"No matter how static and despairing the present looks, the past reminds us that change can occur. At least things can be different. The past is an unending source of interest, and can even be a source of hope.—Natalie Zemon Davis, 1997 address to the American Council for Learned Societies.

Before U-M President Lee C. Bollinger quoted this creed of the historian Natalie Zemon Davis '59 PhD, he provided a context to show that it was more than an academic observation on her part.

Bollinger

"It was at Michigan," Bollinger noted, "that Natalie and [her husband] Chandler became the target of accusations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Deeply concerned about academic freedom and civil liberties, Natalie Davis had researched and done much of the writing for a pamphlet that attacked the unconstitutional activities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities [HUAC]. The University of Michigan Council published the pamphlet anonymously for the Arts, Sciences and Professions. Chandler had signed the check for the printer, who gave this information to the FBI, which led to the charges that Chandler and Natalie were Communists."

		Alumna Davis was on campus to deliver the annual Jacob- son Lecture. In introducing her, President Bollin- ger noted that earlier this year, she received the International Toynbee Prize, which is con- sidered the No- bel Prize of the social sciences.'
Photo by Erwin Schenkelbach

The Davises arrived at Michigan in 1950, he to join the Department of Mathematics as an instructor and she to pursue her doctorate in history. In 1952, Natalie and fellow graduate student Elizabeth M. Douvan (now the Catharine Neafie Kellogg professor emerita of psychology at U-M) wrote Operation Mind, the pamphlet that attracted HUAC's wrath. When Natalie and Chandler returned later that year from France, where she'd gone for dissertation research, the US State Department seized their passports at their Ann Arbor apartment.

Chandler Davis

It was a time of firings, intimidation, blackballing and imprisonment of persons who belonged to, or who would not say they no longer belonged to, or who refused to identify members of the Communist Party USA. The State Department charge read: "You are informed that the passports of yourself and your wife were taken up since the Department desires to give consideration in the light of the recently promulgated amendments to the Passport Regulations to any further travel which you may contemplate. In this connection you are informed that it is alleged that both you and your wife are Communists."

Although the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) held that mere membership in any group could not be a proper reason for firing a faculty member, the Association of American Universities (AAUP) the umbrella group of higher-education administrators, had declared officially in 1953 that membership in the Communist Party "extinguishes the right to a university position " (The AAU dropped the statement in 1970.)

In 1953, the Davises learned from HUAC that Chandler would be one of 15 U-M faculty members or graduate students who would be required to testify on political charges. U-M President Harlan Hatcher negotiated with the investigators and ultimately, in 1954, three "unfriendly" U-M faculty were subpoenaed and tried. Two (see 'It did happen here') declined to testify on the ground of the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination. Davis. however, rested his refusal on the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of association and expression. He ultimately lost his First Amendment case for contempt of Congress at the US Supreme Court level and was sentenced to six months in the federal prison at Danbury, Connecticut.

Now let's fast-forward from those events of 1954 to today. Both Davises were on campus in early October. Natalie, professor emerita from Princeton University and professor of medieval studies at the University of Toronto, came to deliver the Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture for the Institute of the Humanities. And Chandler was in Ann Arbor for the annual tribute to him and his two fellow defendants, Clement Markert and Mark Nickerson, both of whom died recently. Since 1991, the annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom has been sponsored by the Academic Freedom Lecture Fund, the U-M chapter of the AAUP, the faculty Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs and the U-M Office of the President.