BY ELLEN SCHRECKER

Every once in a while, when some new threat to civil liberties or violation of academic freedom surfaces, I get a call from a journalist, documentary filmmaker, or fellow academic asking me to compare the current situation to McCarthyism.

”Can it happen again?” “Is what’s happening today as bad as it was in the 1950s?”

I’m an expert, you see. I’ve written several books about the Cold War red scare and academic freedom and have just finished one about universities in the 1960s. So, whether it was the culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s or David Horowitz’s abortive Academic Bill of Rights in the early 2000s or the attacks on Muslim and pro-Palestinian academics after 9/11 or the latest from Donald Trump, the calls come. Since I’m a historian, my response to such queries is invariably nuanced: “It depends on the context.”

Today, however, there’s no more nuance. McCarthyism has returned.

Or at least it has in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah – all states whose legislatures or education officials have enacted laws or taken other steps to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory or such other “divisive concepts” as race and sex. Similar measures have been introduced or may be pending in nearly fifteen other states. These measures are succeeding in part because the institutions under attack have been so starved and demonized that they are unable to mount an effective defense.

It’s worse than McCarthyism. The red scare of the 1950s marginalized dissent and chilled the nation’s campuses, but it did not interfere with such matters as curriculum or classroom teaching. Its goal was to eliminate communism (however loosely defined) and all the individuals, organizations, and ideas associated with it from any position of influence within American society. The witch hunters achieved that goal by firing people who had once been in or near the small, unpopular Communist party and/or refused to inform on their ex-comrades. They also relied on blacklists, loyalty oaths, speaker bans, and interference from the FBI and other anti-communist investigators.

Academic institutions frequently cooperated—either openly by dismissing professors under attack or else passively, like the AAUP at the time, by mounting little or no resistance to the purges. But the classroom was not targeted. It didn’t have to be. The academic community got the message. Without any specific instructions, many of its members pruned their syllabi and stopped dealing with controversial subjects in their courses—if, indeed, they ever had.

That began to change with the civil rights movement. By the mid-1960s, colleges and universities could not avoid confrontation—both institutional and intellectual—with the real-world issues of race, gender and social inequality. As a result, higher education today is more diverse, its course offerings more probing and inclusive. New problems arose—matters of access and affordability, as well how to ensure that the 75 percent of the nation’s faculty members who lack full-time tenured and tenure-track jobs have the resources to provide a quality education for their increasingly stressed students.

The current campaign to limit what can be taught in high school and college classrooms is clearly designed to divert angry voters from the deeper structural problems that cloud their own personal futures. Yet it is also a new chapter in the decades-long campaign to roll back the changes that have brought the real world into those classrooms. In one state after another, reactionary and opportunistic politicians are joining that broader campaign to overturn the 1960s’ democratization of American life. By attacking the CRT bogeyman and demonizing contemporary academic culture and the critical perspectives that it can produce, the current limitations on what can be taught endanger teachers at every level, while the know-nothingism these measures encourage endangers us all.

Today, the AAUP faces its greatest challenge ever. If the institutions within which we work are to survive as anything more than limited training facilities for most of their students and privileged centers of intellectual growth for the 1 percent, we must recalibrate our operations. Not only must we understand the threat to higher education, but we must disseminate that knowledge to ourselves, our colleagues, our students, their parents, and, ultimately, to the broader public as well.

This can be done. In 1965 as the war in Vietnam was being ramped up, several dozen faculty members at the University of Michigan invented the teach-in to educate their colleagues and students about why the war was wrong. The movement spread throughout academia and then the rest of society. Though it took nearly a decade before Washington finally pulled out of its disastrous venture, the resistance to it had started on campus. Perhaps a similar movement to save our democratic system can start here too. We have no alternative but to try.

Ellen Schrecker is a retired professor of history at Yeshiva University who has written extensively about the Cold War Red scare, higher education, and academic freedom. Her forthcoming book, The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s, will be published by University of Chicago Press in December 2021. Among her books are No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986), The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (1994), and Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998). She has also edited several volumes including Cold War Triumphalism: Exposing the Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism (2004). A former editor of the AAUP’s magazine, Academe, she also writes about academic freedom and the university and has recently published The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the University (2010).