Remembering a Resister

Thomas Abowd

In the Spirit of H. Chandler Davis:
Activism and the Struggle of Academic Freedom
Edited by Michael Atzmon, John Cheney-Lippold, Gary D. Krenz,
Melanie S. Tanielian
Michigan Publishing: Disobedience Press, 2026, 198 pages,
$24.95 paperback.

AMID MOUNTING AUTHORITARIANISM on U.S. college campuses in the last few years, lessons from America’s history of anti-left, anti-socialist state repression are needed now more than ever.

In the Spirit of H. Chandler Davis: Activism and the Struggle of Academic Freedom offers readers probing analyses and vital insights into threats to democracy in this country, past and present. It challenges us to consider the extent to which current violations of academic freedom find their parallel in the purges of the J. Edgar Hoover-Joseph McCarthy era.

This is a superb and eclectic collection of essays in memory of the life, struggles, and political commitments of H. Chandler Davis. Edited by four current members of the University of Michigan community, this volume is that rare book that perceptively details assaults on freedom of speech, assembly and association in the 1940s and 1950s, and what these violations of civil liberties and human rights might teach us today in the fight against fascism in Trump’s America.

“Chan” Davis, who died in 2022 at age 96, was a brilliant mathematician, socialist intellectual and unswerving activist who taught at UM in the early 1950s. As McCarthyite tyranny reached its foul apex in 1953, Davis received a subpoena to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

In response, he built an unrepentant, First Amendment defense of his political activities and dissident views rather than a Fifth Amendment defense, which most of the scores of others similarly accused of communist sympathies chose to wage. When the young professor refused to cooperate with HUAC, his and his family’s lives were thrown into turmoil.

Davis was persecuted not only by an unruly federal government but also by his home institution. This was a UM administration that was led at the time by the disreputable figure of President Harlan Hatcher.

We learn in this book how Hatcher actually conspired with McCarthyite officials in 1953 and 1954 to destroy Davis’s academic career and that of other leftist UM professors. As Davis noted at the time (correctly, it turned out), university authorities like Hatcher were acting as “an appendage of HUAC.” (14)

Tolls of Repression

This compilation of essays opens with personal reflections on Davis’s legacy and travails by his wife of many years, the late historian Natalie Zemon Davis, and his friend and comrade, feminist scholar Joan Scott.

Their contributions document, among other things, some of the tolls of state repression on a radical academic couple and their three young children. These included the federal government seizing Davis and Zemon-Davis’s passports and restricting their travel for nearly a decade.

For Chandler Davis, it also meant the loss of his job when Hatcher fired him in 1954 and a subsequent six-month prison term in a federal penitentiary for contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions from HUAC.

Zemon Davis, Scott, as well as Chandler Davis himself, in the final chapter (a letter he composed to UM faculty in 2019) detail the myriad dangers that left intellectuals were compelled to navigate in order to secure academic jobs and maintain their political commitments in the time of the “Red Hunts.”

Once purged from UM, Chandler and Zemon Davis began a protracted, personal and professional trek that would take them from Ann Arbor to Canada and back to the United States in search of stable employment and academic freedom. It is a tribute to their sheer resolve, courage, and talent that they were able to reconstitute their careers under such constraints.

This was particularly remarkable given that, as one of the book’s contributors, Ellen Shrecker, astutely points out, one difference between the 1950s and now is that Davis and other victims of McCarthyism struggled largely alone.

In his chapter, contributor Alan Wald, a long-time activist and left intellectual who taught at UM for several decades in the tradition of Davis, bridges past and present. Wald provides first-hand insights into the heritage of faculty activism at the school, starting in the 1970s.

This was a crucial period situated in the wake of the gains of the civil rights, women’s rights, anti-Vietnam war movements and other struggles. Though these movements had made the United States (and the American academy) a more open and egalitarian society than it was in the 1950s, much work was needed to both protect these advances and expand on them.

