Ken Paulson: Welcome to “Speaking Freely,” a weekly conversation about the First Amendment, arts, and American culture. I’m Ken Paulson, executive director of the First Amendment Center, coming to you today from Nashville. Dr. William Holda, the president of Kilgore College in Texas, has been on the front lines of a First Amendment battle on his campus because of his decision to allow students to stage “Angels in America.” Welcome, Dr. Holda.

William Holda: Thank you, Ken. It’s a pleasure being here.

Paulson: Can you tell me what precise time you woke up and ended up being a defender of the First Amendment?

Holda: I'm not sure when I woke up and suddenly was a defender of the First Amendment.

Paulson: It became more of a professional role for you at one point, though.

Holda: It surely did. Certainly by the time the play had opened, I knew what that role was going to be.

Paulson: Now there was a day that you first heard that “Angels in America” would be playing Kilgore College, and that was a conversation with a man who would direct the play?

Holda: Yes. In late August, longtime theater instructor Raymond Caldwell had told me, he said, “You know, I … I'm thinking of doing ‘Angels in America’. It would be very challenging, but it would give our students the opportunity to perform a play composed during their own lifetime. And the play has won the Pulitzer and Tony awards and numerous other awards and has really received recognition.” And I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t really pay any attention to it. I … I did a quick search on the Internet for “Angels in America” and everything looked positive. So they were rehearsing for six weeks and I didn’t even know it was on the radar screen.

Paulson: Had he ever come to you before and said, “I may be doing a challenging play?” Was this a unique situation?

Holda: Not until about two weeks before the play. He wrote us a letter and said, “Look, I think there will be some reaction. I'm hoping you all will stand with me. It is a play that is probably the most challenging thing I've ever done.”

Paulson: Now he actually did some editing of the content. There … there are no nude scenes in the production you did.

Holda: That … that is correct. There … there was … the play itself is a real commentary on 20th century life and near the end of this 20th century, the disconnectedness, the estrangement, the loneliness, the unlovableness of the human state, and how political power and those value systems are really juxtaposed against that disconnectedness.

Paulson: Now this … this play had not ignited any controversy in the planning stages.

Holda: No.

Paulson: But then comes a preview of the performance in the newspaper, the campus paper called The Flare.

Holda: That is correct. About two weeks before the play, our campus newspaper ran the preview of the play. And on the very front of the play, they had the cast assembled and, as a border above the top of the picture, it said, “Gay Fantasia.” And then told about the play coming. On the inside of that very same edition was an editorial asking people to keep an open mind. It was certainly a piece of art, a piece of theater, and they should not view it as the college espousing or endorsing a particular view. I think one of the other things that ignited some reaction was that there was a cartoon with two good old boys standing by a pickup truck talking about the college using tax dollars to do a play about “homoseptuals,” and one of them said, “Well, let’s go down to the nude bar and talk about it and drink a beer.” And the students were trying to point out how we engage in that hypocrisy.

Paulson: This was not help you needed.

Holda: No, it was actually … if you had a tinderbox, it was the match that … that really got things going.

Paulson: So people began to notice that this play was gonna come and … and it had gay themes. And … and this began to be known in the general community. When did you get a sense that there might be a backlash?

Holda: My first inclination that there would be some backlash was when I did receive a call from the wife of one of our Pentecostal ministers who knew me and said, “I love the college, but I just want you to know that our church is going to sign a petition protesting the play.” I left the next day, went to Indiana to take care of my ailing father, and my wife called me at home, at my family home in Indiana on Sunday and said, “I need to tell you what's happened.” And what had happened was that one of the local Baptist ministers had come to the college on Friday of that week and confronted Raymond Caldwell, the director, and said, “I hear you're doing a gay play.” And Raymond said to him, “Well, have you read the script of the play?” And he said no. And so Raymond offered him a copy of the script. And he said, “I just have one question I need to ask you and then I’ll know everything I need to know.” And so Raymond said, “Okay.” He said, “Well, does a man kiss a man onstage in this play?” And Mr. Caldwell said, “Yes, he does.” He said, “That’s all I needed to know.” But he did take a copy of the script with him.

Paulson: Do you have any sense of whether he ever read that script?

