inety-nine years ago, Trinity College, Duke's predecessor institution, set a milestone in academic freedom.

A Trinity graduate, history professor John Spencer Bassett had founded the South Atlantic Quarterly to promote the "liberty to think." One of his articles gave voice to that idea: In "Two Negro Leaders," he contrasted the lives and philosophies of Booker T. Washington and William E.B. DuBois.

To gain attention for the view favoring the social advancement of blacks, Bassett later admitted to "doing a very unprofessional thing," then-university archivist William E. King '61, A.M. '63, Ph.D. '70 wrote in a 1995 issue of Duke Dialogue. "With galley proofs of an editorial in hand, he inserted a sentence praising the life of Booker T. Washington and ranking him second in comparison to Robert E. Lee of Southerners born in 100 years." Bassett wrote that blacks were becoming "too intelligent and too refined" to accept an inferior social position, and that to avert costly racial conflict, whites should adopt "these children of Africa into our American life."

In their definitive book The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States, Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger observed: "Himself a son of the South, Bassett thought he could speak these unpleasant truths to his kith and kin with complete impunity. But he had struck a painful nerve of the sensitive Southern conscience. The article was greeted at once with calumnious abuse. Josephus Daniels, publisher of the Democratic, reform-minded Raleigh News and Observer, led the attack. The University of Chicago, he wrote, is not 'the only institution which harbors freaks who rush into absurd statements and dangerous doctrines--statements which, if true, damn the State of North Carolina, and doctrine which, if carried out, would destroy the civilization of the South.' "

Though Bassett held a doctorate from Johns Hopkins and was considered "the leading historian of the state," Hofstadter and Metzger added, "his article was thought to prove its author unfit for his post. Only because he was unpopular, the argument was advanced that he had lost his usefulness to the college."

In the arena of academic freedom, that argument represented an early effort at exercising what Duke law professor William Van Alstyne refers to as "the heckler's veto." And in fact, "When local pressures mounted, and a boycott of the college was threatened, Bassett submitted his resignation."

Meeting on December 2, 1903, at about three o'clock in the morning, Trinity's trustees voted 18 to 7 not to accept Bassett's resignation. Hofstadter and Metzger wrote that five of the seven voting against Bassett were Methodist ministers, one was a U.S. senator, and only one was a local businessman. On the Bassett side, four ministers were aligned with twelve bankers and industrialists. "And not least, Benjamin N. Duke, the patron, voted in Bassett's favor.... Motives are obscure in this as in every case. What is indisputable is that the patron stood foursquare for tolerance, and refused to pander to prevailing prejudice."

Apparently, President John Carlisle Kilgo and the college faculty had been prepared to resign in the event of a contrary decision. One student, who had been listening in on the debate surreptitiously, quoted Kilgo's words to the trustees: "It is one of the inalienable rights of an educational institution and of its teachers to express honest thought. It is this freedom from bondage that has made Trinity College what it is. I beg of you, gentlemen, do not tear out the heart of Trinity College and leave standing there only the carcass of an institution!"

What emerged was hardly a carcass, but a stronger institution--thanks to those "business men on the board of trustees who saved the day for academic freedom," as the student correspondent put it. He went on to report that "we soon had the old [college] bell ringing out the good news, while students from every point of vantage on the old Main Building were crying out, 'Trinity free! Trinity free!' "

King wrote that "Trinity basked in favorable publicity" following what has come to be called "the Bassett Affair." Despite predictions to the contrary, enrollment continued to increase.

The victory notwithstanding, Bassett himself decided to move on; he accepted a teaching offer from Smith College in 1906. While welcoming a reduced teaching load, King wrote, he had "tired of the tension he felt between his role as a scholar and the pull to be a reformer in a region he cared very much about."

--Robert J. Bliwise