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Revisiting Red Scare, Scholars Assess Legacy
By Hans Johnson
Even as faculty members prepare to tackle fresh obstacles in a new century, many remain mindful of legacies from the last one. At an October 1999 conference in Berkeley, California, current and former professors gathered to assess the impact of the anticommunist attacks on academics during the late 1940s and 1950s, an episode that is widely regarded as a dark chapter in the history of academic freedom and civil liberties.
Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the anticommunist loyalty oath that the University of California regents imposed on the faculty in 1949, the Berkeley conference featured a panel of three former UC presidents, all of whom had been in one way or another involved with the oath controversy. As a young physicist at UCLA, David Saxon was one of the thirty-one faculty members fired in 1950 for refusing to sign the oath. Clark Kerr, then an economics professor at UC Berkeley, chaired a key faculty committee that tried to solve the crisis, while David Gardner later wrote the definitive study of the whole affair.
Though the oath was soon rescinded, the California conflict shook the entire academic community, which soon faced similar demands for loyalty and for the expulsion of politically suspect professors. Significantly, though fifty years had passed, there was no consensus among the survivors of the loyalty-oath crisis about its impact. Some of the Berkeley panelists insisted that it had damaged the university, while others viewed it as an energizing experience. All, however, recognized that it was an affront to academic freedom and a violation of faculty autonomy.
Even before the AAUP belatedly censured the UC administration, the university tried to undo the harm the oath had caused. After being nominated by the faculty, Clark Kerr became chancellor of the Berkeley campus. In an interview with Academe, Kerr, now an emeritus professor of economics at Berkeley, described his own experiences during the early 1950s. At one point, he was charged by the chair of the California state legislature’s Un-American Activities Committee with having been a courier for the communists in Central America. His success in rebutting the accusation was, he believes, pivotal in helping the regents and the rest of the university community understand the importance of academic freedom.
Kerr went on to head the entire University of California system. In 1964, a few months after Kerr and the regents received the AAUP’s Alexander Meiklejohn Award, the Berkeley campus became embroiled in the tumultuous Free Speech Movement. Kerr’s eventful term as president ended in 1967, when the regents dismissed him after Ronald Reagan became governor.
Kerr sees many lessons from the McCarthy period for today’s professors. He says high-level political finger-pointing at Berkeley faculty actually backfired, helping to unite faculty members while attracting new educators to the institution. "Some faculty came because they heard that here was a feisty faculty," he explains.
Kerr, an AAUP member since 1942, also learned much from his own experiences in the 1950s. One lesson is that faculty need to push for a greater role in campus governance. "The more contact there can be between academics and regents, the better," he says. "Personal contact is so important, and it builds up a good deal of mutual respect."
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