From a Harvard Crimson article regarding the Harvard faculty’s vote of “no confidence” in Larry Summers:
“Academic freedom is on trial, and…a victory for President Summers’ critics will be a very significant blow to academic freedom in American higher education,”? said Winthrop Professor of History Stephan Thernstrom, who likened criticism of Summers to McCarthy-era tactics of suppressing free speech.[…]
But Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and Professor of Comparative Literature Susan R. Suleiman rejected [Thernstrom’s] argument that Summers’ critics were silencing free speech.
“The one thing that really pushes my buttons is when people try to paint every legitimate action as a form of political correctness. I really find that that is a blunt instrument and that is McCarthyite tactics,”? she said, provoking applause from many faculty members.
Reality check: No one has released a list of 30,000 books which libraries are expected to pull from their shelves. No one is being yanked before Congress and asked to choose between “being in contempt of this Committee and going to jail or forcing me to really crawl through the mud to be an informer.” Ten thousand people (to use Ralph Brown’s conservative estimate) have not been fired. The FBI is not secretly talking with employers to make sure that blacklisted people remain unemployed. And as for academia:
The main academic purges occurred from 1952 to 1954 when the congressional committees had run out of more glamorous targets and turned to the nation’s colleges and universities. Dismissals were not automatic; an academic hearing usually followed the congressional one. Though the faculty committees that mounted the investigations did not normally demand that their colleagues name names, they did expect them to cooperate and discuss their past political activities. People who refused, who felt that such questions were as illegitimate as HUAC’s, were invariably fired. So were most of the others, especially at schools where conservative or politically insecure administrators and trustees refused to accept the favorable recommendations of faculty committees. In a few cases, if a professor had tenure, taught at a relatively less vulnerable private university, and cooperated fully with the institution’s investigation, he or she could retain his or her job. But these were exceptional cases and they often masked the less publicized dismissals of junior professors, who were invariably let go when their contracts expired. By the time the McCarthyist furor subsided, close to a hundred academics had lost their jobs for refusing to cooperate with anti-Communist investigators. Several hundred more were probably eased out under the FBI’s Responsibilities Program and similar measures.
Once fired, the politically tainted professors could rarely find other academic jobs. Like the Hollywood blacklistees, they were confronted with an unacknowledged but thoroughly effective embargo.
Does anyone seriously think that, say, Harvard professor and Summers supporter Stephen Pinker is going to be subjected to this sort of treatment? Or his critics?
In short, the criticism of Summers – and of Summers’ critics – doesn’t bear any real similarlty to McCarthyism, and suggesting otherwise trivializes McCarthyism.
Crimson link via Crescat Sententia.
McCarthy’s spiritual children are busily at work, though.
The RSS links at the bottom of your blog layout are broken–they have “feed:” in the beginning for some reason. Thought you might want to fix it.
Thernstrom’s comments were outrageous and overblown on a lot of levels; I think he probably hurt his cause. He did have an extended comparison with McCarthyism. There was scattered but vigorous applause after he spoke, so there are other professors who don’t know what McCarthyism is. Suleiman’s response was much more in passing.
One correction: Steven Pinker is now at Harvard (not MIT), and in fact spoke against the second proposal on the grounds that there was no principle behind it. But no, his job is not in danger, nor are the jobs of most of the critics. There are Summers critics who are reluctant to speak, particularly junior faculty; it’s widely believed that if the measure had not been a secret ballot, it would have passed. But that’s standard politics in the workplace.
It’s not clear to me what the right standard of comparison should be. This fracas doesn’t have the nation-wide scope that McCarthyism had; at Harvard, McCarthyism amounted to a few junior faculty losing their jobs. The big difference is that if anyone loses their job over this they will likely have no trouble finding a job somewhere else.
I thought so, too. Then I tried deleting the “feed:” bit, and that completely screwed up the layout of the entire page. The sidebar was no longer on the side, the text was all the way to the left rather than being centered in the white area, etc.
So I’ve put the “feed:” thing back.
I don’t understand CSS at all.
Correction made in the post, thanks.
Thanks also for your comments, where were right on target.
What happened to the hundred academics who definitely lost their jobs because of McCarthyism, does anyone know? It’s been 50 years, their career stories must have been complete. Did some of them get new academic jobs when the hysteria eased? Did they get more lowly jobs, schoolteaching or something unrelated to education at all? If so, how did they avoid being rejected as “overqualified,” or did that excuse for not hiring people not exist then? And how could they have gotten any jobs in the midst of that hysteria? Who would hire a supposed “known Communist sympathizer” even to be a janitor? Or did they all just starve to death on the streets?
