Columbia’s situation is neither unique nor unprecedented. The nation’s colleges and universities have almost always given in to outside political pressures. They did during the 1950s and they do so today. But they have never faced such an existential threat. Despite the academy’s central role within American society, the forces arrayed against it are both more powerful and more focused than ever before. Meanwhile, the structural and ideological transformation that occurred within higher education over the past five decades has rendered it increasingly vulnerable to its enemies.
In the fifties, college administrators fired and blacklisted more than one hundred professors, most of them tenured, because of their supposed connection with communism. But they were never questioned about their teaching and research; they lost their jobs only because of their extracurricular political activities and their resistance to the anticommunist inquisition. McCarthyism did not single out the university; its protagonists selected whatever targets would bring them attention. Their ostensible goal was to eliminate the alleged threat to national security posed by the Communist Party. The inquisitors justified their operations by invoking a demonized portrayal of party members as robots under Moscow’s control who sought to betray their country to the Soviet Union. There was enough plausibility to that scenario to allow McCarthyism to dominate domestic politics for nearly a decade, especially after the Republican Party adopted the anticommunist crusade as its main weapon against the Truman administration in the late 1940s.
The Cold War red scare did not rely heavily on violence or criminal prosecutions; its sanctions were mainly economic. It implemented a two-stage procedure that first identified the supposed subversives, and then punished them. That first stage of exposure was usually handled by an official body like the FBI or a congressional investigating committee. In the second stage, the victims’ employers, including the colleges, did the dirty work. The faculty members who tangled with the witch hunt did not, as was assumed, engage in subversive activities, indoctrinate their students, or skew their research. But they weren’t “innocent liberals” either. Most had once been in or near the Communist Party and would have been willing to talk about it, though they wouldn’t agree to name names. The administrators who fired them knew that.