The Trump administration’s attacks on higher education are often called “new McCarthyism,” as the title of a recent conference at Brooklyn College has it. Like the McCarthyites seventy years ago, the Trump administration is using its powers to monitor, harass, and oust perceived political enemies. But the foremost targets of today’s actions, colleges and universities, do not behave as targets did in the McCarthy era. Whatever this is, it isn’t McCarthy redux. It’s far worse.
California, a primary arena of academic McCarthyism in the 1950s and of attacks today, shows the differences. The University of California, Berkeley, has sent the government a list of 160 people alleged to be associated with campus antisemitism and on September 4, 2025, informed those individuals by email that they had been named. The accusations are notably vague. What constitutes “alleged antisemitic incidents” is not defined, and none of the letters states just what behavior or speech provoked its issuance.
The use of vague accusations such as “Communist sympathizing” or “fellow-traveling” was certainly standard during the McCarthy era. But during that time, no university ever “named names” on such a massive and public scale as this. Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr refused entirely to cooperate with the McCarthyites, with the result that a campus security officer, one William Wadman, took upon himself the job of informing on suspect professors and students.
Elsewhere in California, things were more complex. As I have documented in my books on McCarthyism, the chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles, Raymond B. Allen, enthusiastically cooperated with what was called the “California Plan,” which in theory applied to all institutions of higher education in the state. According to the plan, the names of all job candidates at the university were sent first to the head of each campus—at UCLA, the chancellor. The chancellor vetted them according to a sophisticated rationale known as the “Allen Formula,” which Allen himself had originated. Surviving names were then forwarded to the California State Senate Subcommittee on Un-American Activities (CUAC), which was the red-hunting arm of the state legislature and claimed to possess a vast database of alleged subversives. CUAC sent any incriminating information it uncovered back to the university almost always agreed with CUAC’s findings.
Since the plan was directed against job candidates, its targets were mainly young people. This was intentional. Senior candidates were likely already tenured, and they had networks of supporters who could raise an outcry if trouble arose. Junior job candidates, by contrast, often just emerging from graduate school, were more vulnerable.
The plan seems to have worked. After operating for only ten months, CUAC reported that “more than a hundred persons with documented records of Communist activities and affiliations have been removed from the educational institutions of California.” Moreover, CUAC added, all this had happened “without any fanfare or publicity.”
Indeed, during the approximately seven years that the plan was in effect (1953–60), no case of Communist infiltration of universities made the headlines in California. This is in contrast to earlier years, most famously UCLA’s attempted appointment in 1947 of the eminent but atheistic philosopher Max Otto, which made the newspapers and was eventually withdrawn. Seven years after the plan ended, publicity again erupted with UCLA’s attempt to appoint Angela Davis to its philosophy department. While the plan was in effect, confidentiality was maintained.
This emphasis on secrecy, so different from behavior today, is puzzling. The red hunters’ successes were often shouted from the rooftops. Why was it not in these cases?
One obvious reason is that for a university to be found even considering a job candidate who turned out to be a Communist or an “affiliate” was a serious black mark. How had he (or, rarely, she) become a job candidate in the first place? Had a leftist cabal put them forward?
But there was another reason: care for the accused themselves. This care was articulated many years later by E. Wilson Lyon, the president of Pomona College: “The tensions and fears of the McCarthy period led . . . to attempted interference with academic appointments. . . . The grave problems were handled so discreetly, by both the president [that is, by Lyon himself] and the trustees that the faculty and students were totally unaware of them.”
Compare all this with Berkeley’s behavior today. It has blasted 160 names off to the government, without a comprehensive rationale or even the pretense of one but simply as unspecified “allegations.” It makes no effort at confidentiality but declares its action in a series of emails. There is no indication of concern for any of those named.
The damage to them is likely to be significant. Many of those named are untenured lecturers and even students. There is every reason to think that their careers will be harmed or ended. Why employ someone besmirched by such “allegations” when you can hire someone else untouched by them?
Outside California, even the “due process” offered by the McCarthyite California Plan was largely a myth. What tended to happen, as with Morris Judd, a junior professor at the University of Colorado, was that you were summoned to the office of a high administrator who told you, in confidence, that there was “talk” about you and you would be wise to depart. Most of those summoned, apparently, quietly left academia for other fields; we will never know how many. But at least they left with their heads held high. (Judd spent his subsequent working years managing the office of a nearby junkyard.)
For all their faults, some academic leaders of the McCarthy era at least feigned concern for those below them. No such concern appears today at Berkeley, which has cooperated with a brazen witch hunt in ways the red hunters of years gone by could only dream of.
Indeed, open disdain of today’s leaders for those they lead now goes well beyond academia. Young lawyers at law firms that cooperate with Trump feel it when they contemplate building their careers with employment at a compromised law firm on their résumés; The New York Times reported that “it does not appear that [their concerns] are resonating” with leadership. The hundreds of people who work on CBS’s Late Show with Stephen Colbert and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! feel it (as Kimmel remarked) when those shows are summarily canceled or suspended. Their millions of viewers feel it too.
There is more. Immanuel Kant defined the university as a place where only the learned can judge the learned as such. This principle is basic, not only to universities but to all of society. What damage would result if people unschooled in engineering undertook to supervise the construction of jet planes? Or if people who don’t know anything about medicine undertook to judge the safety and efficacy of vaccines?
Berkeley has now announced to the world that the uninformed—apparently, its own legal department, which seems to have sent the letters—have a right to judge the informed. At least one of those named—Judith Butler—is a Jew who believes that being a good Jew compels them to criticize Israel and that this critique is part of their philosophical work. By providing their name to the government, Berkeley is judging that work to be antisemitic. In so doing, those acting on behalf of the university show that they don’t know what antisemitism really is—and that they see no need to learn before taking severe action against someone whom they decide exhibits it.
So, if Immanuel Kant, one of history’s greatest minds, were asked whether Berkeley is a university at all, I fear his answer would be “no.”
And all to please Donald Trump. How sad.
John McCumber is an emeritus distinguished professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of two books on the McCarthy era.