Despite having been written almost 45 years ago, Yale’s 1974 Report of the Committee on Free Expression — better known as the Woodward Report — continues to linger on in academic politics. Free-speech purists celebrate the report as an example of an era before trigger warnings and quarrels over Halloween costumes.
I hadn’t read the report until this summer, and I don’t have any ties to Yale. But I’d heard of the Woodward Report while a college student at Swarthmore, where I graduated in 2014, and had weirdly warm feelings for it. In my imagination, the report was fused with the Berkeley Free Speech movement and the early days of the ACLU. I was attracted to what I saw as the celebration of unfettered discussion and thick-skinned debate, the old-fashioned liberalism I worried my generation was abandoning.
The Woodward Report often gets cited as the predecessor to the University of Chicago’s 2015 Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression, named in obvious homage to Yale. Steven Benner, one of the undergraduate representatives who served on the Woodward committee and whose son recently graduated from Chicago, joked to me that the Chicago statement is a “rip-off.”
But the documents are strikingly different. Whereas the Chicago statement is barely three pages, the Woodward Report spans more than 50. And whereas Chicago’s committee was unanimous and composed entirely of faculty members, the Woodward committee included five students, one of whom, Kenneth Barnes, wrote a lengthy dissent, which, although almost never discussed, is intriguingly appended to the report.
Barnes, then a law student, struck a number of themes that have become prominent in campus speech wars. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse, he argued that free speech ought to be balanced against concerns for the community. Championing “a pure model of free speech to dissident oppressed groups,” he wrote, “often serves the cause of oppression more than that of free speech.” He warned against letting the marketplace of ideas assume “monopoly power.” I’m no Marcusian, but it’s impossible not to admire the boldness of Barnes’s position, which he offered as a lone voice of dissent.
The majority’s report opened on a more idealist note. It quotes John Milton and affirms that the pursuit of knowledge is the university’s foremost function. But the report then moves to a blunt acknowledgment of the trade-offs involved: “Without sacrificing its central purpose,” the university “cannot make its primary and dominant value the fostering of friendship, solidarity, harmony, civility, or mutual respect.”
This dispute between the primacy of speech and deep worries about disparities in campus power dynamics still divides American universities. What remains interesting about the Woodward Report is its honesty about the political stakes and the prominent voice it gave its student representatives. I am struck by how forthright those involved were about the compromises accompanying free expression. This forthrightness deserves emulation, not least because it might increase students’ sense of responsibility for what they say and the community in which they say it.
Students were divided in 1974 when the Yale chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom scheduled a debate with William Shockley, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who spent his later years promoting racial eugenics. Several other Yale groups had invited — and then disinvited — Shockley, while Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster Jr., vacillated. On the one hand, Brewster advised students against “the use of free speech as a game.” On the other, when students shouted down the YAF debate, Brewster said he was sickened by such “storm-trooper tactics.”
Steven Benner, now a molecular biologist and a former professor of chemistry at the University of Florida, drafted the historical section of the Woodward Report (“Of Trials and Errors”). He knew that Brewster was in an awkward position. The president had “managed to make it through the ’60s and Vietnam,” Benner said, only to have Shockley show up. Still, Benner was a stalwart defender of free speech and was concerned that the outrage over Shockley would encourage a “triangulation” away from principles. But he admitted to me that, after attending the YAF dinner with Shockley, he thought it might be a good idea for “all Nobel Prize winners to have their tongues cut out.”
Barnes, now a lawyer in New Hampshire, says he was compelled to write his dissent when he perceived that the Woodward committee’s mission was “predetermined” in favor of a “polemic on free speech.” He emphasized that his goal in the dissent was “not some radical firebombing” but simply to articulate “the civic thing” that he believed the committee was repressing. Like Benner, Barnes was upfront about his own youthful self-righteousness.
After the report’s release, Benner went on to become the speaker of the Yale Political Union. In February 1975, he and Barnes squared off in a YPU debate over the findings. The Yale Daily News reported at the time that Barnes worried that the Woodward committee had set out “to vindicate, not question free speech” and risked imposing “an ideology which might impair … or put blinders on our view of the world.” (Asked about Barnes’s sense that the committee’s deck seemed stacked, Donald Kagan — an emeritus Yale classicist whose frustration with administrative dithering over Shockley helped to precipitate the Woodward Report — replied, with a touch of irony, “It was.”) Looking back, Barnes wonders whether “maybe more people in the audience would agree with me now.”
Although the Woodward Report is still official Yale policy, in practice it has long been superseded. It seems safe to conclude that Yale’s administration no longer agrees with the report’s insistence that disciplinary sanctions “must stick.” Meanwhile, a range of universities, including Princeton and Purdue, have endorsed the Chicago 2015 statement, which effectively repeats the Woodward Report’s principles without repeating its process. Perhaps there is virtue in the brevity and apparent unanimity of Chicago-style statements. But if polls are any indication, students aren’t entirely convinced. What if, instead of just copying either Yale or Chicago, universities sponsored something like Yale’s 1974 process — the writing of a Woodward-style report?
Much like Thomas Jefferson’s proposal that the United States revisit its Constitution every 19 years, universities could periodically renew their messages and policies regarding free expression. Because collective campus memory fades with each graduating class, such renewal should be fairly frequent — say, every eight years. Student could apply to serve alongside faculty members and administrators to articulate their university’s vision, offer perspectives on recent controversies, and outline procedures for disciplining violators.
Students wouldn’t just be signing on to abstract principles, vital as those are. They would also have the opportunity to write official concurrences or dissents. Each report would provide a sense of campus-specific dialogue, which members of the university could then consult — and debate — across time. In 1789, Jefferson justified his 19-year idea to James Madison on the grounds that the earth belongs to the living. With the Woodward report as a reminder, the campus, we might say, belongs to those currently speaking.
