Talk

BFA Visual and Critical Studies and the SVA Honors Program present noted American historian Ellen Schrecker to speak on political repression and the universities from McCarthyism to Trump.

McCarthyism dominated U.S. domestic politics for about a decade during the early years of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Misnamed for a notorious senator from Wisconsin who came late to his own party, it was a campaign to drive supposed subversives out of every position of influence within American society. It had begun during the late 1940s as a response to the tensions of the emerging Cold War against the Soviet Union and a baseless, partisan attack on the Democratic administration of President Harry Truman as soft on Communism. Before it ended in the late 1950s, about 15,000 (or more) people lost their jobs and were blacklisted. Several hundred went to prison. And two – Ethel and Julius Rosenberg – were killed. Even so, limited as it was, it spread a miasma of fear over the entire country as the mainstream institutions of American society purged their ranks of the politically tainted individuals identified by such official witch hunters as the FBI, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Senator Joseph McCarthy. And almost nobody spoke out against it. In retrospect, it became common to regret its incursions against free speech and the right to dissent and assume that McCarthyism would never happen again. But could it? 

Ellen Schrecker is an American historian known for her research on McCarthyism, political repression, and American higher education. Her latest book, edited with Valerie C. Johnson and Jennifer Ruth, is The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing War on Academic Freedom (2024). Among her most important works are The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (2021); Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998); and No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986). She has also published several other books and edited collections as well as dozens of articles in both scholarly and general interest publications. A retired Professor of History at Yeshiva University, she also serves on the Steering Committee of Historians for Peace and Democracy and is active in the American Association of University Professors, having edited its magazine, Academe, for several years and now belongs to its Committee A on Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance.