Lessons from the Past Illuminate Curran Affair

Abstract

If the events in the academy during 1986-87, the case of Professor Charles Curran of the Catholic University of America has been notable for the wide discussion it has stimulated on the issue of academic freedom. In the summer of 1986 Professor Curran was judged by the Vatican to be in open dissent from the prevaling orthodoxy in the Roman Catholic Church and therefore neither suitable nor eligible to teach Catholic theology. Because of this judgment he has been suspended by his university chancellor from teaching in the Spring Semester of 1987 and three of his classes were cancelled.1 Periodically since the late nineteenth century the meaning of academic free dom has been debated in America in response to such specific external demands for the removal of dissenters from our universities, whether they were pro-German professors of the First World War era or Communist Party members during the McCarthy Red Scare.