Academic Freedom and the Lost Cause: The Short Career of Professor Joseph Baldwin at the University of Texas (Report‪)‬

Recent controversy over the contrarian views of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks espoused by University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill and University of Wisconsin lecturer Kevin Barrett serves as a reminder that public universities are essentially political institutions, because they are public assets in which we all have a stake. This was no less true during the seminal decades following the Civil War, when many public universities were founded. Debates within the academy at that time of increasing specialization of the curriculum and democratization of education centered around the nature of the university and the clientele it should serve, but the university also became involved in larger cultural issues, such as the persistent regionalism that continued to separate the North and the South. Nowhere were these political forces more clearly displayed than at the University of Texas in the strange case and brief career of Dr. Joseph Baldwin, a teacher educator who came to Texas in 1881 after a distinguished career in Indiana and Missouri. Baldwin quickly rose from leading summer teachers' institutes to the principalship of Sam Houston Normal Institute, the state's flagship institution for the preparation of White teachers. He served in that post with distinction until 1891, when he was named by the University of Texas to chair its newly-formed School of Pedagogy. Despite creating a respected and growing program for teacher preparation at the University, he was abruptly dismissed and pedagogical studies were suspended just five years later, dealing a blow to the professionalization of teaching in Texas. While the reasons for Baldwin's sudden demise remain somewhat mysterious, it seems clear that he was a victim of short-sighted decision-making, uncertainty about the nature of the University, and Southern provincialism. Texas' Teacher Shortage