Dominique Baker
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bakerdphd.bsky.social
Dominique Baker
@bakerdphd.bsky.social
27K followers 640 following 23K posts
Went to some colleges, now studying them for a living
Talk equally about ed policy and reality tv
She/Her
Personal account

https://www.dominiquebaker.com/

(I generally don't follow students as they deserve space to blow off steam about people like me)
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bakerdphd.bsky.social
A) I told y'all to read No Ivory Tower

B) I'll include my thread on my reread of the book in a reply

C) Lol well now I guess I don't need to write up my thoughts on the first and second red scares and higher ed (though I do have more thoughts!)
Screenshot of the article which reads: The historians, lawyers, and scholars I spoke with were in marked agreement that the current moment is not just comparable to but even more damaging than previous Red Scares. Within higher education, today’s crackdown is “worse than McCarthyism—much worse,” Ellen Schrecker, a historian and the author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, told me. Then, she explained, individual academics were scrutinized and fired for Communist ties. But today, the country is experiencing a “frontal attack on everything that has to do with universities and colleges,” Schrecker said. Screenshot of the article which reads: When I spoke with Schrecker about her study of the second Red Scare, she pointed to Kimmel’s victory as an indication of the difference between the McCarthy era and today. During McCarthyism, “there was essentially no opposition,” she told me. “People either supported the purges, or else they were too afraid.” One representative anecdote in No Ivory Tower describes a graduate student at the University of Chicago who, during the ’50s, was unable to persuade frightened colleagues to sign a petition—not about any politically sensitive topic but for the university to install a vending machine in their laboratory. In contrast, after Disney pulled Kimmel from the air, petitions and calls for boycotts blossomed. The ACLU launched a campaign to “defend free speech,” and hundreds of actors and artists signed on.
November 10, 2025 at 10:30 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Just got this email. I do assume that this is how they got into someone at penn gse's email (not confirmed, this is just my hypothesis). Makes me wonder what the plans are at other institutions.
Screenshot of email which reads: Recently, there has been an increase in phishing attempts targeting University students, with several incidents reported over the past week. These scams have become more direct and aggressive, often involving individuals impersonating University officials to obtain sensitive information. It’s more important than ever to stay vigilant and informed to protect both your personal data and the University’s information.
November 10, 2025 at 6:35 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Lol look at education shining
Screenshot of article which reads: On the other hand, four of the five programs not included as “professional” have higher earnings than debt, with nursing and educational administration being the only programs with sufficient data that had debt levels below 60% of earnings. More than one-third of rehabilitation programs had debt over the new $100,000 cap, while few programs in other fields had that high of a debt level. (Education looks pretty good now, doesn’t it?)
November 10, 2025 at 4:52 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
I mean, c'mon, that's prose honey
Screenshot of article that reads: Because what this sort of reporting ultimately means is that if you have enough money to get somebody, anybody, to produce a white paper for you, which you can then put on some think-tank stationery? Then, my friend, you are ready to enter into the rushing current of elite reportage. For no matter how unhinged the position you’ve taken, or paid someone marginally credentialed to sketch out on your behalf—“Can Woman Think?: We Investigate,” “Is the Negro a Man: A Reconsideration”—that opinion will, by virtue of such provenance, possess all needed evidentiary gravity for the Times. And then some. Screenshot of the article which reads: It’s not that those things don’t matter: they absolutely goddamn do, and will keep on mattering, and I wouldn’t go on with the whole tedious business of teaching if I thought otherwise. It’s just that they never mattered much to the Times and they are, to appearances, mattering less and less by the day. I should remember that, and so should you.
November 8, 2025 at 7:11 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Here's the NBER

www.nber.org/books-and-ch...
