What The Hell America!

“The academy did not fight McCarthyism. It contributed to it.” That was historian Ellen Schrecker’s devastating conclusion in her classic study No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, which came out in 1986. Columbia University, while not the worst in Schrecker’s account, was certainly not the best. Today, as the New York Times has revealed, it’s probably the worst.

At the height of the Second Red Scare, just as the House Un-American Activities Committee was beginning its first of many hearings on the threat of communism in higher education, a group of thirty-seven university presidents from the nation’s most prestigious and elite institutions, including Columbia, gathered to make a statement of principles on academic freedom and the Cold War. The year was 1953.

The statement the presidents issued was a disaster. Though claiming to defend academic freedom, their manifesto included sentences such as these: “Free enterprise is as essential to intellectual as to economic progress.”

More important, the thirty-seven presidents insisted that university members were obligated to cooperate with congressional and other kinds of government investigations. If members of the university did not cooperate, they could expect to be fired:

Invocation of the Fifth Amendment places upon a professor a heavy burden of proof of his fitness to hold a teaching a position and lays upon his university an obligation to reexamine his qualifications for membership in its society.

What did that statement mean?

First, university presidents were not simply declaring that members of the Communist Party were not fit to teach (a claim they had made in another section of their manifesto). They were also claiming that anyone taking a principled stand of refusing to cooperate with a government inquisition was also not fit to teach.

Second, refusing to give testimony to a government body was traditionally thought to be a constitutional right, protected by the Fifth Amendment. Though there was always debate whether that right applied only to criminal proceedings, there was no doubt that congressional investigations carried a considerable punitive element, not unlike a criminal prosecution in a court of law. There’s a reason we call the era “McCarthyism.” But with the stroke of a pen, university leaders simply dissolved the protection of the Fifth Amendment. That’s how repression in this country works: what the Bill of Rights putatively protects, the private sector and civil society, including universities, take away.

But here’s the real coup de grâce of that 1953 statement: “When the powers of legislative inquiry are abused, the remedy does not lie in non-cooperation or defiance.” This was the strategy that the academic leaders of the nation’s leading academic institutions took against the Joseph McCarthys, the red hunters, the government inquisitors. In other words, no strategy at all — just submission. This is the strategy that Columbia has adopted today to deal with the Trump administration.

The American right loved the statement. Grayson Kirk, the newly appointed president of Columbia, had misgivings about it but signed it anyway. Not exactly a profile in courage.

One person at Columbia did speak out against it. Robert Lynd, whom some of you may remember as the famous coauthor of the pioneering sociological study Middletown, said the statement was “an offer by the universities to Senator McCarthy to carry on his aims and his work for him.”

That statement, which was made in April 1953, proved to be more prescient than anyone, including Lynd, realized. The following year, Joseph McCarthy was censured, and his career as a red hunter was effectively finished. But the university statement, in all its repressiveness, lived on.

That’s why Schrecker called her book No Ivory Tower.