Noah Porter versus William Graham Sumner

In January 1879 William Graham Sumner, Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale, assigned as a textbook the popular work by Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology. In a letter to the trustees in June 1880, the president of the college, Noah Porter, objected to the use of the volume. He suggested that Spencer's atheistic materialism would intellectually, morally and religiously harm immature students and bring notoriety to be the institution. Instead, of course, Noah Porter acquired the notoriety in this early and widely publicized case of academic freedom. William Graham Sumner was judged to be a bold and heroic spokesman for professional prerogatives, an uncompromising teacher of the new discipline of sociology. And Noah Porter served the sentence of historical disrepute that the supporters of Sumner passed on him.