Wald takes the reader through the years of an abiding “repression-resistance” dialectic at this university. He chronicles successive administrations attempts to block faculty and student political initiatives, particularly those that have turned a critical gaze on the U.S. empire and on this and other universities’ complicity in imperial ventures abroad and violations of academic freedom at home.

It was this energy, this organizing that created in the early 1990s a still-running lecture series honoring Davis and other former UM faculty targeted by McCarthy.

Assaults on Palestine Solidarity

Several of this book’s other chapters make comparisons and connections between the anti-communist purges of the 1940s and 1950s and contemporary assaults on freedom of expression in the American academy.

Many of the essays address the attacks against Palestine-rights activists on college campuses today. This focus is appropriate given how faculty, students and staff have been targeted in recent years like few others. The harsh disciplining of them — including Trump’s imprisonment of several students in the past eighteen months — is among the most blatant expressions of what contributors refer to as the “new McCarthyism.”

In her chapter, Dima Khalidi, drawing links between past and present attacks on academic freedom, concludes that “Israel and its domestic allies are trying to undermine, if not destroy, the First Amendment…solely to shield Israel from scrutiny and accountability.” (142)

Sadly but predictably, some of these “domestic allies” have been ethically-challenged college administrators and members of universities’ boards of trustees. These are figures for whom donor dollars have proven to be far more important than protecting students and faculty’s safety, reputations, and freedom of expression, assembly, and association.

A comprehensive examination of university administrations’ fealty to the forces of right-wing Zionism and other racist tendencies in contemporary times remains to be written. But this book gets us started nicely.

It may one day be known exactly who fingered Arab and Muslim college activists and provided their names to Trump’s henchmen. What‘s certain is that university presidents who failed in the last few years to protect their own students and faculty from those wishing to abrogate the principles of academic freedom will, in time, be exposed and judged in the same way that former UM President Hatcher is in this text.

Authoritarian Nexus

Contemporary assaults on Palestine-rights activism in educational realms, as this book’s contributors detail, have converged with many other MAGA attacks on academic freedom. These include powerful campaigns against DEI efforts, queer literature, women and gender studies programs, and socialist politics and pedagogy in the U.S. academy.

Such policing has even happened in K-12 schools with proliferating state efforts to ban books over the last decade. What began during Trump’s first term as “anti-woke” and “don’t say gay” campaigns, in Florida and other states, have gained momentum in his current administration.

A potent nexus between an authoritarian state and like-minded forces in civil society has produced a chilling effect on many college campuses and elsewhere across the country.

This volume’s essays explore many of the ways in which these efforts to intimidate and silence have been crafted and, critically, how they have been resisted. Such measures must be contested everywhere because, as Chandler Davis writes in the final chapter of this book, “constantly guarded speech is not free speech.” (154)

Beginning in the Fall of 2023, as Palestine solidarity work on U.S. campuses reached new heights and as college administrations suspended, punished and even arrested young activists with Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, I questioned the claims of a “New McCarthyism.”

Were today’s proponents of academic freedom drawing too quick a parallel with state repression in the 1940s and 1950s? Were these comparisons facile, even invidious?

This book helps us understand that while there are significant differences between these two moments, as Davis himself notes in the book, current forms of authoritarianism are, at a minimum, not different enough from the campaigns of criminalization and the attendant terrors unleashed in the period of the “Red Hunts.”

Given the sometimes superficial and anemic historical accounts of McCarthyism, In the Spirit of H. Chandler Davis is necessary reading for students, faculty and others concerned with safeguarding academic freedom in our turbulent times. The current battle for the academy, for the right to openly express one’s critiques of the U.S. government (and others like Israel), has been joined by the forces for greater democracy no less than the armies of reaction and repression.

As has often been the case since the 1960s, college students are today among the leaders of these multiple movements for civil liberties and human rights. Chandler Davis’ enduring spirit, captured in this vital volume, will continue to inspire all generations of activist intellectuals who must struggle to reclaim hollowed out and impaired rights to freedom of expression — on college campuses and throughout the country.

This collection of essays and the histories it forces us to confront will contribute to more radical visions of democracy and liberation that would exceed limited liberal ones.

July-August 2026, ATC 243