2 Quotes & Sayings By Lionel Tiger
In 1969, Professor Lionel Tiger was fired from the University of Michigan for speaking out against the school's discriminatory practices. In the 1970s he began a long battle to vindicate academic freedom. In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that a public university may not fire a professor solely because he deviates from the official orthodoxy on matters of race and sex—even if his views run counter to those of the state's political establishment
In 1984, Vice President George Bush told a meeting of the National Endowment for the Humanities that Tiger's work should be "suppressed" because it is "divisive." In 1989, after receiving a letter from Vice President Bush requesting their views on an expansion of affirmative action, twenty-nine academicians wrote a letter stating that they would not take sides in what they called "a divisive issue." This letter was published in The New York Times, and to this day has been cited as evidence that the American intellectual elite is itself divided over race.