Holda: I … I think he read enough to find some sections that he could certainly use for his own purposes. That Sunday he wrote a real extensive letter in the local paper, The Kilgore News-Herald, decrying the fact that the college was doing this, and in the letter actually questioned whether or not Kilgore College, and specifically Raymond Caldwell, had ulterior motives, specifically to promote a gay lifestyle and encourage students to follow that lifestyle. At the same day, the publisher of the paper wrote an editorial questioning the college’s judgment, as we were entering a major gifts campaign, of doing a play like this, and in his editorial said, you know, the college is trying to introduce into this community a lifestyle totally unknown in east Texas.

Paulson: Totally unknown in east Texas.

Holda: Yes. As phenomenal as that can sound.

Paulson: And he was absolutely convinced that there were no homosexuals in east Texas.

Holda: Well, that’s what his editorial says.

Paulson: That’s a lot of territory.

Holda: I mean, later he said that he was not in any way trying to decry freedom of speech, which is the cornerstone of his own business, but … that he was simply questioning our good judgment.

Paulson: It’s extraordinary that … that in each case you have freedom of the press at the front end with the … with the students inadvertently … igniting this, and then adding fuel to the fire was …

Holda: Correct.

Paulson: … the publisher of a local newspaper.

Holda: In the next few days, a group of Baptist ministers did get together and form a coalition and organized a petition drive, and began to exert a tremendous political pressure, not only on me but on all nine of our elected board members who were from the regional communities. And it was extensive pressure, threats to withhold money, threats to not cooperate with the college on different ventures, threats by the county commissioners to pull funds from the Texas Shakespeare Festival. And it became very apparent to me that money is one of the greatest levers that people use when they want to exercise power over an entity.

Paulson: And to be clear, that you run a public institution.

Holda: Yes.

Paulson: Funded with tax dollars.

Holda: That is correct. We are a two-year public community college in the state of Texas, established in 1935.

Paulson: And if you were running a private school, there’s no First Amendment issue there at all. You could just decide not to … not to run it and it would be up to your own conscience and your own values to decide whether to carry it or not.

Holda: Well, yes and no. To me, if you're gonna be faithful to your instructional mission, then the pursuit of truth in academic freedom really doesn’t know a boundary. I know there are legal requirements for … for public institutions, but truthfully … and my whole argument was, one, we are an educational institution and the very, very nature of education is to challenge our most deeply held beliefs. And if they can withstand that challenge, then they're worth keeping. It’s that old Socratic ideal of the unexamined life is not worth holding. Well, the unexamined idea is not worth keeping, either. Second of all, our accrediting agency, Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, has very specific requirements about academic freedom. Third, our own policy and procedure manual specified that the instructors have academic freedom. So to me, it was more the very nature of education and not just a freedom of speech issue.

Paulson: And it’s clear to me from your comments that your own commitment to the First Amendment of free expression have been long held …

Holda: Sure.

Paulson: … and you did not wake up a defender one day. But you certainly woke up one morning and found yourself …

Holda: Yes.

Paulson: … sort of in the crosshairs.

Holda: Right.

Paulson: And I have to believe this took extraordinary personal toll as well.

Holda: It did. You know, I've been in the community now 25 years. And I function as a deacon at the Catholic church and I have been organist and choirmaster at the Presbyterian church. My kids have grown up through the school system. I still have … had a daughter in college at Kilgore and a son that’s in high school. And many people in the community know me. And there was tremendous battering and estrangement. And the only difference between me and a piñata is that when the sticks were hitting, there was no candy falling out.

Paulson: (Laughs)

Holda: But you’re … you're pretty well laying out there in the community and everyone is taking a hit. You know, the community, there were many that did support us in the community, galvanized behind me and the college. But … you know, I didn’t want to lash out. And I think that one of the real challenges for me personally was not to get angry, not to attack those people, but to recognize that the very principles that I was trying to uphold was also guaranteed to those individuals who were criticizing.

Paulson: Right. Well, there’s a First Amendment festival at play here.

Holda: Yes, there was.

Paulson: Yeah. Your freedom of speech, their freedom of speech.

Holda: Sure, sure.

Paulson: The freedom of the press, which wasn’t always helpful.

Holda: Right.

