Have I ever told y’all about the time the University of Illinois fired a guy for saying premarital sex is okay and opted to retain a Bircher who claimed after JFK was killed that he was a secret communist murdered by communists for not making America communist fast enough?

I probably have before, but what the hell. Let's go through it again!

Leo Koch was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in 1960. He was fired that year for "promoting" premarital sex in the pages of the Daily Illini, the student newspaper at the university.

What did he write?

The background is that two conservative undergraduates on campus wrote an article in the newspaper deriding the shallow sexual mores of their classmates.

As I recall -- I can't find the original in my files -- the basic argument was something along the lines of "women shouldn't be treated as sex objects, therefore everybody should be celibate until marriage."

Koch wrote a response in a letter to the editor a few days later, in which he said "with modern contraceptives, there is no valid reason why sexual intercourse should not be condoned among those sufficiently mature to engage in it..."

...along with opining that if more people had sexual experience before marriage, maybe there wouldn't be so many divorces.

Even by the standards of 1960, this was pretty tame stuff.

But there was a MASSIVE outcry. Koch had sit-downs with his department chair and his dean saying that his effectiveness as a teacher was now impaired.

His dean got pretty personal in his criticism, in tones that are suggestive of the SJW smear today:

He criticized Koch's carefully constructed self-image as a “fighting liberal battling courageously against the ignorant of society,” calling him arrogant and intolerant.

Koch also became the target of right-wing trolls. The Chicago-based Baptist minister Ira Latimer mailed letters to the families of female students.

Latimer was one of those radicals from the 1930s who became a big-time right-winger in the 1950s.

So, you've got a right-wing crazy sowing dissent through direct mailings, a university administration gunning for Koch... where did the students stand on him?

They were broadly supportive. The student senate passed a pro-Koch resolution in April.

The whole case quickly became a cause celebre for academic freedom. An internal committee of six administrators the University of Illinois put together to review the case was split.

Three believed that Koch's academic freedom had been violated by his firing; three believed Koch was guilty of academic misconduct, but that his penalty may have been excessively harsh.

The ACLU got involved, setting up a "Committee for Leo Koch" that involved some pretty heavy hitters from the time -- Isaiah Berlin, Herbert Feigl, Michael Harrington, among many others.

They compared Koch to Bernard Russell.

Koch filed a legal appeal against the University, but it was eventually shot down by the Illinois Supreme Court in 1963; SCOTUS refused to hear the case.

The Koch case did a LOT of damage to the University of Illinois's reputation.

Roger Ebert was a student there during the controversy and he still remembered it 50 years later. https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/making-out-is-its-own-reward

The university was sanctioned by the AAUP. (There's a good article about this whole business on the AAUP website, written after the Steven Salaita thing, which was -- of course -- also at the University of Illinois.) https://www.aaup.org/JAF6/academic-freedom-and-extramural-utterances-leo-koch-and-steven-salaita-cases-university#.XwYmh_J7nzg

Which brings me to Professor Palindrome, as @jpjjr1961 has so lovingly dubbed him.

Revilo P. Oliver was a member of the classics department at the University of Illinois. He'd gotten his PhD there in 1940 and was a full professor by 1953.

Apparently Oliver actually was a decent Sanskrit scholar, but his real passion was far-right politics.

He was a big contributor to NATIONAL REVIEW in its early days, penning a number of book reviews, and was a personal friend of William F. Buckley, Jr.

He was also a founding member of the John Birch Society.

Anyway, Oliver had a habit of making some pretty out there remarks, publicly and privately.

He accused Felix Frankfurter of being a secret communist agent in 1959 -- a classic antisemitic dogwhistle -- at a DAR meeting.

He wrote a letter to the Democratic National Committee that same year in which he said that he was "not a member of the Communist-front which has used that name ever since the foul mass of syphilitic venom came crawling out of Hyde Park in 1932…"

...before concluding "Solicit your contributions from Khrushchev!"

Illinois senator Paul Douglas's office actually contacted the university over this, because they didn't believe a guy this crazy was actually a classics professor there.

