Book Review: Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge, by Marjorie Heins

Abstract

Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge. Marjorie Heins. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 384 pp. $35 cloth.Before the reviewer of this book began employment at the University of Florida in 2009, he signed a oath pledging to support the Constitution of the United States and of the state of Florida. It was a seemingly benign and innocuous paragraph, part of a much larger Office of Human Resource Services form that also included an intellectual property agreement, a controlled substance questionnaire, and some retire- ment plan information. This reviewer, admittedly, had never read the Florida Constitution, but signing off to procure a tenured position seemed like the proverbial no brainer.It was not always, however, such an easy decision for many professors in the United States. As Marjorie Heins's well-researched new tome demonstrates, oaths and academics have a long, contentious, and pernicious history in the United States. During the last century, many an educator-typically a socialist, a communist, or some other supposed subversive, but sometimes simply a disinterested objector- was pushed outside the ivy-covered walls for refusing to sign oaths. These oaths, as Heins writes, often demanded political or religious loyalty as a test of job fitness.Seamlessly blending legal, political, and cultural history, Heins tells the story of many of the academics (both high school teachers and those at the college and univer- sity levels) who risked occupational security to fight for larger principles. Ultimately, the oaths-more accurately, the multiple hard-fought legal challenges against them- gave rise to the U.S. Supreme Court's recognition of the critical, yet still contested, concept known as academic freedom.Heins, founding director of the Free Expression Policy Project and a civil liberties lawyer with law-school teaching credentials, combines archival research with case analysis and, perhaps most importantly, in-person and telephone interviews she con- ducted in recent years with some of the leading players in the seminal Supreme Court case of Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967). Significantly, Heins interviewed lead plaintiff Harry Keyishian (and was given access by him to his personal papers) and the attorney who successfully argued the case, Richard Lipsitz.The case centered on the constitutionality of the Feinberg certificate that instructors on State University of New York (SUNY) campuses had to sign as a condition of employment starting in the 1950s. Keyishian, an English instructor at the SUNY- Buffalo, refused to sign the certificate, which required faculty to affirm they were not currently members of the Communist Party and to disclose whether they ever had been members. In declaring the certificate unconstitutional, Justice William Brennan wrote for a narrow five-justice majority thatour Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. …