Paulson: And of course freedom of religion, people who have strong convictions that … that what was being done was immoral. Can you talk a little bit about some of the more aggressive tactics used there?

Holda: Sure. As an example, we … we had just launched a major gifts campaign. And some of the individuals who were trying to sponsor large capital gifts threatened to withhold them. And some did. We had some members withdraw from the steering committee of our capital campaign. We had individuals who knew my family. My son took quite a … a bashing in the high school cafeteria about, “Your dad’s gonna lose his job.” And, you know, “And not only will he lose his job …” and, you know … of course, my son said, “Well, good, that’ll just get me out of this town,” you know?

Paulson: (Laughs)

Holda: But, you know, kids accused him of being gay. And it was … and my daughter was very upset by some of the signs that she saw and some of the public displays. At some juncture, a gentleman showed up with a big school bus and it had … he would change the signs. He had 40-foot billboards on both sides of the bus, and he began driving around campus accusing me of raping the virgin village of Kilgore. He had a gift for alliteration. And he would say that the “sewer-sucking sodomites had raped the virgin village of Kilgore,” and I was the cause of that. There was … there was quite a bit of pressure. There was extreme pressure put on the members of our college board of trustees. And I didn’t know really how it was gonna turn out. The board had the option to meet and cancel the play.

Paulson: Were you ever tempted to say, “Hey, ‘The Music Man’ is a terrific show?”

Holda: Well … (Laughs) at that point we were so far beyond that. And … and although people in the community did say, you know, there’s so many good pieces, why are we doing that, the other argument that was used so much was, “This is fine for New York City. This is fine for Los Angeles. It’s not fine for east Texas. We don’t do this kind of thing here.”

Paulson: Did you have conversations with your legal counsel at all about whether …

Holda: Yes.

Paulson: … you even had the option?

Holda: Yes.

Paulson: I think it would be … an interesting case if you decided to withhold the play …

Holda: Right.

Paulson: … as a … as a governmental body, I'm not … I'm not sure how that would play out.

Holda: Well, and … and I knew that not only a cast member but several staff had contacted the ACLU and that they had prepared a temporary restraining order that was going to be filed on the afternoon that the play was to open, which was a Thursday, and would have hit the cycle such the federal court could not have heard the case till Monday when it was over. Now some people encouraged me to take the expedient route – go ahead and cancel it, let the ACLU keep it open, and then everyone wins. But I just didn’t see it that way. I mean, we … I think the college would have lost, and all the entire academic community would have lost, by abdicating responsibility to the ACLU.

Paulson: Clearly a good percentage of the community was concerned about this.

Holda: Yes.

Paulson: I’m … I'm curious about how the students themselves reacted to it.

Holda: Sure. We … we ran a student poll in our student newspaper, and something like 56 percent said they were not disturbed by the themes in the play. A fairly significant number, 31 percent, said they were disturbed by the themes in the play, and the remainder had no opinion. But when you asked them should the play go on, over 80 percent of the students believed that the play should continue. And the faculty, too. The faculty said that over 80 percent of the faculty believed that the college should preserve and protect those principles of freedom of speech and academic freedom.

Paulson: And the fire continues and you're battling parts of the community, but … but the show must go on.

Holda: Yes.

Paulson: And … and can you describe the environment the night the …

Holda: Yes.

Paulson: … the play opened?

Holda: Yes. We had had threats. There had been calls to the … the students in the play, to Mr. Caldwell, to me, threatening us physically, threatening to close the play, to have bomb threats, to disrupt the play in any way, shape or form. A local businessman and a group of them bought two-thirds of the tickets in the theater to try to keep people form coming, and once we became aware of that we decided to resell those tickets. We thought that there would be demonstrations within the play itself, trying to disrupt it, that people would stand up and begin shouting. We had had some threats of violence. So we had to rent and … and borrow metal detectors. And all of the … people coming into the play had to go through metal detectors. The protests that were planned by the local churches fell apart at the last minute, but a group of individuals from a church in the area did come. And it was pretty crude. In fact, seeing stick drawings of … of men engaged in anal sex was actually more crude than what actually occurred on the stage. And young kids, eighth graders, kids in middle school carrying signs that, you know, “God hates fags, fags burn in Hell” … to me, one of the ultimate ironies was a former county commissioner carried an American flag, which is the symbol of our freedom, and said, “KC Trustees Abuse Tax Dollars.” So it was very, very hostile. And it was a media circus all at the same time. That evening, the kids in the play were huddled in the basement, wondering if they were gonna get to … produce this play. And Tony Kushner had written a special letter to them, which I took over and read to them that evening. And in his letter, he said that, you know, we try to create civic stability by appearing to create this uniformity in our community. But the fact that we create an illusion of a monolithic community actually creates more instability. He compared the actions of those who were trying to disrupt the arts to those in Bucharest, Romania, who had recently tried to burn a theater where “Angels” was being performed. And, you know, there was all this homophobia, religious fears, little ladies calling us at night quoting Bible verses to us at home. I mean, you can't imagine that crescendo. It became a real struggle between a college’s right to do its thing and community members who wanted to stop that.

