"The Liberal Arts on Trial: Charles H. Fisher and Red-Scare Politics at Western Washington College of Education" at the Whatcom Museum

Journalist and WWU faculty member Ron Judd will present "The Liberal Arts on Trial: Charles H. Fisher and Red-Scare Politics at Western Washington College of Education, 1933-39," February 8, 2018, at 7:30 p.m. in the Whatcom Museum Rotunda Room, 121 Prospect St.

Judd's work sheds new light on "The Fisher Case," the infamous 1939 ousting of Charles H. Fisher, the fourth president of present-day Western Washington University.  Fisher, a New Deal liberal assailed for "seditious" and "communist" views by a group of Bellingham citizens led by Frank I. Sefrit, general manager and editor of The Bellingham Herald, was eventually fired by the Board of Trustees under pressure from conservative Democratic Gov. Clarence Martin.

Judd places the incident in the context of regional and national political history for the first time. Aided by the discovery of large caches of archival documents, he reveals previously unknown elements of the important case, which had gone unexamined for eight decades, including a conspiracy against the president and evidence of a financial scandal that surely played a role in the ousting of a popular president of 16 years. Judd's exhaustive history of the Fisher case make its primary themes -- free speech, journalistic ethics and academic freedom -- newly relevant in the current political climate. 

Ron Judd is a veteran Seattle Times journalist, historian, and adjunct faculty member in Western's journalism department, who holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and history from Western Washington University (1985) and a master's in history from the University of Nebraska at Kearney (2016).