Collaborating with McCarthy I happened to see that Ellen Schrecker, the veteran Professor of History who in the 1980s exposed the truth about how United States academia fared under McCarthyism, retired earlier this year. Her landmark study of how US universities responded to the McCarthyite challenge - by fully embracing it and implementing witch-hunts on the campus - deserves careful study today. The intolerance, and also the sheer hypocrisy, of those who ran the US universities at this time is noteworthy. In 1953, the presidents of 37 leading US universities urged faculty members to cooperate with the House Unamerican Activities Commission and other witch-hunt committees. By a truly Orwellian distortion, they turned academic freedom of speech into a requirement for academics to speak against anyone, including themselves, who was suspected by the regime. Only in this way, it was claimed, could academics demonstrate they were 'worthy' of free speech. To quo...
Posts
Showing posts from 2013