For Freedom of Expression, For Due Process, and For Yale: The Emerging Threat to Academic Freedom at a Great University

PDF icon cabranes.produced.web_.pdf

We have good news and bad news today. The good news is that we are printing in hard copy the Woodward Report on Freedom of Expression at Yale. The bad news is that we need to reprint the Woodward Report. We are dealing today with interrelated developments at Yale that threaten freedom of expression and the institutions that protect it, including faculty due process rights, sometimes described as academic tenure. Many writers on this subject understandably focus on the fate of students. But it is important to recognize that today’s developments are also redefining the rights of faculty—and the role of faculty in the governance of this University. These are developments that, if not addressed, ultimately threaten Yale’s place among the great universities of the world.

This is a lightly edited version of the remarks of José A. Cabranes, United States Circuit Judge for the Second Circuit, at the reception of the William F. Buckley Program at Yale to celebrate the republication in print of the Woodward Report on Freedom of Expression at Yale (1975). The reception took place at The Study at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut on October 1, 2016. This Essay was first published online at 35 Yale L. & Pol’y Rev. Inter Alia 23 (2017), http://ylpr.yale.edu/inter_alia/freedom-expression-due-process-and-yale-… freedom-great-university [http://perma.cc/E5K9-UFLD]. Judge Cabranes was Yale’s first General Counsel when he was appointed to the federal bench in 1979, having served as legal adviser to Presidents Kingman Brewster, Hanna Holborn Gray, and A. Bartlett Giamatti. He later served as a Successor Trustee (Fellow) of the Yale Corporation for the maximum of twelve years (1987–1999) in the presidencies of Benno C. Schmidt, Jr. and Richard C. Levin, serving as Chair of several Corporation committees, including the Committee on Institutional Policies. He has written broadly on university governance, including the lecture published as Myth and Reality of University Governance in the Post-Enron Era, 76 Fordham L. Rev. 955 (2007). He was sponsored for appointments to the federal bench by Senators Abraham Ribicoff and, later, Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. Before his judicial service he was Chair of two leading organizations of the Hispanic community, Aspira of New York and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (now LatinoJustice), of which he was a founding member.