Academic Freedom under Fire: The American Association of University Professors from McCarthyism to the 1970s

Although many geezers and historians consider the 1950s and early 1960s to be the “Golden Age” of American higher education when the whole system expanded and money seemed no problem, politically things were much dicier. The McCarthy era witch hunt cost dozens, perhaps hundreds, of faculty members their jobs while constricting the political activities of their colleagues and students. That quiescence ended by the 1960s, as the highly charged issues of that decade swept through the nation’s campuses.

The AAUP’s response to all this repression and turmoil was mixed. For a variety of reasons, the Association essentially sat out McCarthyism. Hobbled by personal problems, the general secretary did not initiate or publish investigations by the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Thus, it was not until 1956 -- seven years after the anticommunist witch hunt hit American campuses and much too late to affect it – that the organization issued a report condemning the most egregious academic freedom violations of that era.

A few years later, when the AAUP confronted the academic fall-out of the Civil Rights Movement, it did a credible job of investigating and reporting on the cases of professors – black and white – who got into trouble for supporting the struggle for racial equality in the South. Later on, as student unrest swept through the nation’s campuses, the Association not only dealt with the traditional violations of academic freedom that the unrest had spawned, but also issued some thoughtful policy statements. How effective the organization’s voice had been is hard to tell, especially since the economic crises of the 1970s challenged the status of the professoriate in ways that the AAUP is still sorting out.