In April, the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media appointed Nikole Hannah-Jones, who headed up the New York Times’s 1619 Project, as a Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. While the university’s trustees typically rubber-stamp such academic appointments, they refused to offer Hannah-Jones tenure, and instead offered a five-year, renewable contract. Although the trustees claimed that Hannah-Jones’s lack of academic credentials drove their decision, Knight chairs do not typically come from academic backgrounds and instead usually have distinguished careers in journalism, as she has had. UNC trustees also reached their decision only after conservatives objected to Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project as part of a broader attack against anti-racism. This combination raised questions about whether political interference was at work.
The decision attracted widespread criticism inside and outside North Carolina. Perhaps most importantly, the trustees’ intervention violated the university’s long-standing — albeit imperfect — commitment to free speech and academic freedom, one of the most important reasons for the institution’s rise to international prominence during the past century.
And no one did more to articulate and defend this principle than Frank Porter Graham, UNC president from 1930 to 1949. A prominent New Deal supporter, Graham oversaw the university’s rise as the preeminent public university in the South and a leading light among American universities, before leaving to serve 18 months as a U.S. senator. A cornerstone principle of Graham’s leadership was his adherence to free speech as a vital component of a thriving democracy.
The Great Depression sharply reduced public support for universities, including UNC. Severe cuts affected UNC before Graham took office, and, as state revenue plunged, the reduction in state appropriations for the university reached 54 percent between 1929 and 1933. That reduction meant cuts to faculty salaries, including Graham’s, which dropped by roughly one-third.
At the same time, UNC’s independence was under siege. North Carolina was (and is) a conservative state, and the university addressed sensitive subjects such as evolution, racial justice and labor rights of workers in ways that, though empirically validated, angered conservatives. By the late 1920s, critics, including state power brokers, began insisting that the university toe a different line.
For example, during the mid-1920s, North Carolina conservatives campaigned to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools and universities. But while such efforts succeeded in other states, UNC fought back, asserting the then-new principle of academic freedom and beating back the push. There had long been a tradition of political interference in universities, with instances of faculty firings thanks to the power over funding, jobs and university operations wielded by politicians and trustees tied to the power structure. The American Association of University Professors formed in 1915 to challenge this political interference. And yet a constant tug-of-war took place between universities, especially public universities, and political opinion. In the South, protections for free expression were few, especially on matters of race, labor radicalism and left-wing politics.
Nonetheless, Graham articulated a strict standard of academic freedom in his November 1931 inaugural address. To foster “a growing sense of responsibility and student citizenship to govern themselves in campus affairs,” universities, he declared, should not only encourage but protect lawful assembly and free discussion. For faculty, academic freedom meant controlling the curriculum, setting academic standards and promoting intellectual excellence. The university would encourage professors to “teach and speak freely, not as propagandists, but as scholars and seekers for the truth” and to discover the truth without interference. Lacking such freedom, there could be “no university and no democracy.” For administrators, freedom meant expressing views, without concern about their impact, “asking no quarter and fearing no special interest.”
Looking into an uncertain future, Graham pledged to preserve UNC as a “stronghold of learning and an outpost of light and liberty along all the frontiers of mankind.”
Conservative critics recoiled at this vision, seeing it as subversive and poison to North Carolina’s young minds. The state’s political leadership especially feared free discussion on issues of race and labor, which they saw as subversive, even communist. Yet Graham believed in allowing even communist speech — despite having little sympathy for communists and expressing skepticism about their methods and anti-democratic goals.
He saw free speech as both a manifestation of democracy and as the most effective way to combat toxic ideas. If the public lost access to “open sunlight and fresh air,” he wrote, “then we are not very far from revolution.” Keeping information freely available was far preferable. At UNC, communists received “fresh air and sunshine” and could make little headway.
Graham’s insistence on academic freedom became a key component of how he ran the university. But there were limits to both Graham’s power and vision. Early 20th century North Carolina was strictly segregated, and, as a state employee, Graham was obliged to defend UNC’s policy of excluding African Americans despite close ties to civil rights activists.
At the same time, he became known as a university president willing, to a point, to test Jim Crow. Graham, more than other Southern liberals, managed to thread the needle, enjoying the support of segregationists even while maintaining the confidence of civil rights groups. It was a tricky balance. His willingness to abide by their rigid regime mollified segregationists, even while he promised a long-term gradualist vision of racial justice. An early example came in November 1931, when Black poet Langston Hughes became the first African American to speak at UNC. Despite attacks from the right, Graham steadfastly opposed any attempt to limit campus speakers. “We would not even be a University in name,” Graham later wrote, if he took any other position. Later on, after World War II, as the battle lines hardened, this formula faltered, and Graham lost reelection to the U.S. Senate in 1950 largely because of his perceived disloyalty to segregation.
Similar to his handling of race, Graham was unafraid to support and even champion advocates of labor unions in an anti-union state. In September 1934, 71,500 North Carolina textile workers walked off the job as part of a massive industry-wide strike. UNC graduate and labor activist Alton Lawrence led about 600 textile workers on strike in High Point. Police and National Guard members, using a warrant for forcible trespass, arrested Lawrence and 30 strikers. When Graham heard about the arrest, he telegraphed the High Point police chief offering to post bail for Lawrence. A furor resulted, but Graham held onto his job.
In November 1936, Graham even defended a UNC English professor, E.E. Ericson, after Ericson attended a speech by and ate dinner with Black activist and Communist Party vice-presidential candidate James Ford. Eating with Ford violated racial taboos, leading the Raleigh News and Observer to criticize Ericson for “cavorting with Negroes and Communist candidates.” But Graham not only ignored calls for Ericson’s dismissal; two years later, he sponsored Ericson’s promotion to full professor. If Ericson was fired simply because he ate dinner with “another human being,” Graham said, “then I will have to go first.” The Ericson case demonstrated conservatives’ unease about subversion on issues of race and communism, but it showed how Graham negotiated a position that held off political interference and protected faculty free speech — even regarding the explosive issue of racial etiquette — though at the expense of maintaining segregation at UNC.
Graham’s political skills helped keep conservative critics at bay; his earnest and sincere devotion to the good of the state and his ability to communicate that often disarmed them. Relying on the adage that UNC’s boundaries were “conterminous with the boundaries of the state,” Graham argued that a public university in a tradition-bound state could serve as an engine of economic and political democracy. The contradiction in his rhetoric — that he advocated democracy even while he defended excluding Black students — would become increasingly apparent during the 1940s and 1950s.
Despite economic collapse, war and intense social change throughout the South during the 1930s and 1940s, UNC developed into a world-class institution under Graham’s direction. His understanding that a great university and a great society needed open discussion, free from political interference, helped UNC to flourish.
Like all UNC (and public university) presidents, Graham confronted the limits imposed by the political reality in the state. But his resistance to political interference and dogged support for academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas never waned despite this rugged terrain. Graham’s tenure is a reminder of the value of abiding by such principles, which enable universities to flourish. It’s also a reminder of the dangers of politics interceding in university decision-making, which produces actions, especially on race, that have long tarnished American universities.