Ellen Schrecker

An important work on the higher education system and its discontents. Why are our schools operating as corporations, and what does this mean for the future of education? The author examines the history of academic freedom, then moves into the evolution of the school from an institution of higher learning directed in large part by the faculty to a corporation in the business of delivering degrees directed in large part by the administrators who are more interested in concrete measures of success, such as numbers of butts in seats, then in more nebulous ones, such as the quality of education delivered. Should be required reading for everyone who has been subjected to the ubiquitous propaganda machine that trumpets the evils of modern higher education; if you have ever bemoaned the "indoctrination" or snarked about the easy life of an academic, or asked why we need humanities education anyway, this book is just what you need.… (more)

Ellen Schreck has given us a vivid portrait of the dilemma many college professors faced during witch-hunts of the early fifties. She begins with an extensive history of the concept of academic freedom. No consensus has ever been reached on what exactly it is.

Usually it resulted in debate on campus in response to external threats rather than internal dissent. Leading members of the academic community wanted to control behavior which might lead to outside intervention. The 1st AAUP formulation of academic freedom in fact discouraged controversy and implored the teacher to teach all sides of an issue. Unfortunately, academic freedom meant nothing to those charged with being fellow travelers or communists. One of the great "catch-22s" of this era was that by definition anyone who denied being, a communist was by definition a communist. Simply pleading the Fifth Amendment became grounds for dismissal at many institutions, as did failure to rat on one's colleagues. Even though many academics were not ultimately charged by HUAC, simply the fact they were asked to testify became grounds enough for dismissal. It became virtually impossible to defend oneself, especially when college faculty, presidents and boards, sought to avoid any hint of controversy and found it was much easier to expel the accused than try to defend him. The vaguest hint that federal funds for research grants might be in jeopardy caused the faculty to quiver with anxiety and to throw ethics to the wind. Academic freedom was used to justify firings in many case~. The reasoning was that one could not be intellectually honest if one had had anything to do with communists. Academic freedom was defined from an institutional standpoint rather than and ideological one. Paranoid professors feared that if the academic community failed to purge itself, witch-hunts would organized from the outside. Tragically, Schreck's account shows how academia's self-enforcement of McCarthyism silenced an entire generation of radical intellectuals and stifled all opposition to the official version of the Cold War. Ironically many who suffered the most were teachers who, after becoming seriously disillusioned with communism, had abandoned the party. Many were also accused of communistic leanings for campus political ends. There are all to few examples of heroic faculty who, because of support from their colleagues and/or administration, were able to keep their jobs despite tremendous pressure.

A sad episode in the history of academic community.… (more)

Ellen Schreck in has given us a vivid portrait of the dilemma many college professors faced during witch-hunts of the early fifties. She begins with an extensive history of the concept of academic freedom. No consensus has ever been reached on what exactly it is. Usually it resulted in debate on campus in response to external threats rather than internal dissent. Leading members of the academic community wanted to control behavior which might lead to outside intervention. The 1st AAUP formulation of academic freedom in fact discouraged controversy and implored the teacher to teach all sides of an issue. Unfortunately, academic freedom meant nothing to those charged with being fellow travelers or communists. One of the great "catch-22s" of this era was that by definition anyone who denied being a communist was by definition a communist. Simply pleading the fifth amendment became grounds for dismissal at many institutions, as did failure to rat on one's colleagues.

Even though many academics were not ultimately charged by BUAC simply the fact they were asked to testify became .grounds enough for dismissal. It became virtually impossible to defend oneself, especially when college faculty, presidents and boards, sought to avoid any hint of controversy and found it was much easier to expel the accused than try to defend him. The vaguest hint that federal funds for research grants might be in jeopardy caused the faculty to quiver with anxiety and to throw ethics to the wind. Academic freedom was used to justify firings in many case.. The reasoning was that one could not be intellectually honest if one had had anything to do with communists. Academic freedom was defined from an institutional standpoint rather than and ideological one. Paranoid professors feared that if the academic community failed to purge itself, witch-hunts would organized from the outside.

Tragically, Schreck's account shows how academia's self-enforcement of McCarthyism silenced an entire generation of radical intellectuals and stifled all opposition to the official version of the Cold War. Ironically many who suffered the most were teachers who, after becoming seriously disillusioned with communism, had abandoned the party.
Many were also accused of communistic leanings for campus political ends. There are all to few examples of heroic faculty who, because of support from their colleagues and/or administration, were able to keep their jobs despite tremendous pressure. A sad episode in the history of academic community.… (more)

In her preface to the paperback edition, Schrecker takes note of the recent publication of The Haunted Wood by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, a book that took advantage of KGB and FBI files that have become available since the end of the Cold War to examine the issue of Americans spying for the Soviet Union. In that book, it becomes clear that many had indeed spied for the USSR, especially during the 1930s and in WWII. By 1950, Schrecker concludes, this was pretty much over. The normal background investigations of government employees in sensitive positions would have done just fine to protect the government from internal subversion, yet it was in the first years of the 1950s that the most virulent anti-communism flourished.

