Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK (University of Illinois Press, 2021)

Describe the focus of your book. 

The book is a historical case study about explosive ideas and the struggle to spark, spread, contain, or extinguish them on college campuses. The setting is the University of Illinois in the early 1960s: a traditionally conservative Midwestern campus in an era of idealism over civil rights and fear over nuclear annihilation. The protagonists are two Illinois professors: Leo Koch, a biology teacher and humanist who was fired after writing a letter to the editor that condoned premarital sex; and Revilo Oliver, a classics teacher and white supremacist who was not fired after writing an article that accused the recently assassinated President Kennedy of being a loathsome traitor. The book tries to cast fresh light on the meaning of academic freedom, the early 1960s, and the continuing debates over free speech on college campuses.

How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?

I’ve long been interested in how the news media have historically covered controversial subjects related to higher education. That interest comes from working in journalism and teaching at state universities. I found that premarital sex was a hot news topic in the early 1960s; everyone from Margaret Mead to Gloria Steinem was writing about it. That in turn alerted me to Leo Koch, who made news during that time period for what then seemed like far-out views on sex. After he was fired, the University of Illinois strengthened its academic freedom protections, and one of the beneficiaries was Revilo Oliver. I was reluctant at first to write about Oliver given that he was a racist and anti-Semite. But I decided that addressing the Koch and Oliver cases together would make for a stronger book with broader relevance to what we’re going through these days.

What archives or research materials did you use? 

The University of Illinois Archives was a great resource, as were the Leo Koch papers at the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison. I also drew from the Chicago History Museum Research Center and the Champaign County Historical Archives in Illinois. I’ve found Newspapers.com very useful for historical research, though it isn’t cheap. Of course, there’s also ProQuest Historical Newspapers, which can be accessed through many university libraries.

How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?

Freedom of expression always has been central to journalism history. The early 1960s was a key moment in the battle over free expression, as the time of McCarthyism and the “silent generation” was giving way to a time of youthful questioning and dissent that would culminate in open student revolt by the end of the decade. The book places the Koch and Oliver cases in the context of the culture wars of the era and shows how the cases continue to resonate in today’s polarized political climate. The book also highlights the continuing importance of student news media in promoting the open exchange of ideas. (Roger Ebert worked at the Daily Illini student paper during the early ‘60s and was quite vocal about free speech.)

What advice do you have for other historians that are working on or starting book projects?

I was originally trained as a journalist rather than as a historian, so my advice comes from that background. Try to tell a good story with compelling characters. Avoid presentism, but remember that history always speaks to the present. In particular, history offers useful perspective. It reminds us that we don’t live in uniquely awful times and that nostalgia for an allegedly lost golden age never gets us very far. And it also reminds us that although notions of continual human progress are suspect, at certain moments in the past, we have demonstrated the capacity for working toward just ends and improving our common lot.