Dear Ms. Evans,

I read your recent article entitled "Academic freedom and the university" that appeared in the most recent issue of Aurora. I was with you until page 8 when you used the Project Chariot incident as an example of a failure of academic freedom. Based on the definitions of Dr. Bult-Ito and Provost Henrichs that you provided in your article, I'm not sure it was.

Two words seem to be missing in the provost's caveat: legal and proprietary. I wouldn't think that academic freedom would allow a faculty member to knowingly divulge information that was proprietary or obtained and used illegally. The Atomic Energy Commission contracted with the University of Alaska to conduct bio-environmental studies of Ogotoruk Creek. As the sponsor the AEC owned all intellectual property and retained the right to approve all written or oral disseminations of the information before they occurred. When Bill Pruitt and Les Viereck joined the
U of A's field research team they were obliged to fulfill the letter of the contract.

When they believed their information was being misused by the AEC they tried to solve the problem with the U of A, but also began to go public with their concerns. Les Viereck resigned on principle; he wasn't fired. Bill Pruitt produced a final report that contained recommendations that were beyond the scope of his work and refused the editorial suggestions of Brina Kessel. His contract was not renewed.

After losing his position Bill Pruitt filed a grievance with the American Association of University Professors. After reviewing the facts the AAUP committee judged that the U of A acted properly to modify Bill Pruitt's work. AAUP's judgement doesn't seem to support Dr. Chapin's statement that this was "the most flagrant disregard of academic freedom" at U of A.

How do you account for this significant disparity in judgments concerning the same issue? Perhaps it is because life, and incidents such as those surrounding Project Chariot, are more complex than black and white. You have to go back 50 years and put the incident into the tenor of the time. As you wrote, the university of 1958 was sorely limited as regards research funding, and the faculty and administration wanted to land the AEC funding. No question  about that. But they didn't intend to give up their scientific, professional or personal integrity to obtain and retain the contract.

The faculty 50 years ago was composed largely of individuals who believed that their research belonged to them and they determined how to use and disseminate it. I'm not sure that the faculty and administration had much experience with contract work and the concept of proprietary information and its associated legal ownership requirements. It turned out to be a steep, difficult learning curve. I am sure that Dave Klein and the other faculty members who worked under contracts for the petroleum industry on the North Slope also learned about the processes surrounding the use and publication of proprietary data, especially data the sponsor might not be inclined to immediately release to the public.

After reading your article, and again reviewing the history of the Project Chariot affair, I am convinced that, to paraphrase the words of the warden in Cool Hand Luke, what we had 50 years ago was a failure to communicate, not an abuse of academic freedom.

Sincerely,

Tom O'Farrell, '60

Evans responds: The problems and questions surrounding Project Chariot and the University of Alaska are still debated -- about what really happened, what should have happened, and what parties had what measure of guilt and innocence. What struck me most while interviewing UAF faculty (not all of whom were mentioned in the article) was the immediacy and forcefulness with which so many of them cited Project Chariot as the seminal, watershed moment for academic freedom at UAF.

Thanks for this important story. I read The Firecracker Boys long after my own experience of being wolf-packed for exercising my responsibility to both my art and my profession. I saw in the book what might easily have happened to me and why many in the state could believe that they still could pull political levers behind the scenes to do their dirty work without facing consequences. President Hamilton's immediate and strong defense of my work not only kept me employed, it kept me standing.

F.I.R.E. -- founded by two intellectuals, one on the Left and one on the Right -- took up my case as an instance of "the Left eating its own." Rich Seifert refers to the trauma of the attack on him, and the word applies to mine as well: a two-year investigation by OCR [Office for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education] for my temerity in introducing class and gender as topics for discussion in a graduate seminar called Left Out: Poets of the Political Imagination. And an endless cesspool of harassment that a theologian friend called "an ecstasy of sin" and to which the Anchorage Daily News actually had to declare a halt after a particularly ugly diatribe on me and my French and Indian grandparents from the stage of the Alaska Native Heritage Center. It was a soul-jacking, and I was an easy target: alone in Alaska, aging (called "the old white hag of the North"), and working-class, having come to the state not for adventure but for work.

Since my case, UAA has tried to raise issues of student bullying, especially of women faculty, and to put into place policies that rebalance student rights with those of faculty. Things had to be very out of whack in that regard for my story to have happened as it did. When people speak of the "responsibility" end of academic freedom, they generally do not consider that the greatest responsibility an artist or a professor has is critique of the close-by hypocrisies that are sustained by the fear of standing out among one's peers, but making nice is not necessarily making art.

"Indian Girls" is not a very "literary" poem, but it is a bardic one, public speech, uttered for the sake of the tribe. I did not escape the attacks on me at all unscathed, but I would publish the poem again (that only I, and not the publishers, was the object of vengeance, gives the lie to the alleged rationale for the siege) because it is part of the effort to bring human rights to those most in need of protection. The protections of tenure allowed me to do that. Demanded that I do that. President Hamilton's immediate call to cease "investigation" (and the public re-education I was being set up to experience) gave to the state and the university a very different public face and to tenure a rare championing by administration.

-- Linda McCarriston

These folks seem ignorant of the tradition of gardening among the Tlingit and Haida, particularly potatoes, which they acquired from the Russians in the 19th century. And they seem ignorant of the importance of marine proteins and fats to Alaska. The project seems limited in scope to the Interior, as is much of the activity of the experiment station.

-- Anonymous

Editor's note: Craig Gerlach's work focuses primarily on communities in Interior Alaska. He is one member of the Food Systems Group at UAF; other researchers study different aspects of food production and consumption in Alaska, including marine resources and Southeast agriculture. Master's degree candidate Elizabeth Kunibe, who is affiliated with the University of Alaska Southeast but is doing her work through UAF's Center for Cross-Cultural Studies, has discovered that some types of potatoes grown for centuries in the gardens of Southeast's Alaska Natives predate Western contact and are genetically linked to potatoes found in Chile.

Thank you, Jerry Lipka, for seeing Yup'ik traditional knowledge as a different worldview and knowledge system and incorporating it in such a culturally appropriate way. Alaska is better because you made it your home.

-- Shelley Woods

Wonderful story on research, community and education with a glimpse into a researcher's soul. Looking forward to seeing more of this research at [the School of Education] in the next years. Jerry, please come and share, guide and mentor. The doors are open again.

-- Ute Kaden