Paulson: If you will, talk about that night.

Holda: Yes.

Paulson: You're … you're on pins and needles. Curtain comes up, anything can happen at any …

Holda: Right.

Paulson: … any point. Instead?

Holda: And instead Mr. Caldwell and I went and talked to the people that were gathered there to watch the play. And the play began. The protesters stayed outside through the intermission so that they could be seen to the people coming out at intermission. And then most of them dispersed at that point. The second night, there were only one or two protesters who showed. And by the third and final … third and fourth performances, they had completely diminished. But the … there was tremendous residual resentment among certain elements in the community. And … and this is not always bad. But it was polarizing the community because there were a number of community members who supported the college’s right to … to do the play.

Paulson: And yet after the four shows were concluded, you sold out all the shows.

Holda: Yes.

Paulson: None were disrupted. And you'd sort of weathered this extraordinary period of turmoil.

Holda: Yes.

Paulson: Had to be some sense of relief for you.

Holda: Yes. I knew I was gonna have to go into damage control mode following the play.

Paulson: And … and so sure enough, the other shoe dropped.

Holda: That’s correct.

Paulson: A short time later. And in just a matter of weeks after the play concluded, there was to be a price to be paid.

Holda: That’s correct. The college is in its 15th season of Texas Shakespeare Festival. And it’s one of the top five festivals in all of Texas, of any kind. It brings in professional actors from California and New York and all over the country who in a repertory format usually do four or five performances in about a six-week period, and brings about eleven thousand individuals into the community. And the college has had some difficulty sustaining the … the growing costs to maintain that quality, and so earlier in the year the number of entities had pledged some funds to assist the festival. The Greg County commissioners had pledged $50,000 to support the Texas Shakespeare Festival. And that had actually passed near the end of September, and … and that money was appropriated to the college. However, about … when the controversy over the play was going on, one of the county commissioners came on TV and said, “If the college goes on with the play, then we’re gonna take back our money.” And sure enough, they did. They … they voted to rescind that allotment of $50,000.

Paulson: And did you have a sense that this was the end of the festival?

Holda: No. I'm an eternal optimist, and I knew that we could find other funds somewhere, but maybe not that amount of funds.

Paulson: Was it crystal clear that … that this was payback?

Holda: Yes.

Paulson: Anybody say that?

Holda: The commissioner said one was … the arguments they gave were … were specious at best. One said, “You know, we shouldn’t be spending tax dollars to fund the arts, and that’s really the issue. Has nothing to do with the play.” The other one said, “This is really an issue where if we’re gonna fund one art, why shouldn’t we fund others in the arts and how can we tell others no?” These were the types of arguments given, but it was very apparent that had “Angels in America” not been performed at Kilgore College, the commissioners would not have rescinded their vote.

Paulson: I understand a … a good number of people in the educational community, the theater community, reached out to you.

Holda: They did. Several alumni of the TSF, Texas Shakespeare Festival, put a note out on the Internet, unbeknownst to us. It was called “Save the Texas Shakespeare Festival.” And in $5, $10, and $25 contributions, we had over $10,000 sent to the college to help the festival. Additionally, the Dramatists Guild pledged $10,000. And so almost immediately we were able to make up about $20,000.

Paulson: And then you got a very encouraging phone call from the people at PEN and Newman’s Own. What happened?