The president's office apologized profusely and wrote, "This is by no means the first time that Professor Oliver has caused the University acute embarrassment through the violent expression of his extreme political views, nor presumably will it be the last."

Now, you might say, "Well, Oliver sounds like he was crazy" (and he was CRAZY) "but what he's doing here is merely expressing his political beliefs as a private citizen."

Yeah, but this is the kind of stuff that inevitably bleeds into professional life. To whit...

In 1960, Oliver gave a keynote address at the Illinois Classics Conference -- a professional meeting -- that was supposed to be about the work of Arcadius Avellanus, an early 20th-century Hungarian classicist.

Instead, Oliver used the opportunity to inveigh against the dangers of progressive education, linking modern teaching practices to teenage pregnancy and outbreaks of “gonorrhea and syphilis,” the dangers of international communism...

...and even found to the time to make “almost obscene” disparaging remarks about Charles Van Doren and his involvement in the Twenty-One quiz show scandal.

Presumably he was pissed off that Ralph Fiennes would never play HIM in a movie.

One of the people present in the room that day wrote to the chair of the classics department wondering if Oliver was a fascist.

That was prescient, as I'll get to.

But the pertinent point is that the chair DID NOTHING.

You'd think that there would be consequences for such blatant unprofessionalism in an academic setting.

But the chair simply told Oliver his behavior "only offends audiences and draws them in other directions."

In March 1964 Oliver finally does something that generates a genuinely public outcry.

He'd been writing articles for the John Birch Society magazine AMERICAN OPINION for years, but in '64 he publishes a charming little piece called "Marxmanship in Dallas."

The basic gist of the article, like I said, is that Kennedy was a secret communist who was killed for not delivering America into the hands of international communism fast enough.

Notably, one of the things Oliver claimed Kennedy was dragging his feet on which pissed off his commie bosses and prompted them to kill him was...

Not acting swiftly enough on passing civil rights legislation.

He also insisted on calling Jack Ruby by his birth name, Jakob Rubenstein.

Oh yes, Oliver was a HUGE anti-Semite.

There was a massive public outcry against Oliver -- @jpjjr1961 has written an excellent treatment of this. He actually got hauled in front of the Warren Commission!

But the response by the University of Illinois administration was remarkably restrained. https://twitter.com/jpjjr1961/status/1280962298069356544

Basically, their stance was, "well, this is protected speech! We think it's bad, but ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯.

What explains the discrepancy between Koch and Oliver?

There's a couple of things. Oliver only became a public "deplorable" in 1964, four years after Koch was dismissed and the university was leery of taking another action that looked like it would censor a faculty member.

That's certainly the impression one gets from reading some of the editorials in the Illini from the period, and some of the internal memos about it.

But I actually think this explanation is wrong.

Koch was sacked because university officials were hostile to his politics, and because through Latimer's direct mailing to parents he was undermining the University's reputation with parents.

In other words, he was sacked because he was a left-liberal who pissed off the right.

Oliver, on the other hand, was treated with kid gloves FOR YEARS by his department and the administration in no small part because he was a powerful figure on the far right.

This is one of the legacies of McCarthyism in the university.

I should mention that Oliver got kicked out of the Birchers in 1966 for saying one anti-Semitic thing too many.

He later became a neo-Nazi. As in like, he was a mentor to William Luther Pierce, the author of THE TURNER DIARIES.

I'll give Oliver this much -- by the 1970s he knew better than to openly espouse his extreme political views, lest it cause him too much trouble.

But the guy's politics were still an open secret on campus. And yet he retired from the university with full honors in 1977.

Anyway, all of this is simply to say that not only are battles over what constitutes unacceptable speech endemic to the university...

Historically, those battles have often been resolved in favor of reactionaries.

Food for thought on a Wednesday afternoon.

SOURCE NOTE:

Most of the material in this thread comes from an unpublished research paper I wrote in my first year of graduate school, way back in 2015.

Hmm... maybe I should actually dust this off, polish it up, and try to get it published somewhere.