Is repression on campuses today worse than during McCarthyism? It’s a claim that’s increasingly made, on both the right and the left. Samuel Abrams, a Sarah Lawrence professor and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently concluded that “intellectual life today on campus is worse than the McCarthy era,” an assessment that was promptly echoed by a New York Sun headline.
Liberals have likewise argued that there is a “new campus McCarthyism” caused by conservative forces. Historian Ellen Schrecker, the foremost expert on academic freedom during McCarthyism and author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986), invoked the McCarthy analogy in response to recent right-wing attacks on academe: “It’s worse than McCarthyism. The red scare of the 1950s marginalized dissent and chilled the nation’s campuses, but it did not interfere with such matters as curriculum or classroom teaching.”
Yet the historical comparison is, in many ways, misleading. While political intrusions into academe are indeed much worse today — and likely to get even more repressive under the Trump administration — colleges in the 1950s avoided such measures not because they defended free speech but because they were already suppressing academic freedom. “There will be no witch-hunts at Yale because there will be no witches,” Yale President Charles Seymour announced in 1949. “We do not intend to hire Communists.” Three years later, a Yale survey of faculty noted that the ban on Communists continued with this ironic headline in The New York Times: “Yale Survey Finds No Red Influence or Threats to Academic Freedom.” That historical reality of self-censorship makes it difficult to assess accurate comparisons between McCarthyism and today, when many people are eager to announce how censored they are.
The basis of the latest round of claims about McCarthyism is a new survey of faculty by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which announced that “faculty members are four times more likely to self-censor than they were in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War and McCarthyism.” The basis of the claim is a survey question asked of faculty in the 1950s that FIRE duplicated in 2024: “Have you toned down anything you have written lately because you were worried that it might cause too much controversy?” In the 1950s, 9 percent of faculty affirmed this; in 2024, 35 percent of faculty said yes.
Although the question is the same, the context has changed radically. For one thing, the amount of writing by faculty has increased exponentially. The average professor in the 1950s might have written a few letters and an occasional journal article or research paper. Professors today generate a seemingly endless stream of emails and social-media posts, and they produce much more published research, often on controversial topics. (The number of papers published by 21st-century academics is about 20 times what it was in 1950.)
The historical reality of self-censorship makes it difficult to assess accurate comparisons between McCarthyism and today, when many people are eager to announce how censored they are.
Emails and social media, according to FIRE’s faculty survey, are by far the most common form of reported self-censorship in writing. A majority of liberals, moderates, and conservatives all reported self-censoring their emails and social media, about twice the levels reported for academic publications. And for good reason: On January 14, Millsaps College fired a tenured professor for writing an email to three students that described America as a “racist, fascist nation.” Professors who self-censor their email and social media today are not necessarily more repressed than professors of the 1950s: They just have more opportunities to express themselves in writing, and thus more opportunity to censor themselves as well.
So when professors say that they tone down what they write, what do they really mean? We don’t know. We certainly don’t have an easy way to measure levels of political repression between individuals or over the span of decades based on these vague survey questions.
General surveys of self-censorship or “toning down” writing are a poor measure of how much repression exists. If you look at surveys of the American general public, reported self-censorship steadily increased over the decades from 13 percent in 1954 to 48 percent in 2015, virtually matching FIRE’s finding that self-censorship by academics has nearly quadrupled. In fact, every era since the McCarthy era has had more self-censorship than the alleged pinnacle of freedom achieved in America in 1954. Since most people self-censor out of fear of offending others or being criticized, it’s quite possible that reported self-censorship simply increases as communities grow more diverse, as has happened in America (and its colleges) over the past 70 years.
FIRE’s new survey will at least correct some misinformation from its president and chief executive Greg Lukianoff, who, in a 2023 article for the Washington Examiner entitled “The New Red Scare Taking Over America’s College Campuses,” claimed that the number of current-day professors who were “self-censoring in light of the political climate” was “almost 90 percent.” The new 35-percent figure is misleading enough, given historical differences in writing quantity, but it’s less misleading than 90 percent.