Screenshot of the top of the working paper. Title is "The Economics of Postdoctoral Researcher Positions." Authors are: Donna K. Ginther, University of Kansas & NBER, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Iowa State University & NBER. Published September 17, 2025. Abstract reads: Between 1979 and 2019 the number of postdoctoral researchers in the U.S. increased approximately four-fold, substantially outpacing growth in the numbers of graduate students and faculty at U.S. universities. This chapter argues that the increased reliance on postdocs within the scientific workforce reflects the uncoordinated nature of science funding. The NIH doubling in the early 2000s increased both demand for and the supply of postdocs resulting in a worsening of employment conditions, but this relationship between biomedical R&D funding and postdoc numbers broke down after 2010. Using evidence drawn from newly available data by discipline at the university level, which allows analysis of differences in reliance on postdocs across different fields of scholarship as well as the relationship between postdocs, faculty, funding and scientific productivity across institutions, we find that increases in the number of postdocs are associated with higher levels of research productivity across a range of different disciplines. In addition, we find, mixed support for the hypothesis that research funding is associated with the demand for postdocs. This conjecture appears to be true in chemistry, chemical engineering and psychology, but not in other fields. As federal research funding is reduced and immigration policies likely limit the number of international postdocs, the U.S. may have reached peak postdoc for the foreseeable future. Based on our estimates, this may result in less future research productivity.
November 8, 2025 at 3:49 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Not over the fact that they called their shot, followed through, and people I'm supposed to believe are "objective" and "trustworthy" still joined in the fun of attacking a Black woman
Screenshot of tweet from @realchrisrufo which reads: We launched the Claudine Gay lagiarism story from the Right. The next step is to smuggle it into the Media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center- left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze. 12:32 PM Dec 19, 2023
November 7, 2025 at 8:56 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Given the difficulty accessing the book (release a second edition OUP!), sharing some sections of the end.

Last lines are: "When...the hearings and dismissals tapered off, it was not because they encountered resistance but because they were no longer necessary. All was quiet on the academic front."
Screenshot of page 337, which reads: Such speculation aside, it is still true that the academic profession failed to defend its members against the anti-Communist purges of the 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps I am being unnecessarily harsh on the academics of the time. Yet the firings now have few defenders; many of the professors who themselves lived through the events of that period now admit that they should have defied McCarthyism more vigorously. Had they done so, it is possible that they might have succeeded. Because there was so little mainstream opposition to McCarthyism, in the academy or anywhere else for that matter, there are only a few instances of successful resistance; but those few, like Robert Hutchins's opposition to the Broyles Committee, are suggestive and indicate that support for the anti-Communist crusade was superficial and that resistance to it entailed far fewer risks than people imagined. By refusing to take those risks, the majority of the nation's college professors must share some of the responsibility for the repression that followed. Screenshot of page 340, which reads: McCarthyism also affected the institutional life of the nation's colleges and universities. Here, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the failure to protect academic freedom eroded the academy's moral integrity. Professors and administrators ignored the stated ideals of their calling and overrode the civil liberties of their colleagues and employees in the service of such supposedly higher values as institutional loyalty and national security. In retrospect, it is easy to accuse these people of hypocrisy, of mouthing the language of academic freedom to conceal something considerably more squalid. Opportunism and dishonesty existed, of course, but most of the men and women who participated in or condoned the firing of their controversial colleagues did so because they sincerely believed that what they were doing was in nation's interest. Patriotism, not expedience, sustained the academic community's willingness to collaborate with McCarthyism. The intellectual independence so prized by American academics simply did not extend to the United States government. Screenshot of page 340 which reads: The extraordinary facility with which the academic establishment accommodated itself to the demands of the state may well be the most significant aspect of the academy's response to McCarthyism. It was the government, not some fringe group of right-wing fanatics, which initiated the movement to eliminate Communism from American life. It administered the first stage of McCarthyism, acting through the agency of investigating committees and the FBI to identify political undesirables on campus. It let the universities handle the second stage and get rid of the targeted individuals. In another era, perhaps, the academy might not have cooperated so readily, but the 1950s was the period when the nation's colleges and universities were becoming increasingly dependent upon and responsive toward the federal government. The academic community's collaboration with McCarthyism was part of that process. It was, in many respects, just another step in the integration of American higher education into the Cold War political system. The academy did not fight McCarthyism. It contributed to it. The dismissals, the blacklists, and above all the almost universal acceptance of the legitimacy of what the congressional committees and other official investigators were doing conferred respectability upon the most repressive elements of the anti-Communist crusade.
November 7, 2025 at 7:07 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Higher education did not cover itself in glory when faculty members chose to be silent in the face of persecution, all to help keep the "reputation" of the university, and themselves, intact.