Having studied anti-communism and the career of Tail Gunner Joe for more than two decades, Schrecker is probably better positioned than anyone alive today to put the Red Scare of the 40s and 50s into perspective. What she concludes is that anti-communism was a crusade that has its roots in the 1930s, when the "old left," sympathetic to the USSR, had worked to further causes like trade unionism. In that timeframe, the infrastructure for an anticommunist crusade was put into place. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, HUAC, and a network of professional anti-communists were all in place by the late 1930s and WWII represented merely a diversion from the crusade. The reason why this crusade received such wide-spread acquiescence is that it was plausible that communists were in government -- indeed, as Weinstein and Vassiliev have shown, many were. There are many different reasons for individuals picking up the anti-communist cause in the immediate post-war period. The U.S. was, in fact, sliding toward cold war, with confrontation increasing at an ever more rapid pace from 1946-49. Partisanship, and ultimately official government sanction of anti-communism's institutional apparatus were amongst the most effective supports.

Schrecker is concerned with the general effect on America of a creeping conformity that distanced itself from anything "controversial". For individuals singled out, such as the author's sixth grade teacher, there was plenty of personal trauma. The nation as a whole emerged from the anti-communist crusade weakened, with the range of discussion narrowed to a "Cold War consensus". One wonders if the creeping conformism of "the good war" also laid some of the groundwork for this phenomenon. As Richard Polenberg points out, the New Deal Liberals who ran the OWI stepped away from anything that resembled conflict, approving only films that were "patriotic" in that they did not show any conflict between labor and management, ethnic groups, or black and white. The Red Scare era's aversion to controversy had already been pretty well developed in the course of the hot war, now it's pernicious influence was extended to the cold war.

So what of "Tail Gunner Joe"? Schrecker sees him more as a creature of the anti-communist crusade than as its maker. If the Truman administration had merely played down the Wheeling W VA speech when he announced the alleged list of communists in government, the Senator from Wisconsin may have remained at best a marginal figure. He gained credibility when the Truman administration fought back. In the hothouse atmosphere of the Korean War, McCarthy exploited the partisan potential of attacking the state department for the "loss" of China to the "reds." The Acheson state department, so the conservative argument went, had lost China. McCarthy inherited a group of witnesses who were just waiting to testify against Dean Acheson's faculty at the "cowardly college of containment" (Richard Nixon's formulation). The NY lace importer Alfred Kohlberg was among the star witnesses that had been looking for a political outlet to purge the state department. McCarthy called on Kohlberg and a whole list of others before Patrick McCarran's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to investigate the communist ties of the Institute for Public Research. The committee grilled the "China Hands" like John Stewart Service, John Carter Vincent, and John Patton Davies. (All of whom were eventually fired from the department) The roughest treatment was reserved for the eminent Sinologist Owen Lattimore. Lattimore's career as an academic in the U.S. was effectively destroyed by the process. He ended up leaving the U.S. to head the Chinese Studies Program at the University of Leeds in 1963.

As the IPR investigation revealed, McCarthy was aided in his meteoric rise by a network of professional anti-communists. Among this network certainly the most prominent and powerful was J. Edgar Hoover, who only turned against him after he became worried that too many former G-Men were working for the Senator's Committee and only cut him off totally when it became clear that his recklessness had angered Ike. Always the consummate bureaucrat, Hoover knew when to cut an ally loose. When McCarthy took on Eisenhower, by calling the administration "soft" on communism in November 1953, he prompting Eisenhower to get down in the gutter to fight back. The Army McCarthy hearings were prompted by the release by the administration of the records on Private Shine, which then lead to McCarthy being investigated for securing privileges for the special friend of his chief counsel Roy Cohen. The brilliant setup by Joe Brewer was a very public finale to a process whose outcome was more or less pre-determined. Once McCarthy took on the very popular and politically astute president, he was a doomed political figure.

Why did Eisenhower let him get away with it so long? It seems that the reasons were purely political. As Michael Rogin pointed out in The Intellectuals and McCarthy, McCarthy was the darling of the conservative mid-western wing of the Republican party. Eisenhower, clearly in the camp of the eastern elite moderate Republicans, feared splitting the party. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut "And so it goes."… (more)