Marxmanship at Illinois

His colleagues say of Revilo P. Oliver, professor of classics at the University of Illinois, that "his first name is his last name spelled backward because he doesn't know if he's coming or going."* A competent Latin and Greek scholar, Oliver is a national officer of the John Birch Society. In recent issues of American Opinion, the Birch magazine, he published, under the title "Marxmanship in Dallas," the most elaborate version yet of the diehard "plot" theory of the Kennedy assassination. The Communists executed the President, says Oliver, intending to blame ultrarightists and trigger "a domestic takeover." Not that Oliver misses Kennedy: as long as there are Americans, he writes, Kennedy's "memory will be cherished with distaste."

From shocked citizens across the country, the University of Illinois got a "massive public reaction" denouncing Oliver. That confronted President David D. Henry with a prickly case of academic freedom. Illinois is currently on the censure list of the American Association of University Professors as the result of the 1960 ouster of Biologist Leo Koch, who wrote a letter to the campus newspaper backing premarital sex among students. After a storm of public protest, Henry requested Koch's dean in a letter to relieve the biologist "immediately" of his duties, then had the letter publicized in the press. Henry thus acted without filing formal charges or consulting his trustees, as prescribed by the university's own statutes. While not siding with Biologist Koch's views, A.A.U.P. decided that he had a right to express them and had been fired without a fair hearing. Censure was imposed to prod Illinois into strengthening its guarantees of due process. How would Henry handle Revilo P. Oliver?

This time Henry cautiously turned for advice to the faculty senate, got back a strong statement from its committee on academic freedom backing every professor's right to be "as ungloriously wrong, and suffer the professional consequences thereof, as to be gloriously right, and receive the acclaim of his colleagues therefor." When the "privilege" of academic freedom is abused, said the committee without mentioning Oliver, "it must be recognized that the larger gain is in the brighter image of the university" presented to the scholarly world, as an institution "dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and learning, and one willing to pay the price for strict adherence to this idea."

Endorsing the faculty report, President Henry last week put the case to the Illinois board of trustees, got an overwhelming vote in favor of keeping Oliver. The university is rewriting its academic freedom statutes, and between this and its handling of the Oliver case, hopes to get off the A.A.U.P. censure list by 1965.

*His great-grandparents named their son Revilo Oliver to make a palindrome--a phrase that reads the same backward or forward. Oliver is his family's third consecutive Revilo.

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