THE FACULTY REVOLT OF 1965

By Jim Dean

Editor’s Note--The more than 60 new faculty members who came to Southern Oregon College in 1966 quickly learned that during the previous academic year, 1965-66, the College had been riven by controversy and discontent. What lay behind such a traumatic year never was entirely clear to us. What follows is one person’s attempt to finally make sense of it.

My first inkling that things had gone seriously awry came in August in Dick Byrne’s office (he was Chair of English but was leaving for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas after having resigned from the faculty). “Would you be interested in buying my house,” he asked. “I’m leaving.” Ten minutes later I learned that Chuck Ryberg, also in English, planned to leave to teach in Florida. Happily, Chuck had a change of heart, and stayed.

In September, as we suffered through alternately amusing and appalling orientation meetings, we heard a welter of stories about resignations from the Faculty Council, about the controversy surrounding the Mosser Plan (designed to reward superior undergraduate teachers), and about the Adamian Case. Little wonder that we shook our heads, wondering whether the administration was truly as villainous as depicted, and, more to the point, whether through some misfortune we had fallen into an academic black-hole.


The Revolt of the Faculty Council

Hal Cloer, in a 2004 memoir written for President Zinser and Provost Potter,“The End of the ‘College of Education Era,’” observes that “in 1965-66 there was increasing rebellion on the part of faculty. They had become disenchanted with “the paternalistic and authoritarian structure of the College.” They also believed that the College should no longer be a place where only non-controversial and “safe” ideas were promulgated.

According to Art Kreisman, in Remembering: A History of Southern Oregon University, the Faculty Council, a precursor to today’s Faculty Senate, was established in 1956 and grew from 7 to 13 members by 1965, reflecting the growth of the institution. President Elmo Stevenson’s management style was apparently better suited to the school SOC once was than to the one it had become, and he seemed unaware that the faculty was becoming restive. Elmo reported to the State Board in 1965 that “faculty spirit is good.” Vaughn Bornet remembers that this “spirit” varied by department and division.

Elmo’s characterization was dramatically disproved when on April 13, 1966 (a Wednesday) the entire Faculty Council resigned, including several faculty members who were perceived as being close to the administration. Member of the Council were Edward Fitzpatrick, Ken Bartlett, Beverly Bennett, Phyllis Butler, Richard Byrnes, Jim Doerter, John McCollum, Lloyd Pennington, Sheldon Rio, Fred Rosentreter, Frank Sturges, Arnold Wolfe, and Marshall Woodell. News of their resignations ran in The Siskiyou and appeared in all news media in the area. The event caused a stir not only on campus but also throughout the State. Council members clearly believed that the only way to get the Administration’s attention was to resign.

As reported in the Ashland Daily Tidings on April 14, the Council addressed a letter to all faculty members. It made the following comments: “the Faculty Council has been unable to carry out its proper functions because of apparent lack of respect and confidence on the part of the Administration. Without explanation or justification, the Administration has repeatedly ignored Faculty Council recommendations (even when these had been requested by the Administration), has failed to communicate decisions affecting the Faculty, has misrepresented actions of the Council to individuals and groups of the Faculty, and has, in general, nullified the efforts of the Council. . . . the Faculty Council has been rendered ineffectual as spokesman for the faculty.”

Vaughn Bornet, in his An Independent Scholar in the Twentieth Century, says that President Stevenson “ignored five of their [personnel] recommendations on individuals.” Vaughn suggests that Council members were also frustrated because they were excluded from all meaningful administrative actions-actions that were the province of deans and directors, to whom Elmo did listen. Elmo did not see Council members as part of his management team.

Jim Doerter recalls a meeting of Council (called by President Stevenson) a day after the resignations. Elmo came into the meeting room, visibly agitated, and told startled Council members that he had heard that they wanted to run the place. Then he strode out in high dudgeon, only to return ten minutes later and conduct the meeting as if his outburst had never happened.

