Will the Real McCarthyists Please Stand Up?

Is there a conservative movement to silence dissent on college campuses? At the University of Colorado at Boulder, a radical professor's scholarship and ethnicity is the subject of an official review. Yale recenty fired its one anarchist professor. David Horowitz's Students for Academic Freedom keeps a conservative campus watch list. Conservatives charge that McCarthyist liberals are keeping them out of the Ivory Tower. Liberal professors argue thathat conservatives are out to remake campuses in their image - one professor or one piece of legislation at a time.

Yeshiva University history professor Ellen Schrecker, author of numerous books on the McCarthy Era including No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, puts things in perspective. "The current climate and the McCarthy Era are of course both similar and different," she explained about the post-9/11 United States. "We never see history repeat itself exactly. There's no Congressional investigating committee now, but we see the same process of demonizing enemies and seeing some kind of threat to security that has whipped up a furor with connections to partisan politics."

Ward Churchill, a UC-Boulder ethnic studies professor, thinks the comparison to the Red Scare days isn't accurate to describe the current witch-hunt on campus. "There are parallels to McCarthy's days, but the techniques have advanced," said Churchill in an interview with Clamor. "What that era didn't have is an articulated plan to convert the institutions of higher learning to the dominant ideology."

Schrecker sees an evolution as well, saying, "What's different between now and the McCarthy Era is that then attacks were on individual professors for extracurricular activities with communist groups or whatever. At no time was anybody's teaching or research brought into question. What's different today, and I think more scary, are things directed against curriculum and classroom and attempts by outside political forces to dictate the syllabus."

Middle East Studies professor Joseph Massad endured an investigation into his teaching by his employer, Columbia University, stemming from anti-Israel charges brought on by the pro-Israel group the David Project. And cases such as that of University of Florida computer science professor Sami Al-Arian, whose extracurricular activities with Muslim organizations have him awaiting trial for terrorism charges, illustrate that not all the attacks on professors have shifted to their lecture materials.

Current campus conservatism isn't part of any clandestine plan organized by neoconservatives in a back room of the White House. But it's important to seriously look at cases like those of professors Churchill, Al-Arian, and others in order to determine what kind of wasr is currently being waged on campus and who the combatants are.

Big Man on Campus

The Churchill saga has become a cause celebre for all sides of the controversy. Late last January, Churchill was preparing to leave for Hamilton College, in upstate New York, . But the weekend before his scheduled appearance, remarks he made in an essay titled "Some People Push Back," written the day after September 11, more than three years earlier, became the topic of national conversation. On January 26, 2005 the story was covered by the Associated Press and released on the statewide wire service. At 3:46 A.M. the next morning, Colorado Republican Congress member Bob Beauprez, an alumnus of UC-Boulder, issued a press release calling for Churchill's resignation. Within days, the story was national news, most feverishly embraced by Bill O'Reilly on his conservative talk show, "The O'Reilly Factor." At the end of June, O'Reilly had taken up the Churchill "controversy" on more than 50 programs.