All Scholars

“Ned” Spofford is chiefly remembered for his association with noted English professor and critic Newton Arvin (1900-63) and the scandal Arvin provoked at Smith College in 1959-60.

A brilliant student at Amherst College, from which he graduated summa cum laude, Spofford was offered a position at Smith College by Helen Bacon in the spring of 1956. He was beloved by students who, on his 29th birthday filled his office with forsythia and flowers. He completed his master’s thesis, “Suggestion and Didacticism in the Georgics of Virgil,” in 1958 and in 1959 was accepted for graduate work at Harvard beginning in the fall of 1960. 

In the meantime, Arvin, twice Spofford’s age and a former lover of Truman Capote, pursued Spofford in hopes of establishing a relationship. Spofford could not return Arvin’s desire, but the two maintained a civilized and sympathetic relationship. When Arvin’s apartment was searched by three Massachusetts state troopers, a local police officer, and a United States postal inspector (Postmaster-General Arthur E. Summerfield was on a crusade against pornography) they found gay-oriented magazines and Arvin’s diaries detailing homosexual encounters. Arrested for possessing homosexual pornography, Arvin panicked,  and gave up the names of other gay faculty friends, including Spofford. Spofford’s apartment was searched without a warrant and he was arrested on September 2, 1960 for the possession of another man's pornography. He and Arvin shared a jail cell overnight. Helen Bacon, herself untenured at the time, immediately raised Spofford’s bail by cashing in her war bonds, brought him home, enlisted help from the AAUP, and accompanied him at his hearing the next day. At his September 20 trial before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.,  he accepted, along with the other defendants, a plea bargain of suspended jail terms and fines but no prison time and no trial. Spofford and his English colleague Raymond Joel Dorius (1919-2006) were allowed to accept the deal and yet still plead “not guilty” in order to appeal his case. 

Spofford was sentenced to one year in the Massachusetts House of Corrections and fined $1000 for possessing obscene photographs and literature. Again, Helen Bacon paid his costs as he was released upon appeal. Angry at the invasion of her colleague’s apartment without warning, she encouraged Spofford to make a public fight.  The Smith Classics Department and the college tenure and promotion committee voted to retain Spofford, despite the concerns of other faculty at the notoriety the case had caused and frankly, his sexual behavior. On February 17, 1961, the trustees allowed Arvin to retire at half-pay, but despite the public protests instigated by Bacon and other faculty and students, Spofford and Dorius were not retained. Bacon continued to work on their behalf: She sponsored a faculty expression of regret at the trustees’ action, which passed unanimously and she employed the AAUP to secure a full year’s severance pay for both Spofford and Dorius. Given tenure in 1961, she nevertheless moved that year to Barnard.    

Spofford soon left Northampton for Cambridge. Cedric Whitman, the chair of the Classics Department, told him “If you are guilty, we will set up a committee to deal with it. No guilt, no committee.” (Werth, 235)

In 1963, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned the convictions of all three defendants, ruling that the searches were unconstitutional because the authorities had no warrant and failed to define obscenity.

Spofford completed all the coursework at Harvard for a doctorate and won a Harvard fellowship to Italy to revise his dissertation on Virgil's treatment of farming communities.  When he returned to America in 1964 his doctoral committee  was prepared to accept the dissertation, but Spofford, ever the perfectionist, refused to submit it and left Harvard without a degree. He was given an appointment by Cornell and though an ABD,  tenure in 1970, but abruptly quit and moved to San Francisco, where Dorius had taken a position at San Francisco State. Recognizing his his unique talents as a teaching professor, Stanford appointed Spofford a visiting lecturer at Stanford  to further their graduate students' immersion in Latin literature. In 1974 he suffered a nervous breakdown, “a delayed reaction to the events of 1960” (Werth, 302) and briefly stopped teaching.  He was hospitalized three times in the 1970s but in 1981 fashioned his dissertation work on the Georgics into a 63-page book that went largely unnoticed. Spofford retired in 1988 to live the rest of his life alone in Palo Alto, reading, listening to music, and enjoying the company of friends until his death at 81. 

A shy man, Spofford had a lively sense of humor and enjoyed discussing classical music and opera, but the hunt, arrest, trial, and sentence had altered him. He never fully recovered his composure, despite the admiration of undergraduate and graduate students at Cornell, Stanford, and Yale, who were deeply appreciative of his thoughtful mentoring. He provided a model of close reading of Virgil, Lucretius, and Horace for his students, many of whom kept in touch with him until he died. 

n 2002, Smith recognized but did not apologize for the injustice to its professors and created a lecture series and a small scholarship: The Dorius-Spofford Fund for the Study of Civil Liberties and Freedom of Expression and the Newton Arvin Prize in American Studies.