Cold War On Campus

"The most complete and intensiveanalysis of what [Lewis defines as the Cold War or what might be described as the inquisitionalonslaught by federal and state 'un-American' committees on the integrity and independence of theAmerican professorate during 1946-56." -Edward C. McDonagh, The American Journal ofEducation "Lewis's work reinforces a fundamental point.Administrators at over one hundred institutions share responsibility for actions that helpedstrike a tragic blow to academic freedom and intellectual culture during the 1950s. They wereparticipants in a campaign of political expedience and aggression-along with thousands ofnational leaders." -David R. Homes, Journal of HigherEducation

As the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated in the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government directed billions of dollars to American universities to promote higher enrollments, studies of foreign languages and cultures, and, especially, scientific research. In Cold War University, Matthew Levin traces the paradox that developed: higher education became increasingly enmeshed in the Cold War struggle even as university campuses became centers of opposition to Cold War policies. The partnerships between the federal government and major research universities sparked a campus backlash that provided the foundation, Levin argues, for much of the student dissent that followed. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, one of the hubs of student political activism in the 1950s and 1960s, the protests reached their flashpoint with the 1967 demonstrations against campus recruiters from Dow Chemical, the manufacturers of napalm. Levin documents the development of student political organizations in Madison in the 1950s and the emergence of a mass movement in the decade that followed, adding texture to the history of national youth protests of the time. He shows how the University of Wisconsin tolerated political dissent even at the height of McCarthyism, an era named for Wisconsin's own virulently anti-Communist senator, and charts the emergence of an intellectual community of students and professors that encouraged new directions in radical politics. Some of the events in Madison—especially the 1966 draft protests, the 1967 sit-in against Dow Chemical, and the 1970 Sterling Hall bombing—have become part of the fabric of "The Sixties," touchstones in an era that continues to resonate in contemporary culture and politics.

The "cold war university" is the academic component of the military-industrial-academic complex, and its archetype, according to Rebecca Lowen, is Stanford University. Her book challenges the conventional wisdom that the post-World War II "multiversity" was created by military patrons on the one hand and academic scientists on the other and points instead to the crucial role played by university administrators in making their universities dependent upon military, foundation, and industrial patronage. Contesting the view that the "federal grant university" originated with the outpouring of federal support for science after the war, Lowen shows how the Depression had put financial pressure on universities and pushed administrators to seek new modes of funding. She also details the ways that Stanford administrators transformed their institution to attract patronage. With the end of the cold war and the tightening of federal budgets, universities again face pressures not unlike those of the 1930s. Lowen's analysis of how the university became dependent on the State is essential reading for anyone concerned about the future of higher education in the post-cold war era.

Explores what happened to the university in the postwar years and why these changes occurred

In this conceptually bold project, Heonik Kwon uses anthropology to interrogate the cold war's cultural and historical narratives. Adopting a truly panoramic view of local politics and international events, he challenges the notion that the cold war was a global struggle fought uniformly around the world and that the end of the war marked a radical, universal rupture in modern history. Incorporating comparative ethnographic study into a thorough analysis of the period, Kwon upends cherished ideas about the global and their hold on contemporary social science. His narrative describes the slow decomposition of a complex social and political order involving a number of local and culturally creative processes. While the nations of Europe and North America experienced the cold war as a time of "long peace," postcolonial nations entered a different reality altogether, characterized by vicious civil wars and other exceptional forms of violence. Arguing that these events should be integrated into any account of the era, Kwon captures the first sociocultural portrait of the cold war in all its subtlety and diversity.

The story of McCarthyism's traumatic impact on government employees and Hollywood screenwriters during the 1950s is all too familiar, but what happened on college and university campuses during this period is barely known. No Ivory Tower recounts the previously untold story of how the anti-Communist furor affected the nation's college teachers, administrators, trustees, and students. As Ellen Schrecker shows, the hundreds of professors who were called before HUAC and otehr committees confronted the same dilemma most other witnesses had faced. They had to decide whether to cooperate with the committees and "name names" or to refuse such cooperation and risk losing their jobs. Drawing on heretofore untouched archives and dozens of eprsonal interviews, Schrecker re-creates the climate of fear that pervaded American campuses and made the nation's educational leaders worry about Communist subversion as well as about the damage that unfriendly witnesses might do to the reputations of their institutions. Noting that faculty members who failed to cooperate with congressional committees were usually fired even if they had tenure, Schrecker shows that these firings took place everywhere--at Ivy League universities, large state schools and small private colleges. The presence of an unofficial but effective blacklist, she reveals, meant that most of these unfrocked professors were unable to find regular college teaching jobs in the U.S. until the 1960s, after the McCarthyist furor had begun to subside. No Ivory Tower offers new perspectives on McCarthyism as a political movement and helps to explain how that movement, which many people even then saw as a betrayal of this nation's most cherished ideals, gained so much power.

During the Cold War, more than 36,000 individuals entering Canada claimed Czechoslovakia as their country of citizenship. A defining characteristic of this migration of predominantly political refugees was the prevalence of anti-communist and democratic values. Diplomats, industrialists, politicians, professionals, workers, and students fled to the West in search of freedom, security, and economic opportunity. Jan Raska’s Czech Refugees in Cold War Canada explores how these newcomers joined or formed ethnocultural organizations to help in their attempts to affect developments in Czechoslovakia and Canadian foreign policy towards their homeland. Canadian authorities further legitimized the Czech refugees’ anti-communist agenda and increased their influence in Czechoslovak institutions. In turn, these organizations supported Canada’s Cold War agenda of securing the state from communist infiltration. Ultimately, an adherence to anti-communism, the promotion of Canadian citizenship, and the cultivation of a Czechoslovak ethnocultural heritage accelerated Czech refugees’ socioeconomic and political integration in Cold War Canada. By analyzing oral histories, government files, ethnic newspapers, and community archival records, Raska reveals how Czech refugees secured admission as desirable immigrants and navigated existing social, cultural, and political norms in Cold War Canada.