MEIKLEJOHN, ALEXANDER (1872–1964)

The youngest of eight sons, Alexander Meiklejohn (1872–1964) was born in Rochdale, England, of Scottish parents. His family moved to Rhode Island when he was eight, and he later attended nearby Brown University where he earned his baccalaureate and master's degrees in philosophy. He followed his graduate adviser and close friend James Seth to Cornell University to pursue his doctorate. A few years later, Meiklejohn married his first wife, Nannine, and they began a family.

Upon receiving his doctorate, Meiklejohn returned to Brown as an assistant professor of logic and metaphysics. He attained the rank of professor after nine years, having earned the respect of his colleagues and the admiration of his students. In 1901 Meiklejohn was named dean at Brown (his title was later changed to dean of undergraduates). His most distinctive act as dean was to disqualify Brown's championship baseball team over questions of sportsmanship and honesty. Brown's trustees supported this action and the students accepted it, but the alumni were outraged.

Even as he was establishing himself at his alma mater, Amherst College sought Meiklejohn as a new president who could bring energy and innovation to a college facing declining admissions and sagging academic standards. Inaugurated as president of Amherst in October 1912, Meiklejohn quickly set to work to institute his educational ideals. Almost as quickly, his policies created enemies among the faculty, trustees, and alumni. He opposed the newly popular elective system, believing that students could better understand human culture and the natural world if they were not educated in narrowly specialized classes. He proposed a variety of options for a required curriculum, none of which the faculty accepted.

Turning his attention to other passions, Meiklejohn set up college extension classes in local mills and factories where students taught and interacted with laborers. He hired many new faculty members, terminated many older professors, and chose to ignore those whose tenure was beyond challenge. He irritated additional alumni by refusing to emphasize athletics and by maintaining the tradition of part-time basketball and football coaches. Even within the local community, Meiklejohn was unpopular: Neither he nor his wife were active in the predominant Congregationalist church, and she wrote children's books, traveled to Europe alone, and smoked cigarettes. Meiklejohn himself was known as a socialist, although he never affiliated himself with the Socialist Party. His outspoken opposition to the World War I eroded further the base of supporters of his presidency at Amherst. Nevertheless, he persevered.

By 1923 Meiklejohn was accused by his enemies of financial mismanagement, and the board of trustees asked for his resignation. In protest, twelve graduating seniors refused their diplomas, and eight faculty members resigned their positions. Though he resigned from Amherst, Meiklejohn capitalized on the media controversy surrounding his departure. He toured the country and delivered speeches to promote his first two books: The Liberal College, published in 1920, and Freedom and the College released in 1923.

President Glenn Frank offered Meiklejohn a professorship at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, but struggling with the death of his wife Nannine, he refused the appointment. The next year, however, Frank asked Meiklejohn to create an experimental college within the university, for which he would be given free reign to institute many of the reforms that he had advocated at Amherst and in his books and speeches. Meiklejohn took the post in March, 1926.

The Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin opened in 1927 with an incoming class of 119 men, who signed up for the two-year prescribed program of study. During the first year, students studied Athens in the fifth century b.c.e.; in their second year they traced the history of America through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Between academic years, students were expected to write an anthropological report on the region where they grew up. Faculty members (called advisers to defuse traditional expectations) met with students throughout each week in full-class meetings, but also held regular sessions with subgroups of twelve and engaged in many personal discussions with students.

External opposition to the program mounted quickly. University faculty criticized its independent governance and eclectic curriculum, and newspaper editorials and press reports lambasted its egalitarian pedagogy and Meiklejohn's arrogant style. Responding to these threats and to the economic problems of the Great Depression, the university administration proposed significant changes in the Experimental College in the 1930–1931 academic year. Standardized testing was to be introduced, and curriculum modifications made. Meiklejohn and the faculty refused to comply, and the university senate and administration closed the program in the spring of 1932. The short-lived experiment, however, gave birth to a long-lived legacy: Over the next half-century, the Experimental College inspired scores of innovative undergraduate programs across the United States.

Following the closure of his college, Meiklejohn and his second wife, Helen, moved to Berkeley, California, where they helped found the San Francisco School for Social Studies. The school was open and free to all applicants–from traditional students to housewives, laborers, and retired persons. Beginning with the first class of 300 students in 1934, readings and discussions centered on classical social thinkers and contemporary social problems. By 1942, when the school closed due to economic pressures from World War II, more than 1,700 students were enrolling each year. Meiklejohn pursued his interests in constitutional rights to free speech, protesting against the permanent installation of the House Un-American Affairs Committee and loyalty oaths. He published Free Speech and its Relation to Self Government in 1948, and received honors from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Socialist League for Industrial Democracy. He served as vice president of the league for almost forty years. Alexander Meiklejohn died at the age of ninety-two.

Alexander Meiklejohn's influence is still felt in higher education. Scott Buchanan and Stringfellow Barr rebuilt St. John's College based on Meiklejohn's Experimental College in Wisconsin and Robert M. Hutchins' reforms at the University of Chicago. In Meiklejohn's later years, he was a "sympathetic observer" and senior guide for Joseph Tussman and others who founded the Experimental College at the University of California, Berkeley. Tussman described himself in those years as a "direct spiritual descendent" of Alexander Meiklejohn.

