{"id":1421,"date":"2005-03-19T00:11:02","date_gmt":"2005-03-19T08:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/03\/19\/harvard-professors-lack-clue-regarding-what-mccarthyism-was\/"},"modified":"2005-03-19T00:11:02","modified_gmt":"2005-03-19T08:11:02","slug":"harvard-professors-lack-clue-regarding-what-mccarthyism-was","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1421","title":{"rendered":"Harvard Professors Lack Clue Regarding What McCarthyism Was"},"content":{"rendered":"

From a Harvard Crimson<\/em> article<\/a> regarding the Harvard faculty’s vote of “no confidence” in Larry Summers:<\/p>\n

“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.[…]<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a>) have not been fired. The FBI is not secretly talking with employers to make sure that blacklisted people remain unemployed. And as for academia<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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?<\/p>\n

In short, the criticism of Summers – and of Summers’ critics – doesn’t bear any real similarlty to McCarthyism, and suggesting otherwise trivializes McCarthyism.<\/p>\n

Crimson <\/em>link via Crescat Sententia<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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,”? … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-free-speech-censorship-copyright-law-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}