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 quote Schrecker: ‘[U]niversity administrators clothed their responses to McCarthyism in elaborate rationalizations about the academic profession's commitment to "complete candor and perfect integrity." ‘

They stressed academics’ duty "to speak out", and to quote Schrecker again, ‘warned that "invocation of the Fifth Amendment [right not to incriminate oneself, in US law] places upon a professor a heavy burden of proof of his fitness to hold a teaching position and lays upon his university an obligation to reexamine his qualifications for membership in its society." ‘

The timing of this announcement helped the congressional committees who at the instigation of McCarthy and the HUAC, were poised to ‘investigate’ Communism at American universities. Investigation was carried out by interviewing academics suspected of left-wing activities, whether or not they were current Communist Party members, and getting them to ‘name names’. Those who did not cooperate got the sack. They were then blacklisted so they could not get another academic appointment. This black-list campaign pursued by US universities and colleges lasted for around 10 years, well into the 1960s.

Ellen Schrecker's work is a tribute to the more enlightened times that followed, and to the culture of openness and free speech that then became possible at US universities, perhaps to a greater extent than elsewhere in the world. It is also a reminder of how easily the values of truth and freedom of speech become traduced when those expected to be their guardians collaborate with their grave-diggers.


No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities by Ellen W. Schrecker, Oxford University Press, 1986.

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