See also: Higher Education in the United States, subentry on Historical Development; Liberal Arts Colleges.

bibliography

Brown, Cynthia Stokes. 1981. Alexander Meiklejohn: Teacher of Freedom. Berkeley, CA: Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute.

Tussman, Joseph. 1969. Experiment at Berkeley. New York: Oxford University Press.

L. Jackson Newell

Padraic Macleish

First Amendment Speech Tests All judicial line‐drawing between individual and societal rights and obligations involves a degree of “balancing” (See First Amendment Balancing). But, subsumed under the general notion of balancing, a number of tests have surfaced. These tests were not really articulated by the Supreme Court until the end of World War I; very little litigation on the free‐speech front reached the high tribunal until then. Not counting “balancing” as a specific test per se, a handful of speech tests may be identified. In roughly chronological order, they are (1) the “clear and present danger” test, (2) the “bad tendency” test, (3) the “public versus private speech” test, and (4) the “clear and present danger plus imminence” test—with the last now widely recognized as the controlling Court doctrine.

Authorship of the clear and present danger doctrine belongs to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, with an assist from Judge Learned Hand and active support from Justice Louis D. Brandeis. Initially developed by Holmes in Schenck v. United States (1919), the case grew out of activities engaged in by Schenck and some colleagues that were designed to hamper the government's wartime effort. Convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917, Schenck appealed on First Amendment freedom‐of‐speech grounds. Speaking for a unanimous Court, Holmes pointed out that in ordinary times the defendants' activities would have been constitutionally protected, but that the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. Holmes added, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. … The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent” (p. 52).

But six years later, in Gitlow v. New York (1925), the new doctrine was modified by adopting a “kill the serpent in the egg” approach, which came to be known as the bad tendency test. The New York State Criminal Anarchy Act of 1902 prohibited numerous subversive activities, including the “advocacy, advising, or teaching” of the overthrow of New York's government. Gitlow published and distributed a pamphlet entitled Left Wing Manifesto and was convicted for violation of the statute. With Holmes and Brandeis in bitter dissent, Justice Edward T. Sanford, for the Court, contended that the danger from the utterances at issue could not reasonably be required to be measured in “the nice balance of a jeweler's scale,” that a “single revolutionary spark may kindle a fire,” and that the state may thus “suppress the threatened danger in its incipiency” (p. 669).

In Dennis v. United States (1951), eleven top members of the Communist party had been tried and convicted under the Smith Act of 1940 by a lower federal court. Although he claimed to be utilizing the clear and present danger test, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, in upholding the conviction, adapted the formula to ascertain “whether the gravity of the ‘evil’ discounted by its improbability” would justify governments limits on speech (p. 510). This leaned more toward the bad tendency test and provoked passionate dissents by Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas.

The “public versus private speech” test was prominently articulated by the philosopher and educator Alexander Meiklejohn in the second quarter of the twentieth century. To Meiklejohn, “public” speech comprises any expression concerning public policy and/or public officials and is entitled to absolute protection in the interests of a self‐governing, free, democratic society, based on the First Amendment and the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. An example would be the advocacy of a violent change of our form of government. “Private” speech, on the other hand, pertains to speech that concerns only private individuals in their personal, private concerns, and it can accordingly be regulated or restricted, but only under the due process of law safeguards of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Perhaps surprisingly, one of Meiklejohn's examples is the realm of the visual arts.

Fourth is the clear and present danger plus imminence test. Suggested as early as 1927 by Brandeis and Holmes in the former's concurring opinion in Whitney v. California, it became Court doctrine some four decades later in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). In it, the Court made clear that mere abstract advocacy of the use of force or of law violation was no longer legally or constitutionally punishable “except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action” (p. 444).

See also Speech and the Press.

Bibliography

Alexander Meiklejohn , Free Speech and Its Relation to Self‐Government (1948).

Henry J. Abraham

Alexander Meiklejohn , 1872–1964, American educator, b. Rochdale, England, grad. Brown Univ., 1893, Ph.D. Cornell, 1897. He taught philosophy at Brown (1897–1912), serving as dean after 1901 and, after 1906, as professor of logic. From 1912 to 1924 he was president of Amherst College. Meikeljohn was professor of philosophy at the Univ. of Wisconsin from 1926 to 1938 and was chairman of the Experimental College for the five years of its existence (1927–32). This experiment, in which a period of Greek civilization was studied intensively, inspired similar programs in other colleges, e.g., St. John's College. From 1933 to 1936 he taught at the Social Studies Center in San Francisco. Meiklejohn's educational theories are set forth in The Liberal College (1920), Freedom and the College (1923), and The Experimental College (1932). He also wrote What Does America Mean? (1935), Education between Two Worlds (1942), Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Government (1948), and Political Freedom (1960, repr. 1965).

Meiklejohn, Alexander (1872–1964),born in England, was brought to the U.S. as a child, and after graduation from Brown (1893) became a professor of philosophy there (1897–1912). He was president of Amherst College (1912–24). His progressive ideas of education were carried out when he headed the Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin (1926–38) and further practiced in the School for Social Studies, an adult education institution founded in San Francisco in 1933. His books include The Liberal College (1920), Freedom and the College (1923), The Experimental College (1932), What Does America Mean? (1935), Education Between Two Worlds (1942), Free Speech and Its Relation to Self‐Government (1948), and Education for a Free Society (1957).