Worse Than McCarthy?
Herbert London, The Hudson Institute

Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, writing in the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education claims we are in a neo McCarthyite siege with unwarranted hysteria arising over an alleged left-wing conspiracy on American campuses.

Writing with febrile enthusiasms, she maintains that academics who once lost their jobs during the McCarthy era are now in danger of facing a similar prospect. “Today’s assault on the academy,” she notes, “is more serious.

Unlike that of the McCarthy era, it reaches directly into the classroom. In the name of establishing intellectual diversity, (David) Horowitz and his allies want to impose outside political controls over core educational functions like personal decisions, curricula, and teaching methods.

Overlooked in Professor Schrecker’s diatribe is the condition that inspired David Horowitz’s campaign: the emergence of a political orthodoxy on campus that does not permit the free exchange of ideas on which the Academy was founded. Moreover, Ms. Schrecker contends a campaign has been organized against Middle Eastern scholars who embrace Palestinian nationalism. Yet she overlooks Martin Kramer’s carefully researched book on Middle East Studies programs in America, which demonstrates their widespread devotion to the Arabist position.

If the critics invoke intellectual diversity as an argument for reform of our colleges, they do so because homogeneity and doctrinal proselytizing characterize higher education in the United States. Schrecker maintains that a web of institutions from departmental committees, faculty senates, disciplinary association, scholarly journals, etc., militate against such an eventuality. What she refuses to comprehend is that the radicals’ march through the institution has resulted in control of the very committees and journals to which she refers. Rather than serve to limit politicization, these institutions reinforce it.

It is hardly coincidental that seventeen state legislatures have considered some version of an academic bill of rights, since parents who foot the bill for education are increasingly aware of a political agenda imposed on their children.

So ensconced in every crevice of higher education is this radical agenda, that it is scarcely recognized. On one occasion when I pointed out the enormous disparity between liberal and conservative professors to a university president, he said “we have you, and I believe there’s another conservative in the law school.”

Professors like Ms. Schrecker who rule the roost do not appreciate the fact that if McCarthyism exists on campus, it takes the form of a “gray listing” of the right. The chastening effect of being isolated or treated as a pariah is not understood by Schrecker and her ilk.

Recently a young assistant professor who had longed to write for Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars, said to me, “I’m hesitant to publish in your journal since it will be held against me during tenure deliberations.” It is not the first time I’ve heard such a claim.

The question I have for Ms. Schrecker is -- Whose McCarthyism is she describing? Power resides with the left on college campuses and, despite all the denials, education is adversely affected. This is not only an argument for professorial protection. It is a plea for students’ rights. If only one point of view prevails in the academy, students are ultimately shortchanged.

Ms. Schrecker worries that “the political chill that characterized the McCarthy era may well return to our campuses.” What she apparently doesn’t understand is that it is already there and it is embraced by her colleagues.

NAS11:52 AM