Screenshot of p.312 which reads: Part of the reason for the failure of the academic profession to speak out against the political dismissals of the McCarthy period was that many of its members supported those dismissals. They shared the general hostility to Communists and Fifth Amendment witnesses and felt that such people did not belong in the academic world. Other professors were less sure but did not want to make a fuss. Propriety was the issue here. Though most of the teachers-certainly most of the tenured ones-at the schools we have been studying knew that they would probably not get into trouble for circulating petitions or organizing meetings, they nonetheless kept their distance. They did not want to put themselves in an adversarial position, either with regard to their colleagues or the administration. Those who did defy the conventional limits of faculty debate and insisted that the rights of an individual took precedence over the well-being of an institution engendered considerable hostility. When, for example, during the course of a heated discussion about the University of Michigan's treatment of its unfriendly witnesses,the eminent mathematician R. L. Wilder denounced the administration's cooperation with HUAC as beyond all bounds of morality and decency, many faculty members, though presumably deploring much what HUAC was doing, were shocked at Wilder's lèse majesté. Attacking the president of the University in public did not accord with the "gentlemanliness" expected of a member of the Michigan faculty. Wilder, who later became president of the American Mathematical Society, had sufficient prestige to withstand such collegial disapproval; people with lesser credentials were more vulnerable and more circumspect. So pervasive was this pressure for respectability that even the most committed civil libertarians reined themelves in.
November 7, 2025 at 6:03 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Very exciting! I keep telling people to take the time to read Black Reconstruction.

Posting with alt
Screenshot of the article website. Outlet is Sociological Forum. Title is A Du Boisian Theory of Memory: Truth-Telling Legacies of Du Bois's Black Reconstruction as Decolonized Theory, Method, and Praxis. Author is Hajar Yazdiha. First published: 04 November 2025. Abstract reads: In Black Reconstruction (1935), Du Bois developed a framework conceptualizing collective memory as a political project of knowledge construction where revisionist history served as the political propaganda of the colonizer. The mechanisms of historical distortion have long been built into our colonial epistemological fabric, reproduced through academic knowledge production. To examine these dynamics and their legacies today, this paper shows how Du Bois's Black Reconstruction provides a framework for both studying and challenging the politics of revisionist memory through three interconnected domains: theory, method, and praxis. The Du Boisian theory of memory shows that truth-telling not only helps us better reexamine the contingencies that lead to collective memory in the present. Truth-telling is a guiding force shaping the creative ways we collectively imagine and embark on the future.
November 6, 2025 at 4:13 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Liberal in the 1950s were wild
Screenshot of chapter 9 which reads: During the 1950s, most liberals, academics included, believed that the FBI was above politics. Congress was the villain-sloppily partisan, hungry for headlines, and as eager to persecute innocent liberals as guilty reds. The FBI, on the other hand, was a competent, professional outfit, which could be trusted to handle the Communist problem in a careful and prudent way. This was untrue. The Bureau's ideology was as ferociously reactionary as that of any red-baiting politico, and its agenda was the same as HUAC's. During the McCarthy years it actively intervened to ensure that the people it considered politically unreliable would lose their jobs. But it did so clandestinely. It insisted that it never let outsiders see information from its files, even as it was regularly leaking dossiers to right-wing congressmen and friendly journalists. These people then publicized the damaging material or passed it along to the employers of suspected subversives without, of course, ever letting on that it had come from the Feds. The academy received its share of such items. In addition to the material on Weltfish, Grayson Kirk's papers contain a letter from the columnist George Sokolsky, one of the Bureau's regular conduits, listing all the compromising affliations of another Columbia professor, a few days after that protessor had appeared before Senator McCarthy. There is, of course, no indication that this mateial came from the FBI, but in form, content, and method of delivery it bears all the trappings.
November 5, 2025 at 9:47 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
An excellent summation of how people who were called before congressional investigators fared. Also makes clear, except for a small minority, universities were willing partners in purging faculty during McCarthyism.
