If not for a failed eye test, Bruce Franklin might have been a fighter pilot. Instead, the man later known for his antiwar activities reported to his first Air Force squadron in 1956 as a navigator, thrilled to be flying in updated versions of the long-range bombers he had cheered as a child during World War II.
Photo: Chuck Painter for Stanford News Service/Courtesy of Special Collections & University Archives/Stanford University Libraries
He would leave three years later, troubled by what he was coming to see as a dangerous and dysfunctional system of nuclear oversight. By the mid-’60s, he had become an emerging Melville scholar and was developing the concerns about the military’s escalations in Vietnam that would transform his life. In 1966, the Stanford associate professor of English led protests against the local production of napalm, an incendiary gel used in American bombs. Later that year, he and his wife, Jane, headed with their three kids to Stanford’s overseas campus in France, where encounters with Vietnamese refugees further radicalized their views.
“When we came back to this country, we were Marxist Leninists, and we saw the need for a revolutionary force in the United States,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 1972.
The only tenured professor ever to be dismissed from Stanford, Howard Bruce Franklin, PhD ’61, died May 19 of corticobasal degeneration at his home in El Cerrito, Calif. He was 90.
Things boiled over in early 1971, when Franklin urged demonstrators to shut down Stanford’s Computation Center, which was reportedly running a government program related to the war effort. A crowd broke into the building and cut off power. The resulting discipline case, initiated by university president Richard Lyman, raised questions of academic freedom and its limits. A faculty hearing board voted 5–2 to dismiss Franklin, finding that he had incited the occupation of the center and urged defiance of police orders to disperse. (A third finding, that he had incited additional disruption during the violent night of protest on campus that followed, did not survive court challenge.)
Unable to find work in academia, he studied horticulture before getting hired in 1975 at the Newark branch of Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he taught until 2016. Not far from where he grew up in Brooklyn and teaching mostly working-class students of color, Franklin delighted in the change. “Probably my firing at Stanford was good for me,” he told Stanford in 2021. “I loved being at Rutgers.” He remained a prolific author on topics ranging from science fiction to prison literature to the legacy of the Vietnam War. After taking up saltwater fishing, in 2007 he published The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America, which is credited with inspiring marine protections along the Atlantic coast.
Franklin is survived by his daughters, Gretchen and Karen; his son, Robert; and six grandchildren. His wife of 67 years, Jane, also an author, died in 2023.
Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford. Email him at sscott3@stanford.edu.
