Schrecker, Ellen W. No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 437 pages.
Ellen Schrecker is a Harvard Ph.D. who teaches history at Princeton,
which makes her book on McCarthyism in academia very thorough, somewhat
aloof and dry, and just a shade indignant that the long arm of politics was
able to reach in from the real world and pluck tenured professors from their
privileged perches. The fact that this book was published in the first place
is a measure of the typical academic's sense of self-importance. During the
1950s, hundreds of professors were forced to testify under threat of contempt
and some who refused lost their jobs. Not many years later, hundreds of
thousands of their students were forcibly sent to Vietnam to kill or be
killed, and that seemed okay. Similarly, Schrecker's account of the horrible
blacklist that prevented some academics from finding jobs also deserves
little sympathy. Today's political correctness and preferential hiring and
admissions is a self-imposed campus orthodoxy which, by any reasonable
standard, is more oppressive for more academics than the 1950s ever were.
So Schrecker's sob stories of ruined careers don't interest us much,
but occasionally she mentions one of Joseph McCarthy's flunkies, or a
professor who was turning in his colleagues just a bit too eagerly. The
names plucked from this book tend to fall into those two categories, along
with a few names of McCarthy resisters whom we recognized and respect.
ISBN 0-19-503557-7
Extract the names from this source
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