The New McCarthyism: Academic Freedom After 9/11

A few months after ACTA's study was disseminated, Daniel Pipes, the director of a think tank called Middle East Forum, launched a blacklisting internet site called Campus Watch, which publishes dossiers on scholars who criticize US policy in the Middle East or Israel's treatment of Palestinians. On the website one finds a "Keep Us Informed" section, where Pipes encourages students to inform on any professor who deviates from "correct conduct." Some have obediently complied.

These initiatives marked the beginning of a well-orchestrated attack against academic freedom in the US. In mid-January of this year, the Bruin Alumni association offered students $100 to tape leftwing professors at the University of California Los Angeles. The idea was to expose radical professors who "[proselytize] their extreme views in the classroom." 24-year-old Andrew Jones did not wait long and created a website featuring a hit list of 30 professors he considers the top extremist, leftwing offenders.

As Beshara Doumani, a history professor at the University of California Berkeley, points out in his compelling introduction to Academic Freedom after September 11, Pipes and friends have cynically appropriated the liberal terminology of the New Deal and civil rights eras, employing code words such as balance, fairness, diversity, accountability, tolerance, and not least, academic freedom in order to justify the enforcement of a political orthodoxy that undermines these very values.

The book describes this new assault on academic freedom in detail, distinguishing the current wave from the one launched by Senator McCarthy. As Stanford University Professor Joel Beinin observes, the geographical and political context has obviously changed, so that if in the 1950s scholars who offered a dissenting analysis of the Soviet Union and Cold War were decried as traitors, today it is Middle East specialists who are being accused of treason.

But the main difference between the two academic witch hunts is that today private interest groups and not the government are running the show. Of course, the major players within these think tanks have unhindered access to the corridors of government and are frequently successful in influencing high-ranking public servants; yet the resources for the campaign to de-legitimize academic dissent and to control the production of knowledge come from opulent think tanks.

In addition, the strategy employed today is different from the one used during the McCarthy era. The future of academic freedom, Kathleen J. Frydl predicts in her chapter, will not be determined in the courts but by budgets, whereby those who challenge the powers that be will be cut off from resources, while knowledge will be privatized and become the property of those who have the assets to produce it. The measure of academic freedom, she continues, will not be calculated according to who is fired by the university, but by who is hired -- those who appear to be intellectually recalcitrant will simply not be allowed to enter the academic gates. Finally, tenure will no longer guarantee academic freedom, since job security will be destroyed. Tragically, all of the processes described by Frydl are not part of some distant and theoretical future, but in the past years have infiltrated the higher-education system.

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