Fifty-Year AAUP Members

Among those being honored this year for a half-century’s membership in the AAUP is the faculty member who was the subject of an AAUP investigating report on Grove City College—the institution that has been on the AAUP’s list of censured administrations for longer than any other. The AAUP conducted the investigation after Larry Gara’s abrupt dismissal from Grove City in 1962, purportedly for incompetence. Investigators found that the college had not provided Gara with “any semblance” of due process and that its absence raised “grave doubts regarding the academic security of any persons who may hold appointment at Grove City College.” In an unusual addendum of “supplementary observations” to the report, the committee took up the issue of the “extraordinary publicity” given by the administration to the charge of incompetence. Investigators noted that the administration presented no evidence to this effect and that information gathered about Gara’s teaching and research suggested otherwise. The addendum also noted that some faculty members attributed Gara’s dismissal to an “ideological struggle” that had occurred on campus when Gara, an anti-racist activist and a Quaker pacifist who had spent three years in prison for his refusal to serve in the armed forces, publicly disputed with another faculty member who, along with the president of the college’s board of trustees, had strong ties to the right-wing, anticommunist John Birch society. Following the dispute, and about four weeks before Gara’s dismissal, private investigators visited Grove City and spent “a number of days” informing themselves about Gara.

When AAUP staff contacted him about his status as fifty-year member, Gara responded by expressing his continuing appreciation for the report, which, he said, had “saved my professional life.” Gara went on to a forty-year career at Wilmington College in Ohio, from which he earned an honorary degree in May. The investigating committee’s report, complete with supplemental observations, (.pdf) is available.

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