The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis

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The challenges Chandler Davis faced in the 1950s have returned with a vengeance in the form of red state governors and legislators seeking to police what is taught and thought in universities and to punish those teachers whose ideas are at variance with a reactionary political agenda. We are now experiencing what many are calling a new McCarthyism....through extensive archival research, this mathematician has produced a compelling historical narrative that offers important insight into the actions and motives of the principal players...

It’s a tribute to Steve Batterson’s book that we can raise these questions about the politics of jurisprudence and the vagaries and contingencies of the law. His detailed inquiry in The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis provides the historical insight that I associate with the best accounts of this kind: motives are complex, power a critical variable, timing an unpredictable factor, and rational argument not necessarily a winning strategy. This is a case study with resonance well beyond the specificities of the case. It is an important and worthwhile read.

" ~Joan Scott, author of Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom

"Carefully done...and good reading as well." ~Stephen Smale, UC-Berkeley mathematician, Fields Medalist (Nobel Prize for Mathematics)

"At a moment when conservative forces are once more taking a sledgehammer to academic freedom, Steve Batterson tells the story of the intrepid and far-sighted H. Chandler Davis as it needs to be told. Calmly unpicking the tenacious fallacies used to rationalize the anticommunist purge of the 1950s, he provides a deeply researched and compulsively readable biography that is note-perfect for our time and full of surprising historical details." ~Alan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan, and author of American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War

"Steve Batterson's compelling biography of Chandler Davis reveals a true American hero. His book, relying on primary sources, including intimate interviews, reveals the other side of the shameful McCarthy period, as a progressive thinker stood for his First Amendment rights, refusing to take the Fifth, and was punished for it. Chandler Davis' coolness under fire and his exemplary life, unmarred by bitterness and full of hope and grace, is a revelation for us all." ~Juan Cole, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan

"…furnishes ample proof that professional historians do not have the market cornered on rigorous historical method…a landmark of historical (and institutional and legal) scholarship, as well as a fitting tribute to the author’s late friend…provides essential reading in our own perilous times, when “academic freedom” does indeed seem “mythical”" ~Jonathan Scott Perry, The Historian