As Kreisman says, “The Council was forthright in stating the reason for their resignation: They could no longer accept being ignored by the administration, which did not listen to their recommendations and took actions without their knowledge or consent. They felt useless and slighted.”

A Burning in Effigy

According to the April 15 (Friday) edition of the Ashland Daily Tiding there was “an air of tense excitement over Southern Oregon College campus today following the second straight night of effigy burning on the school grounds.” President Stevenson’s effigy was burned by students Wednesday night but the act was concealed by “college officials.” On Thusday night it was burned again.     

The Tidings account continues thus:

      "Last night’s incident sparked a clash between two student groups and was punctuated by outbreaks of fist fights and name-calling. Reports of the incident from college students were that a band of College athletes swooped down on the effigy burners, `attacking everyone who wore a beard.' The fracas lasted about 10 minutes, and was then broken up by College officials. No injuries were reported. The effigy burning and other turmoil on the normally placid college campus has been blamed on the `revolt of teachers at the school against the administration.'
                    
The previous week student activists had sent a letter to Chancellor Lieuallen complaining that the Administration was unresponsive to their concerns. The Chancellor had replied to the students’ letter, rebuking them, but when contacted by the press he stated that he needed to talk to Stevenson about the turmoil on campus. He had not heard about the effigy burning but was aware of the revolt of the Faculty Council and was concerned.

On the day of the Council’s resignation students circulated petitions backing the Council’s action. They collected about 200 signatures on their petitions.

Inmates and Asylums

Ed Roundtree, President of The Tidings, wrote an editorial defending Stevenson and singling out unnamed teachers in the English Department for raising foolish issues about heavy teaching loads, lack of money for library books, and lack of academic freedom. “Dr Stevenson, who has been in education 37 years . . .is not a man to let the inmates run the asylum,” said Roundtree.

The upshot of the revolt, according to Kreisman, was an “awakening of the Administration.” A Faculty Constitution, modeled on one at the University of Oregon and empowering a Faculty Senate, was drafted and subsequently approved by 82 percent of faculty and by the Administration.

The Mosser Teaching Awards

Art Kreisman recounts that in 1965 Rep. John Mosser convinced the Oregon Legislature to fund a bill which would reward some faculty for outstanding teaching of undergraduates at state institutions. Each teacher judged to be especially meritorious was to receive $1000. For nine months a faculty committee named by the Faculty Council and working with the Administration labored to create a “fair” questionnaire for students to respond to. At the end of the year results were tabulated. Awards were distributed to eleven faculty teachers, most of them teaching introductory sections. However, the process created such acrimony among the College’s Faculty that the awards were subsequently scrapped.

The Adamian Case

When Paul Adamian arrived at SOC in 1965 as an assistant professor of English, he seemed a positive addition to the Faculty. As Bob DeVoe remembers, “He was personally an attractive and vivacious man, obviously intelligent and socially adept.” Bob remembers a departmental picnic on the Applegate River where English greeted the department’s new “fair-haired” boy. Initially Bob was an Adamian supporter, admiring him for his principled refusal to sign the State’s mandated loyalty oath. (Any teacher in the state system not signing would not be paid a salary). Bob’s opinion of Adamian gradually changed as the turmoil surrounding him intensified and he was perceived as being a loose cannon--someone who thrived on confrontation and discord.

Initially, according to Hal Cloer, three faculty members refused to sign the oath, but apparently two reconsidered. Adamian did not, and when President Stevenson and Dean McGill pressured him to sign the oath, he resisted. Adamian also antagonized the Administration by his strident opposition to the teaching awards and by agreeing to serve as faculty advisor for a new student group, the Committee for Social Action.

