When Historical Analogies Go Bad

April 17, 3:59 PM

by Mark Newgent, Baltimore History Examiner

Last month William Brody announced he would retire from his position as President of The Johns Hopkins University. Brody has overseen and guided the university through probably its most successful era. The university receives $1.2 billion in federal research funds (the largest of any university). Johns Hopkins is a world renowned institution and Brody should be commended for his grand achievements. However, he has also left a more disturbing legacy at Johns Hopkins. A disturbing legacy in an area more important than research or grant funding: free speech.

Many remember Justin Park and the “Halloween in the Hood” incident back in 2006. Park a junior at Hopkins posted crude announcements on his own private Facebook page advertising a party his fraternity was hosting. Park’s crude and tasteless humor angered many on campus and the community. The heavy hand of Hopkins slammed down on Park with such a fury that he must have felt like Rubashov from Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. The university’s sanctions were downright creepy. Initially, Park faced a one-year suspension from school, 300 hours of community service mandatory diversity training (reeducation), in which he had to read 12 books and write papers (with predetermined conclusions) based on them. The punishment was so harsh that Park appealed the decision and after some bad press for the university they agreed to an undisclosed settlement.

In the wake of the incident, Brody implemented a vague policy of enforced civility and penned a JHU Gazette article stating that only “serious and substantive” speech would be tolerated, and defined “civility” as whatever he determines it to be. As The Foundation for Individual Rights In Education (FIRE) noted in awarding Johns Hopkins its 2007 Censor of the Year Award, “Brody here clarified that parody, satire, funny anecdotes, crude language, and any other speech that college students, like most members of society, regularly enjoy will not be considered protected speech at Hopkins.”

Indeed this was the case even before the Park incident when the university refused to investigate the theft of copies of a conservative student magazine, The Carrollton Record (TCR). In fact, Brody’s administration banned the distribution of TCR on campus and initiated an investigation into TCR because it had the temerity to criticize the Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance for hosting an event featuring, among other things, an adult film producer. Under pressure from FIRE and state senator Alex Mooney, Brody dropped the investigation into TCR but never acknowledged the stolen copies. Note that diversity of opinion and thought are not protected under Brody’s civility policy. Speech he disagrees with is fair game for censorship. Under this logic, diversity is a community where everyone looks different but thinks the same.

In his JHU Gazette article/directive Brody made an analogy to former Hopkins instructor and head of the Maryland branch of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), Albert E. Blumberg. Brody was correct that Hopkins had barred Blumberg from speaking on campus 1940. However, there is much more to Blumberg than Brody tells us and a better understanding Blumberg reveals that his analogy has a very different meaning than he thinks.

In 1940 the administration understandably, nixed Blumberg's speech to avoid scrutiny from HUAC, which was investigating the Party because of its anti-Roosevelt stance and public support for the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Blumberg was no ordinary communist, he was an unapologetic Stalinist dedicated to overthrowing the American constitutional order (including freedom of speech) and replacing it with Soviet-style totalitarianism. CPUSA meeting minutes reveal that he openly championed the purges of the Great Terror, where the real Rubahsov’s were imprisoned, forced into false confessions, show trials, sent to the GULAG for reeducation, or merely shot in the back of the neck. Around that same time Blumberg castigated a timid young communist because he was not ready to take up a rifle and fight on the streets of Baltimore to use, “force and to expend blood to make major social change.” Hopkins’ obstruction of Blumberg's speech was an understandable expedient given the political climate prior the America's entry into World War II, however, the action was constitutionally abhorrent. Blumberg should have been allowed to speak, no matter how objectionable his views.

I don’t mean to make Justin Park a martyr, he most certainly is not. However, 66 years after Johns Hopkins banned him, William Brody codified into official university policy, some of the totalitarian facets of Blumberg’s reprehensible ideology.

Topics: Johns Hopkins , free speech , Albert Blumberg

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