The uproar started just a year ago.
Once again, the U.S. seemed to be escalating the war in Viet Nam—this time with an armored foray into Laos —and once again U.S. university campuses were up in arms. Stanford saw a fire-bombing and many smashed windows. Radical students decided to protest further by seizing the university's $5 million Computation Center. Angry students mobilized in White Plaza and found the center's doors all locked.
While the students milled about, a professor named H. Bruce Franklin harangued them on their duties: "So now what we're asking is for people to make that tiny little gesture to ... shut down the most obvious machinery of war, such as that Computation Center.'"
Shortly thereafter, the crowd broke into the building, took control and cut off the power to the computers. Officials countered by summoning the police. It was not an epic battle, but it was enough to convince Stanford President Richard Lyman that he had to deal with the question of H. Bruce Franklin, associate professor of English, recognized expert on Melville, and self-proclaimed Maoist. Only a month earlier, Franklin had joined a band of students in heckling Henry Cabot Lodge, former U.S. ambassador to Saigon, with cries of "oink-oink." When Lyman complained that Franklin's behavior was inappropriate, Franklin agreed, adding: "The appropriate response to war criminals is [that] they should be locked up or executed." Lyman now proposed that Franklin be fired on four charges of disrupting the university by incitements to violence.
Franklin, 37, a short, wiry figure who likes to appear in battered khaki Army shirts, had come to this crisis by a circuitous route. Son of a small stockbroker in New York, he was the first member of his family to go to college (Amherst), and there was no radicalism then. In the late '50s he even served as an intelligence officer for the Strategic Air Command. It was only in 1965, when he was already well established in Stanford's English department, that he began to turn into a "revolutionary," which he defined as "someone who believes that the rich people who run the country ought to be overthrown and that the poor and working people ought to run the country. Simple, isn't it?"
Franklin, claiming his rights of free speech, demanded a full hearing on his case. As a tenured professor (on the Stanford faculty since 1961), he had the support of many teachers who disagreed with both his views and his vehemence. To academics, tenure after several years of service is almost sacred; it represents job security, the freedom to speak and write without fear of reprisal.