Harry K. Wolfe, Academic Freedom, and the 1918 Nebraska Professors TrialBy David Moshman, Professor Emeritus of Educational Psychology
Harry Kirke Wolfe (1858-1918), who brought psychology to Nebraska, died a century ago on July 30, 1918, weeks after being subjected, along with others, to an extraordinary trial before the University of Nebraska Board of Regents. They were charged, essentially, with sedition.
After receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of Nebraska in 1880, Wolfe earned a doctorate at the University of Leipzig in Germany under the direction of Wilhelm Wundt, the most important figure in the emergence of psychology during the 1870s as a scientific discipline distinct from philosophy. Wolfe brought the new scientific psychology back to the University of Nebraska, where he became chair of philosophy in 1889. He was actually the only philosopher, and he regarded himself as a psychologist. Because of his strong advocacy for psychology, the Department of Psychology considers Wolfe its founder, despite the fact that his dream of an independent department did not come to fruition until after his death.
In 1895, Wolfe was instrumental in attracting George Washington Andrew Luckey, an expert in child study, to come to Nebraska to found the new Department of Pedagogy. This led to the founding of the Teachers College (now the College of Education and Human Sciences) in 1908, including a department of educational psychology founded and headed briefly by Wolfe before he returned to the department of philosophy in 1909.
An early proponent of active learning, critical analysis, and lifelong inquiry, Wolfe encouraged his students, all undergraduates, to form and justify their own ideas. He founded and maintained one of the first psychological laboratories in the United States and actively encouraged student research. He also highlighted the relevance of the new science of psychology to issues of education and human welfare. Many of his students, including a number of women, went on to earn doctorates and make major contributions to psychology and education.
In 1917, after the United States declared war on Germany, popular and political pressure was brought to bear on the University of Nebraska, as on universities across the country, to ensure that its professors were sufficiently patriotic and its curriculum sufficiently attuned to the war effort. On May 28, 1918, the Regents initiated a public hearing in the Law building to consider charges of “hesitating, halting, and negative support of the government” against more than a dozen professors, including Wolfe and Luckey, whose loyalty was suspect or whose courses were not sufficiently anti-German in ideology.
The hearings lasted two weeks and generated intense publicity. One by one, before a panel of Regents and a large crowd of Nebraska citizens, the professors faced hostile questions about their patriotism and their teaching. Newspapers across the state called for the University to “clean its house.” The Governor concurred. Chancellor Samuel Avery acknowledged problems with Professor Luckey’s “attitude.” The American Association of University Professors, newly founded in 1915, concluded that academic freedom did not protect the teaching of ideas that might undermine the war effort.
On June 18, the Regents announced their decisions. Three professors, including Luckey, were asked to resign. Wolfe was not, but was now publicly known as a teacher whose classes undermined the patriotic values of Nebraska youth. Disgraced and humiliated, he died unexpectedly, apparently of a heart attack, six weeks after the verdicts.
A century later, questions of free speech and academic freedom in times of political polarization remain as relevant as ever right here at UNL, and far beyond. Psychologists must remain free to seek the truth, disseminate their scientific findings, and discuss the individual and societal implications of these findings. Exposing the threats that politicization poses to academic freedom, in fall 2017, in cooperation with the Academic Freedom Coalition of Nebraska, the Angels Theatre Company presented a series of readings in Lincoln and Omaha of David Wiltse’s play Sedition, which is based on the University of Nebraska professors trial.
In Wolfe’s last published article, which appeared the month of his death, he addressed the relation of education and individuality. “Society,” he wrote, “should now be strong enough to do justice to the individual and not seek to crucify or to dwarf him. Too much obedience may ruin character, may dwarf the intellect, may paralyze the will of children and of adults.”