No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities

No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities
ISBN-10
0195035577
ISBN-13
9780195035575
Category
Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / General
Pages
437
Language
English
Published
1986
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Author
Ellen Schrecker

Description

The story of McCarthyism's traumatic impact on government employees and Hollywood screenwriters during the 1950s is all too familiar, but what happened on college and university campuses during this period is barely known. No Ivory Tower recounts the previously untold story of how the
anti-Communist furor affected the nation's college teachers, administrators, trustees, and students. As Ellen Schrecker shows, the hundreds of professors who were called before HUAC and otehr committees confronted the same dilemma most other witnesses had faced. They had to decide whether to
cooperate with the committees and "name names" or to refuse such cooperation and risk losing their jobs. Drawing on heretofore untouched archives and dozens of eprsonal interviews, Schrecker re-creates the climate of fear that pervaded American campuses and made the nation's educational leaders
worry about Communist subversion as well as about the damage that unfriendly witnesses might do to the reputations of their institutions. Noting that faculty members who failed to cooperate with congressional committees were usually fired even if they had tenure, Schrecker shows that these firings
took place everywhere--at Ivy League universities, large state schools and small private colleges. The presence of an unofficial but effective blacklist, she reveals, meant that most of these unfrocked professors were unable to find regular college teaching jobs in the U.S. until the 1960s, after
the McCarthyist furor had begun to subside. No Ivory Tower offers new perspectives on McCarthyism as a political movement and helps to explain how that movement, which many people even then saw as a betrayal of this nation's most cherished ideals, gained so much power.

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