No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities

This is the first systematic study of McCarthyism - the attempt to label people as communists or communist sympathizers, and so hold them up to public scorn and deprive them of their livelihood. American university life was affected almost as much as the entertainment industry and government service: public universities such as Michigan, Washington, and Rutgers actually expelled faculty members, while those at private institutions like Harvard and Reed were only defended after great controversy. This book first traces how the machinery of McCarthyism worked, then deals with general questions of academic freedom and McCarthyite challenges to it on various campuses (both before and during the 1950s). Finally it deals with the academic blacklist and its effect on individual scholars. Students of modern American political history.