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.