Lukianoff has a history of playing fast and loose with such numbers: In The Canceling of the American Mind, the 2023 book he co-wrote with Rikki Schlott, he estimated that during the McCarthy era, “only 100 to 150 professors were fired” while from 2014 to 2022, there were 166 professors fired. This sounds damning until you consider that there are six times as many professors today compared to the start of the McCarthy era, which means that the proportion of faculty dismissed was much higher in the 1950s. Moreover, the number of unreported firings in the McCarthy era was probably much higher than today. The 1950s had no internet or social media to report dismissals and few media outlets focused on higher education. There were no emails to reveal plots to fire faculty, and no Freedom of Information Act laws to compel disclosures. Faculty had essentially no legal rights against dismissals, and so almost no lawsuits were filed. Faculty had no unions to protect their rights or raise objections, and advocacy groups such as the American Association of University Professors were tiny, ineffectual, and isolated compared to the vast network mobilized by organizations like FIRE to support dismissed faculty today.
FIRE hasn’t always thrown around McCarthy parallels so lightly. Twenty years ago, David French, then the president of FIRE, mocked any comparisons to McCarthyism: “When you compare critics of the academic establishment to Joseph McCarthy, you lose a bit of credibility.” French added, “when describing this new McCarthyism, it is no longer necessary to point to any actual censorship and repression; it is merely enough to point to the fear (reasonable or unreasonable? Apparently, it doesn’t matter) of the employed-for-life tenured class.” Today, FIRE is following that same script.
I remain skeptical of the assertions from both the left and the right that campuses today are worse than McCarthyism. It seems ridiculous to claim that America and its universities were freer in the early 1950s at the height of McCarthyism and Jim Crow, when Communists were routinely banned and the power of colleges to censor was virtually unchecked, than they are today.
But perhaps McCarthyism shouldn’t be our measuring stick. We can recognize — and fight — the tremendous threats to academic freedom today without waiting until they’re proven to be the worst in history.
In this battle over which “worse than McCarthyism” is happening today, the new McCarthyism of the left or the old McCarthyism of the right, there is another even more alarming alternative: What if they’re both partly correct?
To be clear, I think most of the censorship in higher education comes from the right. Both left-wingers and conservatives face internal campus repression, while almost all of the external political threats to academic freedom today come from Republicans. But unless we see the multifaceted dangers to free expression on campus, the solutions offered will be partial, inadequate, unprincipled, and often destructive to academic freedom.
Everyone downplays the threat posed by their allies to academic freedom. Some leftists who see only the McCarthyism of the right think it’s reasonable to purge conservatives who threaten the freedom of oppressed minorities. The conservatives who see only the McCarthyism of the left often propose their own McCarthyite solutions, calling for legislative intrusion and bans on subversive ideas like diversity, equity, and inclusion.
We can recognize — and fight — the tremendous threats to academic freedom today without waiting until they’re proven to be the worst in history.
Because FIRE perceives an overwhelming, McCarthyesque threat from the left, it is willing to impose repressive measures to fight it. FIRE has proposed model legislation, “The Intellectual Freedom Protection Act,” that is a dangerous expansion of government power over faculty hiring. Under FIRE’s model act, not only would diversity statements at public colleges be entirely banned, but faculty-hiring committees would also be breaking the law if they gave any consideration to how prospective faculty members would encourage any kind of diversity — including intellectual diversity — in their classes.
The “McCarthyism model” — where one dominant ideology exclusively suppresses the opposing view — does not describe the complex dynamic of censorship in academe today. The belief that censorship is uniformly directed against your side leads to a situation in which you are incapable of seeing the possibility of censorship resulting from your own actions, thus creating the danger of more repression.
When we see campuses solely in terms of a McCarthyism from our ideological enemies, we blind ourselves to the full panoply of censorship that exists. We may abandon a principled commitment to academic freedom when we believe that the fight to defeat our censorious enemies must be pursued by any means necessary. The certainty about a “new McCarthyism” has tempted conservatives to embrace their own McCarthyist instincts. Ironically, the perception that leftists have made today’s campus climate “worse than McCarthyism” may embolden a right-wing movement to actually make it come true.
