at Wesleyan and Yale universities from 1974 to 1975. A decade later, in 1985, with the help of a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union, Franklin appealed the termination, and sought back pay, damages, and reinstatement, but the effort was not successful. A state court upheld Stanford's ruling, and the California Supreme Court refused to hear the case. ACLU lawyer Margaret Casey said the ruling would have a "chilling effect" on the power of academics to express their thinking freely. Rutgers years In 1975 Franklin was hired by Rutgers as a full professor with tenure. In 1987 he was appointed as the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies (emeritus since his retirement in 2016). Franklin's academic career has diverse areas of scrutiny, which relate mostly to the topic of American cultural history. In 2014, he was influential in organizing Rutgers faculty to block the choice of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as commencement speaker. In 2014, Temple University scholar Carolyn Karcher summed up Franklin's achievements by saying that he has an "extraordinary gift for teaching us to read our history in our literature and to glean from both insights that can help us alter our future." Science fiction Franklin has a lifelong passion for science fiction and has been a guest curator on topics about Star Trek and Star Wars. His book War Stars was cited by leftist philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky, who bemoaned the prevalence of a recurring theme in popular literature that "we're about to face destruction from some terrible, awesome enemy." Franklin's research explored America's fascination with superweapons. He argued in War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination that popular American books and novels in preceding decades and centuries, which dealt with the themes of superweapons, may have helped to shape national thinking on this subject. When the movie Independence Day appeared in 1996, Franklin said "Fundamental to the historical experience of [American] culture are alien invaders who came armed with a superior technology and wiped out the culture that was here." His book Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century (1966) identified American authors including Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville as pioneers of this genre who wrote science fiction, contrary to popular understanding. His Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction won the Eaton Award in 1981, and contributed to Franklin receiving