Donald Downs will retire at the end of the school year after 30 years in the Department of Political Science





Passionate free speech scholar Donald Downs will retire at the end of the school year after 30 years in the Department of Political Science

University of Wisconsin (UW) - Donald Downs was years away from establishing himself as one of the country’s top free speech scholars and advocates, but he still knew a First Amendment problem when he heard one — and he wasn’t afraid to share his opinion, even during a job interview.

During dinner at Otto’s on Madison’s west side the night before he was to formally interview for a faculty position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984, Downs was aghast when representatives of the Department of Political Science made a confession: An upcoming campus lecture by Jeane Kirkpatrick, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations known for a foreign policy doctrine of backing anti-communist dictators, had been cancelled under the threat of student dissent … and the professors hadn’t put up a fight.
“I got mad,” Downs recalls, 31 years later. “I said, ‘You don’t have a university if that kind of thing happens.’ This is a major figure and she can’t come here for a talk? I was amazed.”
Downs, the Glenn B. and Cleone Orr Hawkins Professor of Political Science and Alexander Meiklejohn Professor of Political Science, Law and Journalism, has brought that kind of verve to the UW-Madison campus since arriving in 1985; despite his fears about his blunt honesty at Otto’s, he did in fact land the job.
He will retire later this month, having built a reputation as a fierce defender of free speech and academic freedom, an acclaimed constitutional law scholar and an award-winning teacher who challenged students to consider all sides of an issue.
“Don is the kind of professor who has students who take every class with him,” says David Canon, chair of the Department of Political Science.
Or, as former student Jason Shepard (B.S.’99, Journalism and Political Science; M.A.’06, Ph.D.’09, Journalism), now chair of the Department of Communications at Cal State Fullerton, puts it: “He had sort of a cult following, and I was a proud member.”

For details - news.ls.wisc.edu


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