Vaughn Bornet reports on one incident in Churchill Hall, when Elmo threatened Adamian. “’I’m going to punch you in the nose,’ he yelled.” However, Adamian was not easily cowed. According to a summary of events recorded for the archives at the University of Nevada, Reno, Adamian complained to the state chairman of the American Association of University Professors that his academic freedom was being abridged. This action led to a notice of termination from the Administration. Predictably, he appealed his firing to the AAUP. After considering his request, the AAUP forwarded his letter to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU recommended that the services of the ACLU of Oregon be made available to him, though he accepted a position as lecturer at the University of Nevada, Reno before a hearing could be held.

It is not surprising that events taking place forty years ago will not be remembered in the same way by everyone. There is divergence of opinion about the sequence of events and about motives for particular actions taken by Adamian, his supporters, and his antagonists.

Art Kreisman recalls that he had just returned from a sabbatical leave in January of 1966 and found “the Adamian mess in my Bailiwick.” Initially Art felt sympathy for the new assistant professor who had joined English, the department of which Art had been chairman before becoming Director of Humanities. Additionally, he felt that “the whole idea of a loyalty oath was wrong.” But he was not happy that Adamian had gone about “raising an outcry about being penalized for not signing” and faults Adamian for becoming extremely “contentious-even using his classes to preach his cause. . . .”

Art arranged a meeting between Stevenson and Adamian. At the meeting’s conclusion the President agreed to withdraw the letter of termination if Adamian would agree not to complain to “off-campus organizations such as ACLU and AAUP.” The two shook hands. According to Art, “A week later, Adamian violated the agreement by going to the ACLU again. Stevenson reinstated the dismissal, and I could only concur with him.”

Hal Cloer’s perspectives differ from Kreisman’s in several ways (These perspectives are most fully developed in Hal’s “A Work Biography for Richard Bolles,” which he wrote for a workshop on career development in 1975.). As a member of the ACLU, Hal was involved early on in providing advice to Adamian about how to proceed until the courts could decide on the constitutionality of the loyalty oath. Hal enlisted the help of six other faculty members who were sympathetic to Adamian or were ACLU members. This group called itself the “war council.” One of its specific duties was to keep the antagonism between Adamian and the Administration from boiling over into the public arena. And as Adamian felt he was being penalized (his pay was withheld and he was told he would be barred from campus) for acting on conscience, the “war council” advised him to be discrete in his behavior until legal issues were resolved. It also cautioned Stevenson and McGill to proceed prudently, since the oath was likely to be declared unconstitutional.

The “war council” took it upon itself to monitor Adamian’s professional conduct on campus. Hal maintains that the “war council” saw no evidence that Adamian’s behavior was unprofessional at any time. Indeed, the fact that his department and division heads recommended that he be retained and promoted strongly suggests that his job performance was excellent. Certainly the Administration’s refusal to accept the Faculty Council’s favorable review of Adamian helped precipitate the Council’s mass resignation.

Kreisman maintains that the AAUP and the ACLU were “happy to jump into the fray.” Cloer believes that the AAUP was only a marginal player in the campus drama, and that the ACLU acted principally behind the scenes (more about this in a few paragraphs).

An Illuminating Sidelight

Marginal player or not, the campus chapter of the AAUP (about 30 members) had resolved to assemble a committee to ascertain the facts about the “touchy” relationship between Adamian and the Administration. Larry Butler, local head of AAUP, had difficulty finding people to serve. When it became known that no one in the Social Sciences would serve, Vaughn Bornet said, “If nobody else will do it, I will.” Vaughn did not know Adamian personally, but thought he deserved a hearing. He was not aware that the “radical” Adamian was “despised” by Dean McGill and had lost the support of Kreisman.

Vaughn’s willingness to serve did not make him popular with the Administration, and in June he himself received a one-sentence letter of termination from President Stevenson. Vaughn does not speculate about whether his willingness to serve on a board of inquiry lay behind his dismissal, but it seems reasonable to assume that it was a contributing factor; his agreement to serve and the letter of termination were only a few days apart. Stevenson, who had appointed Vaughn as division head in 1963 and considered him a member of the administrative team, thought Vaughn guilty of betraying him and was enraged.

