The Danger of Silence When Academic Freedom Is Under Threat
Dominique J. Baker | 10 March 2026 | Inside Higher Ed
Before Clark Kerr was president of the University of California from 1958 to 1967, he was a faculty member working on a committee to evaluate colleagues who had refused to sign California’s new loyalty oath, which included, among other points, an explicit disavowal of membership in the Communist Party. In the wake of his death in 2003, The Daily Bruin reported that even though Kerr had signed the loyalty oath, he “also disagreed with the idea and rallied faculty against the regents’ policy.” This is a generous interpretation, given that Kerr himself in volume two of his memoir makes clear that he despised Communism—“I was totally opposed to communism”—and only “rallied” for a subset of the faculty who offered proof to his committee that they were not members of the Communist Party…