As the phrase “in the spirit of” suggests, this collection of essays by distinguished contributors is not a detailed historiography, such as Steve Batterson’s The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis: Communism, McCarthyism, and the Myth of Academic Freedom. Chandler’s courage in the face of political persecution by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, his unrelenting activism despite imprisonment and blacklisting, function here (for the most part) as a shared frame of reference in which to consider the struggle for academic freedom in the present-day United States.
Joan W. Scott’s “A Professor’s Fight Against McCarthyism Resonates Today” sets the stage. Diverse entries in the book are linked by the overarching concern with the political climate that several contributors characterize as a new McCarthyism. For example, the White House tweeted on August 5: “Communism is the greatest threat to our country.” Red Scare, like a plastic bottle, never really goes away.
Another recent manifestation is the White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s sermon at the U.S.-hosted Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism on July 16, in which he identified a “fatal cancer on our civilization” — attributed, somehow, to the left. Hard powers granted by the National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 are required to “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest and prosecute those political terrorists who operate in our country.”
If, as Miller also asserts, legal systems don’t work, judicial systems don’t work, jury trials don’t work, one has to wonder what law enforcement is supposed to mean, and what being “completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization” might look like. The accelerating body count of interactions with ICE, police suppression of campus protests, defunding of particular academic programs, and the debanking of Francesca Albanese, a scholar and the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, all come unpleasantly to mind.
Scott notes striking changes in the uses of the First Amendment in political discourse: “It is hard not to conclude that differential applications of the First Amendment have a lot to do with the politics of those invoking it.” Miller states the double standard directly: “One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties,” so “these appeals must fall on deaf ears.”
Ideological constructions of the target(s) of suchlike disquisitions have morphed since the heyday of McCarthy and have become, so to speak, more inclusive and diverse. The target set now encompasses, among other threats to civilization, gender studies (see the essay by Catherine R. Stimpson) and activism for Palestinian rights (see essays by Dima Khalidi and Juan Cole). More examples can be found, in the book and outside of it.
There is, nevertheless, some encouraging news. Ellen Schrecker’s article, “No More Chandler Davises! Academic Freedom Needs Collective Action, Not Heroes,” points out that “collective bargaining is spreading throughout the academy” as “faculty members nationwide have finally begun to recognize the interconnections between academic freedom […] and their working conditions.”
One might have entertained in this context a passing mention of the 1965 Soberman Report on tenure in Canadian universities commissioned by CAUT. But this is a book focused on the U.S.
Some of the concerns raised are not uniquely American. Henry Reichman’s essay tackles the purported principle of neutrality is applied differentially, though not arbitrarily, with the Kalven Report exhumed or reinterred on a case-by-case basis, repressive “neutrality” measures (aimed at students and faculty) available on demand. I do not have space here to describe how Reichman proposes to thread that needle; consider it a teaser.
It is surprising that the collection does not include a contribution on one of the causes important to Chandler, who had been urging the mathematical community to divest from military uses of science. Perhaps the issue would now be one of involvement with technologies of surveillance and military applications of AI. I appreciate this may present difficulties in considerations of academic freedom; it does not follow that it shouldn’t be discussed.
The 22-point manifesto tweeted a few months ago by Palantir, a software company that analyzes data for militaries and police services, proclaims that a new arms race is unfolding, this time for AI weapons; hard power (again) is needed to show who’s boss. While that is too recent to have made it into this volume, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto was unleashed in 2023 and could have been addressed in the spirit of Chandler Davis. Its section titled quite simply “The Enemy” seems relevant to a book concerned with a multidimensional assault on higher education: “Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs,” etc.
I don’t think Andreessen is referring to the PhD-credentialled CEO of Palantir, or to a band of broligarchs, powerful and unaccountable, waxing philosophical on some technological republic while predictive-policing everything from text messages and library searches to medical and bank records, their machinery already on a civilizing mission out there, bombing schools and universities to keep us safe.
Vladimir Tasić is professor of mathematics at the University of New Brunswick, and a member of the CAUT Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee.
