Abstract
Cold war ideology had serious consequences for American academia. Legend holds that professors were persecuted into silence by McCarthyism, and that everything returned to normal once the paranoia had run its course. But anticommunism had lasting systemic effects upon American scholarship and contributed to a general depoliticizing of research. A spirit of empiricism and logical positivism came to dominate the social sciences, and philosophy became largely analytic. Behaviorism excluded psychoanalysis from psychology. Literary studies developed a “new criticism” that sought to view texts as context-free and autonomous. The role of philanthropic foundations, especially the Ford foundation, also privileged empirical studies. A form of myopia eventually ensued, in which professors became viewed as “leftist liberals,” when, in fact, their concrete political and voting practices maintain a right-wing orientation. The misnomer “leftist liberal” masks the pervasiveness of neoliberal policies that, over the past decades, have reshaped higher education in the US.
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Bonfiglio, T.P. (2017). Anticommunism and Academia. In: The Psychopathology of American Capitalism. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55592-8_9
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