Sidney Hook: Disillusioned Revolutionary

Sidney Hook's dedication to purging academia of Communist Party members arose from his own experiences as a disillusioned former supporter of the Soviet Union. Born in 1902, Hook grew up in the working-class community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.Footnote ¹⁷ The child of central European Jewish immigrants, he was involved in radical politics from a young age. As a teenager, Hook was already a committed socialist. He campaigned for the socialist mayoral candidate Morris Hillquit and faced popular opprobrium for opposing American involvement in the First World War. After earning his bachelor's degree from City College in 1923, he entered Columbia University, where he completed his PhD in philosophy under the supervision of John Dewey. In 1927, he joined the philosophy department at New York University, where he was the first professor in the United States to teach a class on Marxism.Footnote ¹⁸ By this point one of the country's leading Marxist intellectuals, in 1929 he traveled to the Soviet Union to conduct research at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow.Footnote ¹⁹ A supporter of the worldwide Communist movement, in 1932 Hook signed an open petition supporting the American Communist Party's candidate for president, William Foster.Footnote ²⁰ One year later, Hook published his most important work of philosophy, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation, which synthesized a version of Deweyan pragmatism with a Marxist critique of capitalism.Footnote ²¹ By doing so, Hook aimed to make Communism more open to what one historian called pragmatism's commitment to “flexibility, experimentalism, and revision.”Footnote ²² While Hook had some silent reservations about the Communist Party's tendency toward dogmatism, up until this point he had refrained from publicly criticizing the Soviet Union. He still held out hope for the world's first Communist country. This would change.

In 1933, Communist Party leaders organized a denunciation campaign against Hook's heterodox interpretation of Marxism. They maintained that pragmatism's emphasis on voluntarism clashed with the more economically determinist models the Soviet regime favored. Communist newspapers began to label Hook as a “revisionist,” “reactionary idealist,” and “philosophical hack” who served the interests of the “bourgeois.”Footnote ²³ One Communist sympathizer, Harry Martel, called Hook “a reptile of the worst type … an advocate of fascism and enemy of the proletariat.”Footnote ²⁴ While Hook had already grown weary of the Party's rigid sectarianism and failure to adequately confront the rise of Fascism, its demands that he recant his philosophical views were too much for him to bear.Footnote ²⁵

Ironically, the Party's attacks on Hook inoculated him from charges that his radical politics made him unfit to teach. Foreshadowing an attack that Hook himself would make on professors associated with the Communist Party, the right-wing New York American denounced him as a radical propagandist who indoctrinated his students.Footnote ²⁶ Hook felt concerned enough about the accusations to write to NYU chancellor Harry Woodburn Chase to explain that the charges were based on lies and represented a serious threat to academic freedom.Footnote ²⁷ At the time, Hook's philosopher friend Ernest Nagel worried that NYU might fire him due to the publicity. Nagel wrote, “I am holding my breath, hoping for the best, and terribly unhappy because I am so far away.”Footnote ²⁸ He need not have worried. As Hook later acknowledged, the university was much more likely to tolerate a politically active radical on its faculty if they knew that he was being attacked by the Communist Party.Footnote ²⁹

The American Communist Party's embrace of Stalin during the Moscow Trials (1936–1938) marked the “decisive turning point” in Hook's move toward militant anti-Communism.Footnote ³⁰ In the widely publicized hearings, most of the surviving leaders of the Russian Revolution were charged with plotting to overthrow Stalin and reinstate capitalism. Hook sat on a committee with his pragmatist mentor, John Dewey, to investigate the charges against a key target, Leon Trotsky.Footnote ³¹ The experience was life changing. Stalin's crimes were obvious to Hook: they represented nothing less than a great purge of the old Bolsheviks who had formed the backbone of the October Revolution. American Communists, however, defended Stalin as beyond reproach. They condemned Stalin's critics as capitalist lackeys, imperialist tools, and Trotskyist saboteurs. Due to Hook's opposition to Stalin, Communist students hissed at him while he walked to class through Washington Square Park.Footnote ³² In his experiences debating the Moscow Trials, Hook discovered “the face of radical evil—as ugly and petrifying as anything the Fascists had revealed up to that time—in the visages of those who were convinced that they were men and women of good will.”Footnote ³³ Hook would remember these experiences, particularly when his opponents claimed he was supporting a “purge” of Communist faculty members during the McCarthy era. The Communists themselves, he believed, had supported an actual purge in the Soviet Union where countless victims had lost their lives.