Most members of the faculty were unaware of Vaughn’s dismissal. He made no effort to have the news bruited about the campus, and it appears that few ever knew what had been done to him. Sixteen weeks passed before he finally took his grievance to the Chancellor’s office, emphatically testifying to the unfairness
of his firing. A short time later, for whatever reason, he received an abject apology from Stevenson saying that he had reconsidered his earlier letter of termination. “I see no ‘grounds’ nor reason to adhere to the provisions of my letter to you dated June 28, 1966. . . . I wish to ask your forgiveness for the emotional disturbances and disrupted relationships which have inconvenience and plagued you.”


Behind the Scenes

Many of us in the class of 1966 knew that Adamian had refused to sign the loyalty oath, that he had been terminated, and that the loyalty oath itself was found unconstitutional. But we did not know how the latter came about, nor exactly how the ACLU and AAUP were involved. The AAUP’s involvement seems to have ended when Adamian accepted a faculty position as lecturer in English at the University of Nevada, Reno. He had not yet finished his PhD, which explains why he was given a lower rank at Nevada than at SOC, where ABDs were regularly appointed as assistant professors.

Hal Cloer answers many questions about the how and why of events. As noted earlier, Adamian had approached Hal and asked if he would be willing to contact the ACLU of Oregon and see if the organization would help him keep his job--even though he had refused to sign the oath. Hal agreed to do so. Subsequently, ACLU of Oregon’s Board met and decided to take on the case. Hal, in turn, sought counsel from Eric Allen, editor of the Medford Mail Tribune. Allen suggested that he contact Ed Branchfield, an influential local attorney, as well as “head of the Republican-controlled legislature,” and leader of the previous year’s unsuccessful attempt to change the ‘oath’ by legislative action.

Hal tells us that in the 1950s he discovered that he an Allen seemed be the only ACLU members in the Rogue Valley. During his early years at SOC he himself was once labeled a subversive by a local religious radio station. President Stevenson, always sensitive to community feeling, cautioned Hal “that he might be causing difficulties for the college.”

His willingness to be a member of such a “controversial” group as the ACLU and provide assistance to people like Adamian stemmed from his knowledge of events at Stanford in the early 50s when he was a student there. He saw dramatic evidence of what damage could be inflicted on professors judged to be “be subversive” and persecuted by California’s version of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Hal characterizes the activities of such committees as “witch hunts.”

At any rate, Hal’s conversations with Allen and Branchfield resulted in the establishing of the “war council,’” as noted earlier. The council laid out a strategy in three parts: ”1) try to get the oath thrown out in the courts, 2) help Adamian keep his job during the testing in the courts, [and] 3) keep the college and state system of higher education from getting in trouble with the public over the issue.”

Early-on the seven member council concluded that its best chance for achieving success was to “keep the matter an ‘abstract issue’ rather than merely a ‘personal issue’ involving Adamian alone; as much as possible, Adamian’s role was to merely be a name of a faculty member which was being used to test the legality of the oath.”

The group had help from unlikely allies. Though the dean of faculty, the president, the chancellor’s office, and the attorney-general’s office were required to enforce the law mandating the oath, the chancellor’s office and the attorney believed the law to be a bad one. Thus they worked quietly and cooperatively behind the scenes “in an effort to keep it from becoming a public issue” while the legality of the oath was determined in the courts. Ed Branchfield believed that “in light of recent U. S. Supreme Court rulings . . . the oath would not withstand a testing in the courts.”

The chancellor’s office and the attorney general’s office apparently cooperated much more fully than President Stevenson and Dean McGill. Hal states that the two latter were unsophisticated about the weakness of the State’s position, thus were “always endangering the course of events through bald threats and warnings directly to Adamian. We would then have to work to keep matters on an impersonal level and re-impress on McGill and Stevenson that they had no case and it was only a matter of time until this would be established-and that it was up to them to be cooperative and helpful (e.g., not, as they had threatened, to bar Adamian from the campus).”

The attorney-general finally pushed for an expedited hearing. The hearing was closed, and heard in a Eugene court. The oath was quietly declared unconstitutional. In a sense, the issue ended with a whimper rather than a bang. Hal takes satisfaction in how the case was resolved: “I feel that our success in getting the law struck down without the public even knowing it was being tested over a period of several months, our success in seeing that Adamian’s job was not lost in the process (and his back pay came through as anticipated), etc., was largely due to my efforts and foresight.”

Afterword

As Kreisman stated, Stevenson fired Adamian a second time, and he took a job at the University of Nevada Reno. His continued activism resulted in his termination by the board of Regents after three years at the University, though his colleagues at Nevada voted to promote him and give him tenure. He appealed the termination, and was once re-instated to his position by a Federal District judge. However, the judge’s decision was reversed by the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Forty years after the fact, questions about the Adamian Case still linger. Was Adamian an ardent believer in social justice and a principled disciple of Thoreau for refusing to accept the authority of an unjust law? Was he a victim of administrative arrogance and heavy-handedness, or was he responsible for bringing trouble upon himself by heedless activism and confrontation? More pointedly, did he deserve the treatment he received at SOC? To one outsider who came a few months after Adamian left, the evidence suggests that he was more sinned against than sinner.

Further, did his dismissal from UNR by the Regents lead some faculty at SOC to revise their perceptions about him and conclude that his firing here must have been deserved (after all, his activism led to his termination from two schools)? Finally, was the blighting of his academic career in some measure tragic? Hal Cloer, for one, believes it was.

Brad Lucas, a professor of English at UNR, explores the significance of Nevada’s “Adamian Case” in a web essay written for the Center for Holocaust, Genocide, and Peace Studies. In a generally sympathetic treatment of Adamian, Lucas’ conclusions about the historical and personal sources of Adamian’s activism are especially interesting. Lucas is currently writing a book about what led to the President’s Day disruptions of May, 1970 at UNR, in the aftermath of the Kent State killings. Adamian played a significant, and disruptive, role on that fateful day. Lucas’ essay can be viewed at www.unr.edu/chgps/govday.html

Sources

“Lack of Teacher Voice.” The Ashland Daily Tidings. 14 Apr. 1966.

“Teacher Revolt Rocks SOC Campus.” The Ashland Daily Tidings. 14 Apr. 1966. p. 1.

“SOC Campus Tense As President’s effigy Burned. The Ashland Daily Tidings. 15 April, 1966. p. 1.

“The Pied Pipers of SOC.” Editorial by Edd Roundtree. The Ashland Daily Tidings. April 16, 1966.

Bornet, Vaughn Davis. An Independent Scholar in the Twentieth Century. Talent Oregon. Bornet Books. 1995.

Cloer, Hal. “The End of the “College of Education Era.’”, May 10, 1998.

________. “A ‘Work Biography’ written for Richard Bolles’ Workshop on Career Development.” August, 1975.

Doerter, James. Telephone conversations, May 2005 and April 2006.

DeVoe, Robert. “E-mail to Jim Dean, April 3, 2006, entitled ‘1965.’”

Kreisman, Arthur. Remembering: A History of Southern Oregon University. Eugene, Oregon. University of Oregon Press. 2002.

Lucas, Brad. Untitled Essay on the Web Site for the Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Peace Studies, University of Nevada, Reno. No date.

University of Nevada, Reno Libraries. “University Archives. Paul S. Adamian: Papers, 1965-1979. AC 403.”

I am especially indebted to Hal Cloer for guiding me through the sequence of events and clarifying issues, particularly those relating to Adamian. To Jim Doerter I owe thanks for telling amusing and dramatic stories about a fateful year and encouraging me to write this article. I benefited greatly from Vaughn Bornet’s questions, clarifications, and careful reading of a draft of this text. Bob DeVoe helped me understand Adamian on a more human level and nicely provided me a sense of the tenor of the times.