When it appeared in 1975 Yale’s Free Speech Policy made such a forceful case for the absolute necessity of protecting free expression on campus that it was quickly adopted as a model for a number of other universities. Forty years later, however, events at Yale and elsewhere demonstrate that many of the old certainties about the nature and primary importance free speech in the academic arena are anything but certain (…)
These and other such activities presaged Woodward’s prominent role in supporting his Johns Hopkins colleague, international affairs expert Owen Lattimore, whose reluctance to criticize Soviet actions led Senator Joseph R. McCarthy to condemn him as “the top Soviet espionage agent in the United States” in 1950. Though McCarthy and countless others urged Johns Hopkins administrators to fire Lattimore, Woodward was in the front ranks of a faculty cohort who succeeded in persuading the Hopkins higher-ups to retain him even after he was indicted by the Justice Department in 1952 and up until he was finally cleared of all charges in 1955.