While Hook remained rhetorically attached to Socialism, by the late 1930s he had abandoned any involvement in organized progressive politics and his commitment to anti-Communism grew stronger. In 1939, Hook and Dewey formed the Committee for Cultural Freedom, an organization dedicated to promoting the view that Soviet Communism and European Fascism, for all their surface differences, actually represented the same totalitarian menace to free society.Footnote ³⁴ The point was to make any expressions of sympathy for the Soviet Union anathema. The signing of the nonaggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviets in August 1939 made this task much easier. The ease with which Communists abandoned their militant anti-Fascism after the pact made Hook's attack on Party members much more convincing, especially to liberals.Footnote ³⁵

By 1940, Hook felt encouraged that the Hitler-Stalin pact had disabused so many liberals of their former toleration for the Soviet Union, but he also outlined the high bar that academic Communists must be expected to meet before they could be welcomed back into the company of scholars. For Hook, support for the Communist Party represented such an egregious violation of professional ethics that abandoning the movement was a necessary but insufficient act on the road to contrition. This was no minor indiscretion. Hook wrote, “The mistakes of these individuals bordered on crimes … they have justified purges, frame-ups, and political murder.”Footnote ³⁶ Not only did Hook believe Communists had played an active role in supporting state-sponsored terror, he also had firsthand experience of the way that the Party worked to destroy the reputations of its opponents. Hook observed that Communists “have lied about principled opponents to Stalinism, blackened their reputations, and where possible, cut them off from their sources of livelihood.”Footnote ³⁷ Even with this terrible stain on their reputations, however, Hook believed that ex-Communists had a useful role to play if they publicly acknowledged the profound nature of their political errors and actively opposed Soviet totalitarianism.

While Hook's insistence on the admission of guilt as a necessary first step on the path to atonement might suggest a parallel with religious thinking, he more frequently described his policy on ex-Communists in terms of the need to eradicate diseases. For Hook, the Great Depression—with capitalism and democracy in crisis—had created a breeding ground for deadly ideological viruses. The state's inability to deal with mass unemployment made Communism, a deadly pathogen, attractive. Intellectuals who had cured themselves of the Communist “disease” had a responsibility to inoculate their colleagues and fight the pathogen itself. As Hook explained:

Communists and fellow travelers had a moral duty, Hook believed, to repent and vocally condemn their former views and past associates. By doing so, they would make use of their experience to help stop the Stalinist germ from spreading to new hosts. Leaving the Party was not enough; only thorough repudiation would do. As Hook wrote of an old acquaintance who had broken ranks with the Communists but failed to publically condemn them, it meant little to condemn one murder when one had already forgiven a million of them.Footnote ³⁹ For Hook, it was imperative that Party members and fellow travelers fully acknowledge moral culpability and then actively condemn the horror of Soviet totalitarianism before they could be expected back into respectable intellectual company.

Through his work in organizations like the ACLU, Hook worked to have these views enforced against not only Communists but also those who refused to actively criticize the Soviet Union. In the months after the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed, for example, Hook worked with allies on the ACLU's Academic Freedom Committee to deny membership in the group to well-known sociologist Robert Lynd.Footnote ⁴⁰ Lynd was not a Communist. He simply believed that attacking Communists was counterproductive. Lynd considered Fascism a much greater threat to international civil liberties than the Soviet Union and worried that shunning American Communists would play into the hands of right-wing conservatives. These were positions Hook thought should have no place within the ACLU. While he was unsuccessful in dismissing Lynd from the committee, in the aftermath of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, ACLU leadership increasingly adopted views on Communism that aligned with Hook's. In 1940, the ACLU board purged its executive members tied to the Communist Party.Footnote ⁴¹

While Hook's anti-Communist positions gained support following the Nazi-Soviet Pact, once the United States allied with Russia during the Second World War, he again found himself in the minority within the ACLU's Academic Freedom Committee. During this period, Columbia University philosophy professor Corliss Lamont helped launch a movement that had Hook removed from the group's executive board for “actively opposing academic freedom,” an event that Hook would never forget.Footnote ⁴² After explaining that he doubted the Moscow Trials were frame-ups and accusing Hook of secretly working with the FBI, Lamont issued Hook a stern warning: “I urge you … to be a little more accurate and restrained in your remarks about old friends like myself. It is just possible that one of these days you might be held strictly to account for your statements.”Footnote ⁴³ Lamont also predicted that Hook would suffer professionally for the way he had tried to purge Communist professors from academia. When the attacks on Hook would commence, Lamont noted that he would be there to help him: “When your present activities in the realm of academic unfreedom catch up with you and you yourself become subject to a purge for various past connections and opinions, you can depend on me to fight for your rights to the last ditch.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Rubbing salt in the wound, Lamont wrote to Hook gloating over the esteem with which many Americans now viewed the Soviet Union and mocked him for having been kicked off of the Academic Freedom Committee.Footnote ⁴⁵ In response, Hook (unsuccessfully) attempted to have Lamont removed from the ACLU board of directors and publicly denounced him as a foolish propagandist for Stalinist repression.Footnote ⁴⁶ His greatest revenge on Lamont, however, was to become the most cited expert on Communism and academic freedom during the Cold War.

Hook's Test Case: The University of Washington, 1949

In 1949, the University of Washington set off a national debate over academic freedom when it appointed a faculty committee to investigate whether professors with ties to the Communist Party should lose their jobs.Footnote ⁴⁷ The university had called the investigations after state hearings on subversion in higher education had brought the issue into the public consciousness. The outcome of the University of Washington dismissal hearings were widely seen as the test case for how other colleges and universities would treat the question of Communist Party membership during the tense years of the early Cold War. Hook agreed. He wanted to play a role in setting a national precedent against Communists in higher education.

The University of Washington administration acknowledged that there was no problem with the teaching and research records of the faculty threatened with dismissal. The only charges of professional misconduct stemmed from their ties to the Communist Party. Two of the professors, Joseph Butterworth and Herbert J. Phillips, openly admitted their membership in the Party, while the third, Ralph H. Gundlach, argued that he was under no obligation to discuss his political affiliations with university officials. The university appointed a faculty committee to undertake an exhaustive investigation of the accused professors, which expressed doubt about whether Communists had enough autonomy to remain professionally independent, but concluded that the university would be in clear violation of its own rules and regulations if it fired the professors without evidence of misconduct. The faculty committee was overruled: all three professors were fired. The president of the University of Washington, Raymond Allen, insisted that the firings were far from a “witch-hunt.” They were simply a matter of professional ethics. He hoped that the firing would set an example for other colleges and universities to follow.Footnote ⁴⁸

Hook saw the University of Washington cases in similar terms: he understood what a powerful national precedent they could establish. He was so wrapped up in the coverage of the dismissals that he advised University of Washington's director of public relations on how its administration could do a more effective job selling its campaign against the Communist professors.Footnote ⁴⁹ The hearings led him to write the most widely cited article on academic freedom and Communism during the Cold War, “Should Communists Be Permitted to Teach?,” published in the New York Times Magazine in February 1949.Footnote ⁵⁰

In the article, later elaborated upon in his book Heresy, Yes—Conspiracy, No, Hook used his pragmatic theory of education to justify the necessity of keeping Communists out of higher education. Following Dewey, Hook believed that pragmatism necessitated a democratic vision of society in which popular discussion and debate fostered communal improvement.Footnote ⁵¹ In such a society, Hook believed “policies would be treated as hypotheses, not as dogmas and customary practices as generalizations, not as God given truths.”Footnote ⁵² True democracy would be impossible, however, if citizens were not trained to debate each other rationally. Once trained in critical reasoning, citizens could make the best arguments for their positions and easily see through propaganda from the left or the right. Academic freedom protected experts, who sought to discover new truths, from the interference of outsiders who had an interest in distorting research to advance their own agendas. Proponents of academic freedom, Hook noted, understood that “the heresies of yesterday are often the orthodoxies of today. In the interests of winning new truths, it is better to err on the side of toleration than of proscription.”Footnote ⁵³ By providing an outlet for intelligent questioning of long-established norms, academic freedom helped democracies evolve.

The problem, according to Hook, was that it was just such principles that Communists had chosen to reject. They had abandoned the tools of logic and evidence (the scientific method) for the dictates of Party orthodoxy. The Communist Party controlled every facet of its members’ lives, brooked no dissent, and aimed to overthrow democracy. While Hook worried about the impact of academic fellow travelers who naively supported Communist positions (he called them “ideological typhus Marys”), his real concern was with Party members.Footnote ⁵⁴ By joining the Communist Party, they had surrendered any claims to intellectual freedom. In every field of knowledge, from philosophy and economics to the sciences, Hook underscored, the Communist Party obligated its members to obey its commands. The shifting positions that the Party forced academics to take could best be summed up in its evolving stance on Franklin Roosevelt: “In the social sciences, Communist Party teachers taught in 1934 that Roosevelt was a Fascist; in 1936, during the Popular Front, a progressive; in 1940, during the Nazi-Stalin Pact, a warmonger and imperialist; in 1941, after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, a leader of the oppressed peoples of the world.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The unique discipline the Communist Party placed upon its members mandated they violate the core mission of the university, the unhampered search for truth, rendering them intrinsically unfit to serve as scholars.

Hook dismissed the view, put forward by the AAUP and civil libertarians such as Alexander Meiklejohn and Helen Lynd, that only the conduct of individual scholars, rather than one's political affiliation, should determine academic fitness.Footnote ⁵⁶ Strictly adhering to this position, Hook responded, would actually lead to more repression against professors. To ensure that individual Communists were not indoctrinating their classrooms, universities would have no choice but to query their students about the political line taken by their teachers. This would turn students into spies and the classroom into a police state. Better to avoid this likelihood by simply treating Party membership as a matter of presumptive unfitness for teaching and research. While Hook acknowledged rare instances may exist that would justify a faculty keeping a Communist in their departments (for example, if Party member Pablo Picasso were teaching Fine Arts, Hook acknowledged the loss to the university might justify keeping him on staff), he thought such cases were extremely unlikely.Footnote ⁵⁷ This was because even if one granted that some Communists chose not to abuse their position, the fact that they were in an organization that encouraged them to do so was sufficient reason to dismiss them on the grounds of professional incompetence. By way of analogy, Hook argued that just because a man who had joined a band of assassins may choose not to commit murder in certain instances, this did not mean it would be wise to put him in a position where he could easily kill you. Hook's response to Communists who claimed they were being smeared with “guilt by association” was this: “Why should I take all the time and trouble involved in watching you? Your act of voluntary membership in a group which officially instructs you to betray our trust is an indication of professional unfitness to carry out the public trust.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Hook's experience with the Communist Party, going back to the 1930s, had led him to believe that its members could not be trusted.

Hook's New York Times Magazine article had enormous influence on how university administrators, elected officials, and the broader public understood the threat that Communists posed to academic freedom. Officials from the University of Washington referenced Hook's work in defending the dismissals against their opponents.Footnote ⁵⁹ Major organizations, including the National Educational Association, the AAUP, and the ACLU were forced to grapple with Hook's arguments against Communist faculty. A dozen newspapers reprinted the piece.Footnote ⁶⁰ Time magazine published a sympathetic feature story on Hook's argument.Footnote ⁶¹ Every letter in the subsequent issue of the New York Times Magazine was devoted to Hook's article. As Hook explained to Dewey, nothing he had ever written had garnered nearly as much attention.Footnote ⁶² Hook set the terms of the debate over academic freedom and Communism that would consume American higher education during the McCarthy era.

John Dewey, Pragmatism, and Academic Freedom in the Cold War

Hook's commitment to pragmatism helped him convince Dewey that Communists had no place educating students. Hook and Dewey's correspondence on academic freedom reveals the facility with which philosophical pragmatism, which had often served to challenge the status quo during the interwar period, could be used to sustain it during the early years of the Cold War.Footnote ⁶³ In 1949, when the University of Washington case was making headlines, it seemed as though Dewey, one of the nation's most respected liberal thinkers, strongly disagreed with Hook's analysis. In the week following Hook's 1949 article in the New York Times Magazine, Dewey wrote a letter to the editor in which he argued that a general ban on Party members would have a negative influence on academic freedom across the country. On the one hand, Dewey thought that Communists placed their allegiance to a foreign power and that “in the abstract, there can be no doubt that this fact unfits one for the office of teaching impressionable students.”Footnote ⁶⁴ As a pragmatist, however, Dewey argued that while a rule barring Communists might seem correct in the abstract, it did not necessarily follow that it should be implemented in practice. He noted that there might be some Communists who do not actually obey the commands of their leaders and that a general ban would drive Party members underground and potentially make them more dangerous. The question of faculty independence needed to be examined on a case-by-case basis. This was especially important given the alarming rise of anti-Communist sentiment in the years following the end of the Second World War.

Most importantly, Dewey stressed the unintended consequences such a ban would have given the current political context. He noted that “action of the kind proposed is bound to have indirect consequences which will be much more harmful in the end than are the evils directly guarded against. … It acts as provocation to those who are much more emotional than scholarly; who are more given to following a crowd than to engaging in careful discrimination.”Footnote ⁶⁵ After all, Dewey was familiar with the threat that public opinion could have on academic freedom. He had seen the way that New York's City College had been forced to deny Bertrand Russell a professorship in 1940 because of popular outrage over the renowned philosopher's defense of atheism and sex before marriage.Footnote ⁶⁶ Unlike Hook, Dewey believed a Red Scare was gripping the nation. He pointed out that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was investigating passages in the textbooks of private schools and calling for panels of government-appointed experts to prescreen course materials. Any efforts to create a rule barring Communists, Dewey maintained, would contribute to the climate of fear, rather than calm it.

In a series of letters, Hook implored Dewey to change his position. Demonstrating the flexibility of pragmatic ethics to accommodate seemingly mutually exclusive positions, Hook flipped Dewey's logic on its head. Instead of having negative consequences for democracy, education, and reasoned debate, Hook thought his policy would actually reinforce rigorous professionalism, intellectual honesty, and academic autonomy.Footnote ⁶⁷ Hook claimed there was a strong case that if professors dismissed Communists, there would be a much lower likelihood the state would intervene and run roughshod over academia's vaunted independence.Footnote ⁶⁸ He also argued it was unfair to link the illiberalism of HUAC to his principled position, which was based on professional ethics. Just because HUAC was a flawed vehicle for ferreting out Communist educators, it did not follow that such educators should not be ferreted out. Contrary to Dewey's assertions, Hook argued that concerns about witch-hunts were vastly overstated. He reminded Dewey of the government-sponsored crackdown on dissenters during the First World War, which Dewey had initially supported and Hook had suffered under as an antiwar activist. Hook pointedly observed that he knew political hysteria firsthand and that there was nothing close to such an outbreak in postwar America.Footnote ⁶⁹

Faculties themselves, not administrators or the state, Hook acknowledged, should carry out the investigations and the dismissals. If they saw a compelling reason to keep Party members on faculty, even though they had automatically committed themselves to violating basic principles of academic integrity, they had the right to keep them there. Hook also noted that he was open to changing his approach if conditions on campuses worsened and universities started persecuting nontotalitarians.Footnote ⁷⁰ He was convinced, however, that it would be better for education, democracy, and the academic profession for universities to consider Communist Party membership as indicative of professional unfitness. While Dewey tried to assuage Hook by noting that their positions were essentially identical, he initially stuck to his view that the danger to academic freedom was greater with the kind of general rule that Hook was suggesting.Footnote ⁷¹

A few months later, Dewey reversed course. In an interview with the New York Times regarding the celebration of his ninetieth birthday, Dewey continued to insist that there should be no “repressive” legislation targeting Communists and fellow travelers because such laws would do more harm than good (a position with which Hook agreed). On the other hand, Dewey also stated, “I do not think Communists should be permitted to teach. … I know from personal experience how difficult it is to conduct a teachers’ group if you have to deal with Communists. But in getting rid of Communists we must not destroy the morale of the teaching profession.”Footnote ⁷² This was essentially Hook's position. Dewey had moved away from his initial letter in the Times, which had warned of the negative consequences of supporting the dismissal of Communists when a Red Scare was clouding the nation's judgment, to Hook's view that educators had a responsibility to bar Party members from teaching. Pragmatic reasoning could easily change course, even on questions of such import as academic freedom. When lobbying academic and civil liberties organizations to adopt his anti-Communist position, Hook would often refer to Dewey's interview with the New York Times to support his view. He also took credit for changing Dewey's mind on the question of Communist educators.Footnote ⁷³

Against Tolerance: Lobbying the Academic World against Communism

Hook was the most influential writer on academic freedom during the early years of the Cold War, but his lobbying efforts arguably made an even greater impact on academic policy.Footnote ⁷⁴ At the time of the University of Washington case in 1949, for instance, Hook worked with his ally, philosopher Arthur Lovejoy, to ensure that the American Philosophical Association would not take a stand criticizing the dismissals.Footnote ⁷⁵ In 1953, Hook lobbied the ACCF, the country's most influential organization of liberal anti-Communists (and the domestic offshoot of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom), to adopt his position on Communist professors. The statement, which was composed with the assistance of New York Intellectual Irving Kristol, read, “Where does the Communist teacher fit into the scheme of academic freedom? The only reasonable answer is: He does not. A member of the Communist Party has transgressed the canons of academic responsibility, has engaged his intellect to servility, and is therefore professionally disqualified from performing his functions as scholar and teacher.”Footnote ⁷⁶ While historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a member of the ACCF's Academic Freedom Committee, complained that this statement exaggerated the Communist threat to higher education just as an unprecedented wave of dismissals was taking place, it stood.Footnote ⁷⁷

Even when Hook's lobbying did not convince his critics to change their positions, it did help shift the discourse, so his adversaries had to work on the terms he had helped set. Instead of focusing their energies on defending individual professors, who were often fired with no evidence of wrongdoing except having once associated with the Communist Party, groups like the AAUP were constantly forced by Hook and his influential allies to defend their first principles. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Hook wrote a number of letters to the AAUP lambasting the organization for refusing to alter its long-held position that only professional incompetence or moral turpitude, not Party membership by itself, could constitute grounds for dismissal. The currency of Hook's views within the general public, even among some members of the AAUP, made it difficult to launch effective resistance to the politically motivated faculty dismissals of the McCarthy era.Footnote ⁷⁸

While Hook was a philosophical pragmatist whose primary concern was always with the consequences of a given set of actions, his voluminous writing and lobbying against Communist professors rarely discussed specific academic freedom cases. This is what makes Hook's public debate with his colleague Edwin Burgum so revealing. Burgum, a longtime New York University literature professor, was suspended (and later dismissed) by the university for taking the Fifth Amendment when questioned by a congressional committee on his ties to the Communist Party.Footnote ⁷⁹ In NYU's student newspaper, the Square Bulletin, Hook delivered a withering assault on Burgum's credentials to remain at the university. While Hook claimed that he would refrain from discussing the specifics of the case because it may fall under faculty review, he made his position on Burgum's character clear. He believed Burgum was a liar, a fraud, and an apologist for mass murder. Hook was incredulous that Burgum, “a member of many notorious Communist Party front organizations,” dared raise the banner of academic freedom to defend himself against the university's charges of professional unfitness.Footnote ⁸⁰ Hook was outraged by what he considered Burgum's hypocrisy. In the 1930s, Hook noted, Burgum had defended Stalin's show trials, attacked the formation of the Committee for Cultural Freedom due to its criticism of the Soviet Union, and showed little concern for the academic freedom of Fascists, whom he demanded be expelled from their teaching posts. By contrast, Burgum had “never once raised his voice in behalf of the tens of thousands of students and professors dismissed, exiled and shot in Communist countries.”Footnote ⁸¹ For Burgum to proclaim the ideals of academic freedom, “which he had traduced for so long, is a piece of gross hypocrisy, part of the pattern of gross disingenuousness and duplicity which has marked his thought and behavior during the last sixteen years. Burgum would be better served to let others speak for him. His hands are unclean.”Footnote ⁸² According to Hook, Burgum lacked integrity, honesty, and any form of moral center. His actions seemed to confirm Hook's assessments of why Communists had no place on campus.

When questioned about his membership in the Party by a congressional committee, Burgum, like many others in his position, had chosen to take the Fifth Amendment. This was on the principle that the state had no right to compel citizens to discuss their legal political activities or to require them to “name names” of past associates.Footnote ⁸³ As Hook explained in his article on Burgum, universities should not tolerate such behavior by their faculty members. He argued that taking the Fifth Amendment on the questions related to the Communist Party—an organization devoted to destroying academic freedom everywhere in the world—could never serve as an excuse to keep one's job. The analogy Hook chose to use for such an individual was telling. An academic who took the Fifth Amendment on the issue of Party membership “would be comparable to an individual who, although we had evidence he was a carrier of infection, refused to be examined.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The Communist threat needed to be quarantined.

Students, Hook observed, were easily susceptible to the careful insertion of the Party line, which was often so subtle that it could “only be detected except by a knowledgeable and critically trained observer.”Footnote ⁸⁵ What if, Hook asked, Communist faculty members were assigned to teach ROTC sections? What if they worked in buildings where confidential scientific research was stored? What about the national security threat such teachers represented when teaching students who may someday join the army? Hook expressed incredulity: “I cannot believe that even those who believe that membership of the Communist Party should be permitted to teach would like to turn them loose on students who are to join the armed forces or would like to give them access to restricted places and material.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Even if Burgum had no access to classified material, as an English professor he might compel students to turn against their country. For Hook, therefore, expelling subversive faculty members such as Burgum was a matter of national security.

In Burgum's lengthy response, published in the Square Bulletin while he was still on unpaid leave pending the university's investigations into his political associations, he blasted Hook for tarring his character, diluting the purpose of the Fifth Amendment, and undermining academic freedom. Burgum argued that he refused to answer questions the congressional committee posed about his political associations because doing so would only legitimize the investigations themselves. As Burgum elaborated, “It is the duty of a citizen to oppose anti-democratic trends. If one were to cooperate with McCarthy or the McCarran Committee by answering the questions of the modern inquisition, one would be tacitly subscribing to their premises and siding their objectives. This is no way to oppose their nefarious goals. To refuse to answer questions is one way to protest against the invasion of civil rights.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In this analysis, Hook would have him fired for defending constitutional freedoms.

