Chaucer expert, activist Charles Muscatine dies at 89

Charles Muscatine, 89, a specialist in the medieval poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer who in 1950 was fired from his job as an English professor at the University of California at Berkeley because of his refusal to sign a McCarthy-era loyalty oath, and who later agitated for reform in higher education, died of an infection March 12 at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Oakland, Calif.

Dr. Muscatine's staunch beliefs in freedom of speech and public education landed him at the center of events that shaped the campus's reputation from the 1950s to the 1970s as a haven for leftist activism.

When the University of California regents required faculty to sign an oath forswearing allegiance to any organization opposing the U.S. government, Dr. Muscatine was a newly hired assistant professor with a home under construction and a wife expecting a baby. Nevertheless, he became one of 31 faculty members who refused to sign, in defense of academic freedom and freedom of speech.

Many of the non-signers were distinguished international scholars; none had been accused of specific wrongdoing or disloyalty; and all were fired by the university's regents.

"As a young assistant professor, I had been insisting to the kids that you stick to your guns and you tell it the way you see it and you think for yourself and you express things for yourself," Dr. Muscatine said in an interview posted online by the Northern California Chapter of the ACLU. "I felt that I couldn't really justify teaching students if I weren't behaving the same way."

After his dismissal, he was hired at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he taught for two years until a California appeals court struck down the loyalty oath requirement as illegal. Dr. Muscatine was reinstated at Berkeley in 1953, and several years later published "Chaucer and the French Tradition," one of the first attempts to examine Chaucer's style and analyze his poetry in the context of medieval art and culture.

"Among Chaucerians," said Micha Grudin, a former student of Dr. Muscatine's and a professor emerita at Oregon's Lewis & Clark College, "the one book everyone knows is this" one.

At Berkeley, Dr. Muscatine was so widely known for his resistance and so admired for his courage that he became a pivotal figure in restoring peace to the campus after the rebellion known as the Free Speech Movement, in which students disrupted classes and staged sit-ins and large-scale protests to demand that university officials allow on-campus political activity.

Dr. Muscatine headed a faculty committee that embraced the movement as a phenomenon to be examined for its lessons rather than as an embarrassment to be dismissed. Its work culminated in 1966 in a 228-page analysis that included 42 recommendations to make the university more personal and less alienating.

Known as the "Muscatine Report," the document was praised as a blueprint for higher-education reform. It emphasized the importance of teaching, proposing that the university incorporate teaching evaluations into tenure decisions, offer freshman seminars, and invite student input into course offerings. It pushed the university to create a new "doctor of arts," a doctorate without a dissertation, for scholars who wanted to dedicate themselves to teaching rather than research.

Some of those recommendations took hold. But less than 10 years after its release, most of the recommendations had faded without action, casualties of apathetic student and faculty who were "ready to sit on their private concerns again," Dr. Muscatine told the New York Times in 1972.

The experience launched Dr. Muscatine into a second career as an advocate for higher-education reform. He traveled across the country, lecturing and advising schools.