Remembrance of Bertram H. Davis, 1918-2007

By William W. Van Alstyne

For eighteen years, the last eight of which he served as general secretary before returning to the classroom and his fine scholarship, Bertram Davis was the omnipresent teacher within the AAUP. He educated the revolving numbers of staff and national committee chairpersons and members, the national officers and national educated me. He did this not by lecture, but by quiet observation, by impeccably written reports, by personal example, by demeanor, humor, and, sometimes—perhaps most effectively—just by a mere glance. I am writing these few paragraphs while looking at his photograph, the one featured in the AAUP Bulletin (and republished here), marking his return to academic life. Tall, bespectacled, his high cheekbones and prominent forehead conspicuous in a decidedly handsome face, he looks acceptingly, directly at the reader with a slight, knowing smile. I look at the photograph, look away for a moment, and still see him embodying the standards that characterized his own life and the standards he represented within and on behalf of the AAUP—standards of professionalism, standards of shared governance, standards including the responsibilities (and not merely the and, most of all, standards of personal integrity itself.

After reading through the materials on the many staff positions he held before becoming general secretary (including editor of the Association’s journal, the Bulletin, which later changed its name to Academe), I turned to the large number of reports of which Bert was the principal—sometimes the sole—author. The last he gave as general secretary included, among many other things, his account of the substantial change that had just then been put into place by the entry of the AAUP into collective bargaining, and the collapse of the Nixon administration that same year (1974). Acknowledging the uncertainties that lay ahead, he concluded with a spirit of resolve, tempered, however, by a reminder of what the AAUP needed always to recall. And so, in that final report as general secretary, he summed up in the following way:

We can devote our full energies and resources to the advancement of higher education, and if we keep our sights on the things that we believe in both we and the academic profession should prosper. In the midst of the cynicism which seems to pervade so much of modern life, perhaps there is no greater distinction than to hold to principles and policies which are at once a check on abuses of power—including our own— and a guide to professional fulfillment.

How characteristic of the teacher within Bertram Davis, that he would draw the AAUP to hold to principles and policies to “check on abuses of power,” an easy and popular message in itself, but one to which Bert added the reminder that abuses of power may include our own.

With this, Bert took formal leave from the AAUP to return to academic life as a scholar, as a professor, once again immersed in the very special richness of eighteenth-century English literature he had continued to pursue avocationally during his years of distinguished service with the AAUP. And so one might end these passing words of tribute to Bertram Davis with this one particularly suitable quotation from his many thoughtful reports, but I cannot do so. His service to the AAUP did not in fact end in 1974. Rather, it continued influentially for more than another twenty-five years, first as a faculty member of the AAUP’s Committee A (the oldest, preeminent committee on academic freedom and tenure) for nine years, including a term as the committee’s chair, and then for an additional seventeen years as a committee consultant.

It is not feasible to record the numerous reports from those additional years of altruistic service. They are too many, and a bare recitation is not the right way of paying tribute to this wonderful colleague as we all knew him and, indeed, still do. I would, however, mention one in closing, as I think it captures his spirit and his keenness especially well. It is the report published in the September–October 1989 issue of Academe, involving the removal of the Reverend Charles E. Curran from teaching Catholic theology (Curran’s academic specialty on which he had published many books and papers) at the Catholic University of America, quite contrary to the university’s own previously stated policy on academic freedom. The university administration’s decision was driven by the determination of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, presided over at the time by Cardinal Ratzinger (who is now Pope), finding it intolerable even in academic courses at Catholic. University on theology that Curran would not agree to confine his points of view to those in accord with Lee Professor church doctrine as settled in Rome. The report prepared by Bert Davis runs to fourteen pages. It is courteous, exact, comprehensive, compelling. It ranks with only one other AAUP case report in overall excellence (the report by Richard Brandt and Hans Linde, in 1971, on the dismissal of Angela Davis by the board of regents of the University of California). Summarizing it would be an injustice to the full report, which I commend to the reader to retrieve and review. It is classic Bert Davis

—William W. Van Alstyne
Marshall Wythe School of Law
College of William and Mary

Bertram Davis’s Chief AAUP Offices and Committee Service

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