Screenshot of chapter 7 which reads: Their fates varied, though certain patterns emerge. Most of the professors who cooperated with committees and preserved their universities' reputations by naming names and avoiding publicity had no professional problems. Those professors who cooperated part of the way with the committees and, thus, could convince all but the most irrational anti-Communists that they were no longer in the Party usually managed to keep their jobs. Professors who refused to cooperate with the committees but did cooperate with their colleagues-and this seems to have been the largest group-sometimes kept their jobs, if they had tenure and taught at private colleges or universities, and sometimes lost them, especially if they were at public institutions. Professors who refused to cooperate with both the congressional and the academic investigations were almost always fired. What stands out is the overwhelming consensus within the academic establishment that it had to respond to the ongressional hearings. Once HUAC, SISS, or Senator McCarthy questioned a teacher and raised the issue of Communism, the academic community rushed to investigate. Except for a tiny and highly marginal group f civil libertarians, few academics challenged this aspect of the academy's collaboration with the congressional committees. Few seemed to notice that by putting the jobs of unfriendly witnesses in question, America's colleges and uni- versities had given Joseph McCarthy and the members of HUAC a say over selecting their faculties.
November 5, 2025 at 9:22 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
This is the AAU arguing that Communists could not be professors. It also argued that people who used their Fifth Amendment rights when called before the deeply unfair congressional investigators, who were willing to twist documents and testimony to suit their aims, were not fit to be professors.
Screenshot of chapter 6, part 1 of a section that reads: The real meat of the statement was its section "Obligations and Responsibilities of University Faculties." Here the AAU dealt with the coming congressional investigations and insisted that "it is clearly the duty of universities and their members to cooperate in official inquiries...When the powers of legislative inquiry are abused, the remedy does not lie in non-cooperation or defiance." Such "ill-advised, though not illegal, public acts or utterances" on the part of a professor "do serious harm to his profession. his university, to education, and to the general welfare." They are also inconsistent with his "obligation to maintain [the university's] reputation," as well as an even more important professional obligation of the college teacher: [Long direct quote from the resort follows] Above all, he owes his colleagues in the university complete candor and perfect integrity, precluding any kind of clandestine or conspiratorial activities. He owes equal candor to the public. If he is called upon to answer for his convictions, it is his duty as a citizen to speak out. It is even more definitely his duty as a professor. Refusal to do so, on whatever legal grounds, cannot fail to reflect upon a profession that claims for itself the Screenshot of Chapter 6, part 2 if quote which reads: fullest freedom to speak and the maximum protection of that freedom available in our society. In this respect, invocation of the Fifth Amendment places upon professor a heavy burden of proof of his fitness to hold a teaching position and lays upon his university an obligation to reexamine his qualifications for membership in its society. Screenshot of chapter 6, completely separate section which reads: As if to underscore its importance, the public-relations officers of all thirty-seven schools simultaneously released the AAU statement to the press. Its reception was all that its framers had hoped for. The [federal] committees loved it. The SISS's fnal report, "Subversive Influence in the Educational Process,'" quoted it at length. The press reprinted and praised it. Conservative papers picked up on its condemnation of Communist teachers; liberal ones hailed it as a reaffrmation of traditional liberties. In a letter to the other members of the organization, Princeton president Harold W. Dodds, who, as the head of the AAU, coordinated the distribution of the statement, noted that he had received hundreds pf newspaper clippings and "the only editorial I have seen which attacked the statement, apart from two or three small local papers on the extreme right, appeared in the New York Daily Worker."
November 5, 2025 at 8:52 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
AAU enters the chat!

AAU statements *matter*. When the AAU released a statement about the compact, it was as if the kill bill siren went off and we, higher ed experts, all rushed to read it. The fact that they participated in McCarthyism, and gave it justification to ostracize people, is big.
Screenshot of Chapter 6 which reads: There was. however, another organization which had some claim to speak for the academic community as a whole. This was the Association of American Universities (AAU), a group whose nembership consisted of the presidents of the thirty-seven leading universities in the United States and Canada. Nominally concerned with maintaining the standards of graduate education and with such practical matters as interlibrary loans, the organization responded to the challenge of the Cold War by breaking with its own tradition and making a public statement. By 1950, it had decided to issue a report on "the privileges and responsibilities inherent in academic freedom and tenure." Naturally, drafting such a statement, especially one that would satisfy thirty-seven college presidents, took years. Screenshot of Chapter 6 which reads: The statement, entitled "The Rights and Responsibilities of Universities and Their Faculties," was officially released on March 24 over the signature of all thirty-seven presidents. Much of its eleven pages consisted of the usual rhetoric about academic freedom, couched, however, in language that one assumes the writers thought would appeal to its intended audience. Such a sentence as "Free enterprise is as essential to intellectual as to economic progress" gives an idea of the overall tone of the document. To be fair, not all of it was fluff, the statement did mention a few specific threats to that enterprise, including "special loyalty tests which are applied to...faculties but to which others are not subjected." And, I'm a section entitled "The Present Danger," a title bestowed perhaps by Henry Wriston, the document's co-author and himself a founder and active member of the committee of that name, the AAU described the main threat to academic freedom: world Communism. Teachers who adhered to such a movement-with its commitment to "falsehood and deceit," "revolution," and "thought control"-obviously disqualified themselves from the academic protession. The AAU statement was quite explicit, "Present membership in the Communist Party... extinguishes the right to a university position."
November 5, 2025 at 8:40 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
The people who seek to censor academia have always loved to pitch it as a way to "promote freedom of thought and expression"
Screenshot of Chapter 6 which reads: HUAC was also planning to look for Communist teachers. Its new chairman, the former FBI agent Harold Velde, made that clear as early as November. "I feel," he explained a few weeks later, "that we should look into the field of education. That has been largely left untouched up till now...but I believe that it is a very fertile field for investigation and it should be done." Colleges were going to be HUAC's main target, for, as an unidentified HUAC staff member explained to the FBI, the committee "believes it can obtain more publicity by exposing Communist affiliations of college professors rather than public school teachers." Senator McCarthy, now finally with an investigating committee of his own, also promised that he would be "going into the education system" and would be "exposing Communists and Communist thinkers...in your educational institutions," a service that he claimed was one of "trying to promote freedom of thought and expression in college."
November 5, 2025 at 8:06 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
"I know that ain't who I think it is" gif
Screenshot from chapter 6 which reads: Such was McCarran's clout as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that he forced a reluctant Justice Department to indict Lattimore not once, but twice. The first indictment, written up by Roy Cohn, was so vague that it was thrown out of court. The second was, too, but not until 1955.
November 5, 2025 at 7:14 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Loyalty oaths! I had forgotten that Clark Kerr, before he became president, helped investigate suspected Communist faculty (that's in a different section of this chapter).

For some reason, faculty who fled fascist Europe were not fans!
Screenshot of chapter 4 which reads: Almost every state, whether or not it investigated its universities or had them investigate themselves, imposed some kind of a loyalty oath on its teachers. Both the Ober and the Pechan laws, for example, contained loyalty oaths in addition to their provisions for academic self-certification. By the late fifties, thirty-two states required loyalty oaths. Their inefficacy in no way interfered with their popularity among state legislators, for they were inexpensive to administer and easy for voters to understand. "Any teacher who doesn't want to take a loyalty oath ought to go back to Russia. was the way one rural Pennsylvania legislator viewed the matter. And the fact that in practice many of the people dismissed for refusing to sign such oaths were civil libertarians or Quakers did not keep state legislators from passing them, and often adding new provi- sions to old oaths. Two types of oaths were involved. The first was essentially a pledge of allegiance, calling for loyaltv to the state, the nation, and their constitutions. Many states had had such oaths on the books for years. Since 1934, for example, New York academics had been pledging to support the federal and state constitutions. Since 1942, every employee of the University of California had had to take a similar oath. Though there was criticism of these oaths for singling out the academic profession and, as one critic pointed out, reducing the professor to a second-class citi- zen," they were in themselves innocuous. Neither Communists nor civil libertarians objected to taking them. The second type of oath presented more problems. The product of the Cold War, it required its takers to swear that they did not subscribe to certain beliefs or belong to certain organizations. Its sole function was to eliminate Communists. Screenshot of chapter 4 which reads: These non-signers were among the most respected people on the faculty. Their unofficial leader, Edward Tolman, was a nationally honored psychologist who had taught at Berkeley for thirty-two years, and many others were equally eminent; among the younger recusants were some of the University's more promising scholars, including its future president David Saxon. None were Communists; a significant number, however, had fled from fascist Europe. These people tried to warn their colleagues about the dangers ahead. The German-born medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz was most graphic: It is the harmless oath that hooks; it hooks before it has undergone those changes that will render it, bit by bit, less harmless. Mussolini Italy of 1931, Hitler Germany of 1933, are terrifying and warning examples for the harmless bit-by-bit procedure in connection with political enforced oaths.
November 4, 2025 at 6:51 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
An example of how universities began to purge suspected Communists after WWII (Allen was the president of the University of Washington, which was the first big test of academic freedom postwar...higher education obviously failed that test)
Screenshot from chapter 4 which reads: By the early fifties, as we have seen, the student left was all but extinct on American campuses, its demise the product of external repression and personal prudence. Faculty radicalism, which even during the 1930s had always been much less in evidence than the student variety, simply did not exist in any organized form after the Second World War. Nonetheless, there was considerable pressure to rid the nation's colleges and unirersities of politically undesirable teachers. The focus here was on individuals, on the supposedly subversive professors whose affiliation with the Communist Party disqualifed them from academic life. The issues that Rapp-Coudert had raised in 1940-41 resurfaced. It was clear that, once the Cold War intensified, the academic community as a whole would have to grapple with the problem that the New York City Board of Higher Education had tackled few years before. As in the earlier episode, the academy confronted the issue only after outside political authorities forced it to. And, as the New York authorities had done before, academics--administrators and professors alike-readily accommodated themselves, both in theory and practice, to the demand that they expel Communists from their faculties. The process took but a few years. Screenshot of chapter 4 which reads: Such behavior, especially Gundlach's failure to answer Allen's questions, constituted "neglect of duty," which the committee defined as including, in addition to teaching, "a reasonable measure of cooperation with the University in matters affecting the welfare and reputation of the institution." This notion that a professor had the "duty" to safeguard his university's "reputation" was to become an increasingly important element in the academy's response to the growing pressures of McCarthyism. Screenshot of chapter 4 which reads: Essentially, he argued, as the faculty committee had done, that academics "have special obligations" that "involve questions of intellectual honesty and integrity." Communism, because of its demand for uncritical acceptance f the Party's line, interferes with that quest for the truth "which is the frst obligation and duty of the teacher." Because t was Impossible for even the most "sincere" individual to belong to the Communist Party and yet retain an open mind, Allen concluded that Butterworth and Phillips were "by reason of their admitted membership in the Communist Party ... incompetent, ntellectually dishonest, and derelict in their duty to find and teach the truth."
November 4, 2025 at 5:06 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Good gracious Third Way

www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/m...
Screenshot of article that reads: “A Mamdani victory is a serious political problem for those in the party who believe, as we do, that our primary focus must be on flipping red and purple seats blue, expanding the map for Democrats, and creating a path back to Congress and the White House,” Matt Bennett, executive vice president of center-left think tank Third Way, told MSNBC. “The [Democratic Socialists of America] platform — which Mamdani has not repudiated — hands a potent set of weapons to Republican ad makers eager to tie Mamdani-style politics to Democrats running in much tougher places than deep blue New York.”
November 4, 2025 at 4:01 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
So the rich have always been into using their power to push universities to investigate their workers. Bill Ackman and Marc Rowan must be so proud.
Screenshot from chapter 3 which reads: An equally ineffectual inquiry took place in Illinois, where a legislative committee took on the University of Chicago in April 1935, after the drugstore magnate Charles Walgreen announced that his niece, an undergraduate at the University, was being subverted by her teachers. The publicity that accompanied Walgreen's charges stimulated the legislature to look into Chicago's allegedly "subversive Communistic teachings and ideas." Besides questioning Chicago's president, dean, and several professors, the investigating committee also took testimony from Walgreen, his niece, and a professional anti-Communist, suburban Chicago woman named Elizabeth Dilling, who eagerly identified dozens of people, including Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and Senator William Borah as Communists. The investigators focused their attention on three professors whom Walgreen and Dilling claimed were main culprits: Frederick L Schuman, Robert Morss Lovett, and Harry Gideonse, the future president of Brooklyn College. Though Schuman and Lovett certainly sympathized with the Popular Front, neither they nor Gideonse were Communists, and they were able to convince the majority of the committee that there was no subversion at Chicago.
November 4, 2025 at 3:23 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Well, at least we're cutting slots for phd programs so that's not a repeat?
Screenshot from chapter 2 that reads: If for undergraduates the Depression seemed to curtail their own prospects for social mobility, for faculty members and graduate students brought more immediate deprivations. Unlike undergraduate enrollment, which began to decline in about 1932, graduate enrollments actually increased in the early thirties. Twenty-six percent more Ph.D.s were awarded in 1935 than 1931. After alI, staying in school was one way an intellectually talented student could avoid outright unemployment after graduation. Not that the prospects for these young academics were very promising. The economies that the Depression forced on the nation's colleges and universities, especially on the public ones, hit their faculties hard. A special survey by the AAUP found that 84 percent of the schools it studied cut professors' salaries, usually by about 15 percent. The brunt of these and other cut-backs fell upon junior faculty members, many of whom were being unceremoniously pushed off the academic ladder. These people were often let go after a year or two to be replaced by other similarly lowly and poorly paid members of the academic proletariat. Many schools created new positions below the regular faculty ranks--tutors, fellows, and instructors, positions which paid miserably and offered no security. By the mid-thirties, 80 percent of the teaching at Brooklyn College was done by people with these off-the-ladder appointments, some of which paid as little as $600 a year. But even these unsatisfactory jobs were hard to find. Harry Marks, a historian who got his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1937, recalls writing more than fifty letters for jobs and getting only one offer, a one-year appomtment at a salary so low that he literally couldn't afford to take it. Since like almost everybody who went to college during the Depression he had gotten teacher's certificate, he taught high school instead.
November 4, 2025 at 3:51 AM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
"In almost every situation, faculty members and administrators responded to outside pressures for the dismissal of dissenting faculty members in accord with what they believed would best protect or enhance their school's reputation."

Chile, the more things change, the more they stay the same
Screenshot of page 23 which reads: Procedures apart, however, there were fewer differences than we might assume. Institutional loyalty was the overriding concern. In almost every situation, faculty members and administrators responded to outside pressures for the dismissal of dissenting faculty members in accord with what they believed would best protect or enhance their school's reputation. The rhetoric of academic freedom obscures those concerns, as, in many instances, it was designed to. After all, even the famous academic freedom statement that the University of Wisconsin released after the Regents reinstated Richard T. Ely in 1894 was planned in part as a piece of institutional promotion-as, in the words of the man who suggested it, "an excellent advertisement for the institution." Stripped of its rhetoric, academic freedom thus turns out be an essentially corporate protection. And, as we trace its development during the Cold War, we should not be surprised to find that it was invoked more often to defend the well-being of an institution than the political rights of an individual.
November 4, 2025 at 2:47 AM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Delaware
Tree with shocking golden yellow leaves above the blue rock wall in the park Top of the blue rock wall with various grasses nearby and a hill with vibrant greens and yellows from trees in the background Big tree with varying colors of leaves (red at top moving into oranges and then greens at the bottom). Picnic bench underneath.
November 2, 2025 at 9:10 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Now how does one get a faculty gig at Featherstone University, I'm sorry, at FU?
Screenshot of article which reads: What’s the secret to success at Featherstone University? “Surrounding yourself with people who pronounce ‘Versailles’ correctly,” its website reads. Admission at FU, the university’s favored acronym, isn’t contingent upon an application. Prospective students can enroll if they meet a set of “very particular criteria,” like possessing generational wealth, demonstrating equestrian dressage skills, and owning an ancestral portrait.
October 31, 2025 at 5:23 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
To prep for the higher ed policy class on censorship next week, I'm rereading Schrecker's No Ivory Tower. Buddy this intro has it all! SCOTUS jumping on the bandwagon, disregard of first amendment rights, why congressional hearings played such a key role, how private companies aided the government.
Screenshot of page 3 that reads: McCarthyism: The Anatomy of an Inquisition By February 3, 1960, Joseph R. McCarthy had been dead for nearly three years, and the novement that had received his name was presumably over. But not for Chandler Davis. On that day, Davis, a former instructor of mathematics from the University of Michigan, ended a six-year struggle against McCarthyism, said goodbye to his family, and surrendered to a federal marshal in Grand Rapids to begin serving a six-month prison term. Davis's crime had occurred on May 10, 1954 when he refused to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) whether or not he had ever been a Communist. Davis challenged the committee, insisting that its questions about his politics infringed upon his freedom of speech and, as he put it, overstepped "the bounds placed on Congress by the First Amendment.'" He knew that he would probably lose his job and be convicted for contempt of Congress, but he hoped that the Supreme Court would eventually exonerate him. Instead, on June 8, 1959, the Court in effect ruled against him in the similar case Lloyd Barenblatt, another former college teacher who had also defied HUAC on First Amendment grounds. The 5 to 4 decision affirmed that the committee did not violate its witnesses' constitutional rights by asking them about their relationship with the Communist Party (CP). That ruling sent both Barenblatt and Davis, whose case was determined by Barenblatt's, to Danbury Federal Penitentiary. Screenshot of page 7 which reads: Most of this housecleaning took place at congressional hearings. Legislative investigations gave the conservatives a perfect arena for their campaign against the New Deal and its supposed sympathy for Communist subversion. To begin with, as congressmen constitutionally immune from lawsuits, they could make accusations without having to worry about being sued for libel. In addition, since legislative investigations were not judicial proceedings, these politicians could use witnesses whose testimony did not have to stand up in court. Best of all, committee hearings created headlines. American politics had never offered a more dramatic spectacle than the confrontation between the investigators and their witnesses, especially when those witnesses pulled microfilms out of pumpkins and talked of false names, clandestine meetings, secret passwords, and the arcane workings of a shadowy underworld peopled by Soviet agents and urbane upper-class spies. Once the rise of Richard Nixon showed how a smart politician could parlay his berth on an investigating committee into the Vice Presidency, congressmen clamored for such positions. In 1952, 185 of the 221 Republicans in Congress applied for seats on the House Un-American Activities Committee, an unpopular assignment only a few years before. Screenshot of page 9 which reads: McCarthyism was amazingly effective. It produced one of the most severe episodes of political repression the United States ever experienced. It was a peculiarly American style of repression--nonviolent and consensual. Only two people were killed; only a few hundred went to jail. Its mildness may well have contributed to its efficacy. So, too, did its struc- ture. Here, it helps to view McCarthyism as a process rather than a movement. It took place in two stages. First, the objectionable groups and individuals were identified-during a committee hearing, for example, or an FBI investigation; then, they were punished, usually by being fired. The bifurcated nature of this process diffused responsibility and made it easier for each participant to dissociate his or her action from the larger whole. Rarely did any single institution handle both stages of McCarthyism. In most cases, it was a government agency which identified the culprits and a private employer which fired them.
October 30, 2025 at 6:54 PM
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Y'all made Bill de Blasio open his word processing software and address journalistic malpractice

www.thenation.com/article/soci...
Screenshot from the article that reads: Hurley was a bit halting and clearly embarrassed. He apologized repeatedly and noted that when he didn’t hear back after an attempt to find me through my website, he searched online for contact info. He apparently chose an e-mail to try, got a response, conducted the entire “interview” via e-mail, and never bothered to confirm the identity of whom he was communicating with. No phone call, no Zoom, nothing. This explanation and apology doesn’t add up, unless a previously well-respected outlet has abandoned meaningful journalistic standards and ethics. Did their conservative bent cloud their judgment? Did someone cleverly lay a trap for them? Or was this just shoddy work by a journalist and his editors who were supposed to maintain quality control? Screenshot from the article that reads: Every journalist who immediately took The Times’ story on face value and commented online, despite its evident disconnect from everything they knew about me and my views, unfortunately enabled the spread of a falsehood. The ones who exercised thoughtful discretion and came to me for confirmation helped protect their readers from literal, actual fake news. Let the reader beware. And let us all—news consumers and journalists alike—demand better.
October 30, 2025 at 6:21 PM