EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

DATE: 4 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 13, 2011.

EVENT: Ellen W. Schrecker, a history professor at Yeshiva University, will give the 2011 University of Michigan Senate’s Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom.

The lecture—”The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University”—is free and open to the public.

The lecture is named for three faculty members—Chandler Davis, Clement Markert and Mark Nickerson—who in 1954 were called to testify before a Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities. All invoked constitutional rights and refused to answer questions about their political associations. All three were suspended from the University. Markert was subsequently reinstated and Davis and Nickerson were dismissed.

Schrecker’s talk analyzes the roots of academia’s current predicament, which stem from two different, but related, phenomena. One is a political campaign against the academic profession that began as a backlash against the 1960s. The other element is the ongoing financial crisis that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s and that produced major structural changes within the academic community.

The talk is based on her book, “The Lost Soul of Higher Education.” She has written extensively on McCarthyism and academic freedom, and among her other publications are “Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America” and “No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities.”

PLACE: Honigman Auditorium, 100 Hutchins Hall, U-M Law School. Central Campus map: http://www.umich.edu/~info/mapsAndDirections.html#anchor_centralCampus

SPONSORS: The Academic Freedom Lecture Fund, American Association of University Professors University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Chapter and Michigan Conference, University of Michigan: Office of the President, Office of the Provost, Office of the Vice President for Communications, Law School, College of Literature, Science and the Arts: Humanities, History Department, the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs and an anonymous donor.