Last month, when Temple University officials persuaded sympathetic state assemblymen that Pennsylvania colleges and universities have no problem with academic freedom, they picked an odd totem to make their case—historically-challenged historian Ellen Schrecker. Dr. Schrecker’s testimony was presented to the Pennsylvania State House of Representatives Committee by Rachel Blau DuPlessis.
“First, she offered a case study of the 1953 firing of Professor Barrows Dunham, the chair of Temple’s Philosophy Department, a rescinding of tenure provoked in large measure by government intervention,” DuPlessis said. “This was used as an a [sic] historical example so that we may learn from history, and is not a comment upon this hearing.”
“She discussed this event in the history of this particular university within the larger context of McCarthyism, showing the general implications for universities and for freedom of thought of this kind of attempt to regulate association, to create an academic blacklist, and to use economic sanctions (job loss), analyzing the chilling effect on the university.”
Dr. Schrecker, who teaches at Yeshiva, fancies herself to be an expert on the McCarthy era. Speaking of learning from history, we should point out that Barrows Dunham testified before the U. S. House of Representatives Committee on UnAmerican Activities, commonly known as HUAC.
Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, R-Wisconsin, chaired the U. S. Senate Government Operations Committee. He never chaired nor served on HUAC. In fact, he never served in the House of Representatives, which, as every high school civics student should know, is a minimum prerequisite for sitting on a committee in that legislative chamber.
This cavalier attitude towards historical precision makes the history professor’s encounters with writers who actually know their subject nothing short of disastrous. Luckily, she does not venture outside of the Ivory Tower too frequently to meet them.
John Earl Haynes of the Library of Congress pointed out to Dr. Schrecker that, contrary to her assertions, the overwhelming evidence from official archives here and abroad proves that the Soviet Union had penetrated the U. S. government before the onset of World War II. Dr. Schrecker dismissed this record as something that happened in the long ago past, a strange mindset for an historian to possess.
When veteran journalist M. Stanton Evans asked her to name people Sen. McCarthy had harmed with false charges of communist conspiracy, Dr. Schrecker said the harm was in the “atmosphere” or “climate.” Thin air is always hard to document, particularly when it is metaphoric.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
