McCarthyism in
Higher Education

While the House Un-American Activities Committee grabbed headlines by investigating Hollywood in 1947, the chill of anticommunism spread into numerous other aspects of American life. Universities were frequently targeted by state and federal officials for fostering communism. In 1948 the state of Wisconsin Un-American Activities Committee questioned faculty members. When the board of regents fired two professors, the university president defended the decision by arguing that any instructor who had been a member of the Communist Party was “incompetent, intellectually dishonest, and derelict in their duty to find and teach the truth.” Two years later, the state of California fired seven faculty members at San Francisco State College when they refused to sign a loyalty oath. At the federal level, congressional investigations into radical faculty members began in earnest in the early 1950s. Accused professors often faced dual interrogations: the first from HUAC and the second from their own university administrators. The nearly one hundred academics who lost their jobs—whether by admitting to a Communist past or by refusing to answer the questions at all—usually found themselves, like their counterparts in Hollywood, unable to find new employment. The following documents examine McCarthyism in higher education during the early 1950s from a number of different viewpoints. As you read, consider the implication for colleges and universities if the principle of academic freedom is overruled in the name of national security.