Friendica Social Network (Leipzig)

Victor Silverman

4 Wochen her •

Victor Silverman
4 Wochen her •

Thinking about the absurd declaration by #NYU of its faculty as persona non grata, simply for being present at student demonstrations about #Palestine I am reminded of something Ellen Schrecker years ago wrote about how universities justified the firing of faculty during the McCarthy era

At no point did the college teachers, administrators, and trustees who cooperated with McCarthyism by evicting unfriendly witnesses and other suspected Communists from their faculties admit that they were repressing dissent. On the contrary, in their public statements and in the documentary record that they produced, they often claimed that they were standing up to McCarthyism and defending free speech and academic freedom. It is important, therefore, to go beyond the rhetoric of the period and examine what these people were doing rather than what they were saying. They said that they were opposing Senator McCarthy and the more rabid red-baiters of the period. Yet, when given an opportunity to transform that opposition into something more concrete than words, almost all of these essentially liberal academics faltered. Either they participated in and condoned the dismissals or else, when they opposed them, did so in such a limited fashion that they must have known they would not succeed.

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