Professor Weintraub discusses claims of McCarthyism:
"Disagreement is not McCarthyism
By: E. Roy Weintraub
Issue date: 2/14/07 Section: Letters
Last update: 2/14/07 at 7:00 AM EST
I have read the "flyer" for Monday's "Shut Up and Teach" panel discussion, with its reference to Joseph McCarthy, suggesting that dark forces are trying to silence some politically minded Duke faculty.
In the late 1940s, my father, an economist, was attacked in newspaper editorials in The Brooklyn Eagle for teaching communism to nice Catholic boys at St. Johns University. He was, of course, an early Keynesian. In the late 1940s, the man who would become my doctoral adviser had to leave the United States for almost a decade to avoid the agitated involvement of the Regents of the University of Michigan in his tenure case, based on his admitted connection with the Communist Party as a graduate student and young instructor. In those years with the Smith Act in place, one could be jailed for being a Communist Party member. That he was doing the work for which he would later win the Nobel Prize mattered not at all to the Regents."
http://media.www.dukechronicle.com/media/storage/paper884/news/2007/02/14/Letters/Disagreement.Is.Not.Mccarthyism-2719267.shtml?sourcedomain=www.dukechronicle.com&MIIHost=media.collegepublisher.com
I had hoped that this might possibly be worthy of a new thread, but alas, I guess not...