Holda: Yes. Well, I had a call from Diana Aiten-Shanker at PEN to say that I had received Newman’s Own Award. I had never heard of PEN. I wasn’t even sure what Newman’s Own was. And I thought it was one of these where, you know, you get your name in a book and they're selling a book. And once I really discovered what the award was and the import of it, it was … just phenomenal and a real eye-opener that this event that we’d gone through and which I thought was very localized and provincial, had had much further reaching consequences.

Paulson: And this … and this award, to be very clear, was to recognize … for your courage.

Holda: That the award was to recognize me. It … it is a $25,000 award funded through the … the graciousness of Paul Newman and his partner, A.E. Hochner. And they do it to promote the freedom of speech, especially as it relates to the arts. I got to the event. It was a wonderful gala. And at the gala, by the time I arrived, we were about $18,000 shy of being made whole. And Mr. Hochner, after I was introduced by Tony Kushner and given the award, got up to the podium and announced that he and Paul Newman were going to make a special gift of $18,000 so that we would be made whole. It was … it was just a wonderful moment.

Paulson: That’s a … that’s a wonderful conclusion to the story. But I have a hunch the story doesn’t really end there.

Holda: No, it doesn’t.

Paulson: This … this probably will continue to be a battle in the community. For those who are in a similar position to yours, people who run public institutions …

Holda: Sure.

Paulson: … and want to make sure that free expression is protected but aren’t necessarily interested in … in jumping in front of … a speeding train, what advice would you have going in?

Holda: I think, you know, one of the first realizations is … is that if we are going to be faithful to who we are as educators, then the pursuit of knowledge, the pursuit of truth, the challenging of our most deeply held beliefs, is critical to the very venture of education. And so for all of those who are in education, my advice would be, be faithful to your calling as an educator in the realm of ideas. Second, is realize that communities are not monolithic, that people might portray to you that a community is all one way or another but our communities are very diverse. In fact, right before this happened, we were all in Texas reading about Rudy Giuliani and the Brooklyn Museum. And, you know, for a city that is perceived as liberal and progressive as New York City to have had that very same event or type of event happen is, to me, a lesson. Third is that some of the Gandhian principles of passive resistance really do work. Stay with what you believe. Don’t flinch. Stay firm to your convictions, but you can do it in a manner that is not angry and that is actually much more effective.

Paulson: Very well put. And if that were indeed the end of the story, you would not have to put on another play at Kilgore College. What does this do? Does it have a chilling effect at all on those who would put on a future …

Holda: It … it has some. We … we've asked our instructors to at least notify us when they're gonna be doing something that could potentially be controversial, not with the idea of squelching that but to simply give us an opportunity to be engaged, to lay the groundwork, to properly educate our own communities so that we’re not in a reactive mode.

Paulson: How has this changed Kilgore College?

Holda: You know, Kilgore is a city that grew up in the oil patch and it was a blue-collar, all-field supply town. But it’s also been a community of culture. Van Cliburn grew up in Kilgore, went to Kilgore High School, graduated from Kilgore High School and took classes at the college. Our auditorium bears his name. So there is that cultural heritage. But it is important that as a public community college that’s supposed to be so tuned into the community that we also become a witness, a beacon for our own community, to try to translate what we are. Today as a college we’re much stronger because those groups that might try to control our agendas realize that that is not simply their role.

Paulson: It’s a heartening story, and we at the First Amendment Center appreciate your defense of free speech. It’s not an easy road, is it?

Holda: No, it isn’t. And sometimes it’s very lonely. A friend wrote me a note and said Justice Holmes wrote that only when a person is in that depth, a blackness of despair such as surrounds a dying man, and in those moments of hope and despair, you recover and rediscover your principles and what is really important to you, only then will you have achieved. And, you know, I'm glad to get through that loneliness and to realize there’s a much larger community out there that support the same thing. I … I didn’t even know that the community was there.

Paulson: Thank you for your story. Thanks for joining us.

Holda: It’s my pleasure.

Paulson: We’ve been visiting today with Dr. William Holda, president of Kilgore College in Kilgore, Texas. I'm Ken Paulson, back next week with another conversation about the First Amendment, the arts, and American culture. I hope you can join us then for “Speaking Freely.”