As someone whose professional career was torpedoed by malevolent supervisors, and who can’t get another job like it because I have no good references, and who can’t get a lowlier job because I’m overqualified, I’m kind of curious.
Academics are incredibly at the whim of what people say about them. Even today, people who are “troublesome” have a hard time getting a job where they want to be. I would imagine McCarthyism had an enormous impact on the lives of young scholars.
Change your html for the RSS link so it points to:
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/wp-rss2.php
Oh, I forgot, and change it for your comments so it points to:
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/wp-commentsrss2.php
Long delay because I’ve been sitting here in a flu daze thinking thinking thinking about the subject…and because of the flu daze must delay posting on it. But did want to post this fix. Now, back to staring at the wall…
Academic freedom is on trial? Uh, no, that would be the case if there were any concerted campaign to remove Summers from his tenured position as faculty. His position as president of the University is another matter entirely and has nothing to do with matters of academic freedom. If you want to see where academic freedom is really on trial these days just look to Colorado. How do Summers defenders think about Ward Churchill I wonder.
I’m surprised in general that there has been little substantive discussion of the Summers case. There have been a lot of aspects that have been ignored. Many people (including some who should know better, like LuboÅ¡ Motl) are focusing on his January remarks. There’s a lot more than that to what was going on; a lot of it has to do with governance of the University and the relation between adminstration and faculty.
For a better view, I recommend Harvard Magazine‘s coverage, which includes texts of many of the remarks for and against Summers. I might recommend starting with Prof. Hoxby’s remarks on February 22 and Prof. Matory’s remarks on February 15.
Freed is right. Academic freedom is far more applicable to a tenured professor like Churchill than it is to a university president. Just because he sits atop that throne doesn’t make him an “academic” – that status lef thim when he left his positions at MIT and Harvard for one at the World Bank, etc. Tenured is the key word at play.
Stephan Thernstrom has a long history of this sort of thing. In 1991, _New York_ Magazine published an article entitled “Are You Politically Correct?” which popularized the term “P.C.” and the claim that doctrinaire liberals were forcing students and teachers to oppose racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and social injustice under pain of stigmatization. Illustrated with pictures of Nazis burning books and of Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution, the article began by presenting Thernstrom as a martyr to “P.C.” “As he walks by on the quad, students whisper, ‘That man’s a *racist*” (The article went on to express shock that, with “Political Correctness” replacing Greatness as a criterion for study, professors feel free to to teach works that are not famous: “Catharine Stimpson praises an obscure novel called _Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand_”).
Simon –yes to all your speculations. Some were able to find work elsewhere, some got jobs in Canada, some left university teaching, some committed suicide in the face of public shaming. Griffin Fariello’s _Red Scare_ gives a good overview. A number of private universities didn’t put McCarthyist policies into effect: hence when intellectual historian Ludwig Edelstein refused to promise the State of California he would not mention Marx in his Berkeley philosophy classes, he got work at Johns Hopkins. Black colleges in the South were also, at least for a time, accommodating to scholars who’d been Redhunted out of their former jobs.
I still remember when William F. Buckley was invited as commencement speaker for the Vassar Class of 1980. He was later disinvited, but not because of political correctness per se. It was because the senior class apparently did not realize the Buckley family’s role in drumming out certain Vassar faculty during the McCarthy period. At least as one story had it, Priscilla got a bad grade from a particular teacher, and decided to get even by bringing her family’s influence to bear.
According to Eleanor Roosevelt Senator McCarthy had ‘very hairy knuckles’.
Little known fact: Robert F. Kennedy was on Joseph McCarthy’s staff, as his legal counsel.
Thanks for the links, Dylan. I’m starting to think my spouse’s push for our kids to go to Yale is maybe not such a bad idea.
Stephan Thernstrom has a long history of this sort of thing. In 1991, _New York_ Magazine published an article entitled “Are You Politically Correct?”? which popularized the term “P.C.”? and the claim that doctrinaire liberals were forcing students and teachers to oppose racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and social injustice under pain of stigmatization.
I can’t speak to Thernstrom, but I graduated from college in 1989 and PC had already had lots of discussion, not just on campus but nationally (the oppressive powers of the PC police were being decried, along with the dangers of ecstasy), so I’m not sure this was the really the break-out moment for the concept.
of course, it tired us then too. or rather, there was a brief moment when the term was a useful way to capture the shock awakening that many folks had on coming to a large diverse campus, but almost immediately it became a put-down by the right…
I don’t know a lot about the Summers casse, but so far, I would say i am a Summers supporter. A major distinction in this case vs. the Colorado case, is that one is a state institution and one is not.