crib four decades ago by political harassment of professors who were suspected of saying or thinking unpopular things.

USF's president Judy Genshaft, like most Floridians, wasn't here then. But voluminous files tell the sordid history of the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee -- or Johns Committee, after its founder and chairman, Charley Johns. One of the best succinct sources, "Cold Warriors in the Hot Sunshine: USF and the Johns Committee," a November 1992 Sunland Tribune article by historian James A. Schnur, is easily accessible via the USF library's Web site. His extensive 1995 thesis is in the USF library.

USF wasn't the only school the Johns Committee targeted for suspected communists, integrationists, homosexuals and unsuitable reading materials. As the newest, however, it was the most vulnerable. Interrogating students and faculty, secretly at first, the committee's chief counsel and investigator collected more than 2,500 pages of testimony from which it later alleged assorted offenses against community and political orthodoxy.

Amid all this, and under related pressure, USF rescinded one professor's appointment. The university system's governing board then demanded the firing of another professor, Sheldon Grebstein, for nothing more than exposing writing students to an essay that quoted beatnik authors. President John S. Allen suspended Grebstein and then restored him with a reprimand. The affair raised the spectre of USF being academically blacklisted. Grebstein, who left in disgust, eventually became president of the State University of New York at Purchase.

"The University of South Florida acquired permanent scars from the Johns Committee investigation," Schnur wrote in "Cold Warriors." Allen gave up much of his program "to prevent the Board of Control and Johns Committee from dismantling the university he loved. Although the school's phenomenal growth as a commuter school certainly changed its character, to a larger extent USF's fundamental intellectual principles became a casualty of the battle to preserve the institution. . . . Legacies of the Johns Committee continue to haunt USF to this day."

And even, it would seem, to this day.

Amid all this, a kindred drama has played to a different, quiet end at Florida State University with the death from natural causes of its most controversial professor, Glayde Whitney. A psychologist whose special expertise was in mice, Whitney had long been under fire for contending that blacks are generally inferior to whites. Then he wrote an approving introduction to an autobiography of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, and FSU president Sandy D'Alemberte came under substantial pressure to fire him. D'Alemberte, a liberal and a lawyer whose special expertise was in the First Amendment, refused.

"I disagree with (his) position. These kinds of disagreements are common on college campuses and represent the very essence of what universities are all about," D'Alemberte said.

FSU may have lost some contributions over that, but it kept something worth infinitely more: its reputation.

USF and Judy Genshaft would profit by that example.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright