Even though today’s assault on the university is immeasurably worse than McCarthyism, similarities do exist. Both repressive movements emerged from the efforts of powerful right-wing forces to roll back the progressive social and economic reforms of an earlier era. In order to divert attention from their presumably unpalatable goals, those forces started a crusade against an inflated and demonized enemy which they offered to eradicate. In the late 1940s and the 1950s, the target was the nonexistent threat of Communist teachers; today, it’s the supposed radicalism of the university and its alleged failure to fight antisemitism. The success of both campaigns relies on economic sanctions—and on the collaboration of mainstream academic leaders.
Still, the differences between today’s attack on higher education and that of the 1950s are undeniable—and make the current situation so much worse—for two main reasons.
The first is that, unlike McCarthyism, which focused only on the past political activities of individual professors, the current onslaught, led off by the not inconsiderable power of the federal government, touches almost every aspect of higher education. Besides the crackdown on campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza and the threatened deportations of students and faculty members, it also reaches into classrooms, laboratories, curricula, libraries, dormitories, DEI programs, admissions offices, personnel decisions, athletics, accreditation agencies, and even—as in the remaking of the New College of Florida from liberal campus to conservative bastion—entire institutions.
The other reason today’s attack on the university is worse than McCarthyism is that, despite higher education’s much larger footprint within American society, today the academy is in a much weaker position to resist political intervention. The Cold War Red Scare occurred during what historians call academia’s Golden Age. Colleges and universities had considerable prestige and were expanding exponentially, while politicians at every level were throwing money at them. But since the late 1960s, the combination of a powerful right-wing backlash against the student movement and the concurrent imposition of a neoliberal regime of austerity has undermined the academy’s financial stability and undercut its public support.
During the late 1940s and the 1950s, at least 100 professors were fired and blacklisted for political reasons. Most had tenure. And most had once been in or near the Communist Party—but had more or less dropped out. They would have been perfectly willing to talk about their own political activities, but not about those of others—and their administrations knew it. But so powerful was the taint of communism that every institution that housed faculty members targeted by the inquisition felt compelled to investigate those people’s politics and supposed fitness to teach. Surprisingly, those panels never asked about anyone’s teaching and research.