Burgum argued that in his case there was much more at stake than his own career: it actually involved the question of whether academic freedom would survive at NYU. His dismissal would send a strong warning to students and faculty members that certain lines of thinking would not be tolerated. It would have a chilling effect on the entire school. Burgum insisted his teaching and research record, along with the conventions of academic freedom, remain the focus of attention: “It is upon that record alone that I expect to be judged and not upon the hysteria of the moment bent upon destroying all decent standards of teaching and research in our universities.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Burgum worried that Hook's philosophy set a dangerous precedent: it represented “the intrusion of McCarthyism into academic life.”Footnote ⁸⁹ His final difference with Hook, Burgum maintained, was that even though he did not agree with his views, he did not “think therefore, that he should be dismissed from the University.”Footnote ⁹⁰ While Burgum was the one losing his job because of his supposed commitment to totalitarianism, it was Hook, he argued, whose views were actually illiberal and would restrict academic freedom.

Burgum's response resonated with at least some NYU students, who found Hook's arguments unconvincing, condescending, and disconnected from the political reality of the McCarthy era. In the anonymously published and mimeographed article, “Student Reply to Sidney Hook,” the authors pointed out that Hook had refused to examine Burgum's actual twenty-eight-year record as a professor at NYU.Footnote ⁹¹ Had he done so, they noted, Hook would have been forced to admit that there was absolutely no evidence that Burgum had violated professional ethics. The administration had not accused him of engaging in indoctrination. In fact, Burgum had a strong teaching record and was popular with undergraduates. The students mocked Hook's seemingly contradictory view that Communist indoctrination was “so subtle” it could evade detection except by trained experts, and that it simultaneously represented a serious threat to the nation's security: “According to professor Hook, they [Communists] might be engaging in a propaganda so insidious that those who have been indoctrinated do not know what has happened to them and those who have not succumbed to it, do not realize that an attempt to indoctrinate them has been made.”Footnote ⁹² While Hook claimed to be a “pragmatist,” the students insisted his philosophy of academic freedom seemed to be based almost entirely on an a priori rule against Communists. Hook had left the world of actual practice behind.

Not only that, Hook seemed blind to the way his obsessive anti-Communism contributed to a general decline in academic freedom. While Hook's massive output on the Communist question made Party members and sympathizers seem like serious threats, the true problem facing academia was the repression of radical and even liberal voices:

The main issue was that polemicists such as Hook, who dominated the national conversation, would not even admit that there was a “Red Scare” in the first place.

While some students opposed Hook's reasoning on the Burgum case, his ideas managed to make an impact where they mattered most: in the upper echelons of the university administration. Responding to the debate over Burgum's fitness to teach, NYU chancellor Henry Heald recited Hook's position almost verbatim, “A member of the Communist Party is not a free agent intellectually or politically. He cannot claim academic freedom because he has forsaken his claim to academic freedom. He is restricted to a form of thinking and action dictated by a foreign power.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Invoking the Fifth Amendment was a constitutional right, but Heald declared it would represent the height of irresponsibility for a university administrator not to dismiss a professor who left any room for doubt on his fitness to teach in a free society. Whatever the students might think, Hook was right. Keeping Burgum on the faculty, Heald maintained, was not worth the risk he posed to students and to the country.

Corresponding with His Critics: Challenges to Hook's Analysis of Academic Freedom

Hook's critics argued that by magnifying a largely nonexistent problem, and then calling for a radical solution that involved dismissing professors for their political affiliations rather than their professional conduct, he had helped limit the academic freedom of all scholars, not just Communists. His vaunted commitment to pragmatism was failing him: they urged him to look more closely at the actual effect of his writings. While Hook claimed his call to purge Communists was intended to keep faculty autonomy free from government interference (who would do it for them if they relented on their duty), critics argued his writing had actually encouraged the excesses of the McCarthy era. They explained that his focus on Communists had made it difficult to fight much more pertinent threats to academic freedom, including draconian loyalty oaths, dismissals of ex-Party members who chose to take the Fifth Amendment, and massive repression of the academic freedom of civil rights movement supporters in southern universities.

They wrote him letters imploring him to change his focus. In 1953, John Herman Randall, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, called on Hook to take a serious look at how college administrators had interpreted his writings. Randall explained that no matter what Hook would like to believe about himself, his activism had “objectively” harmed the cause of academic freedom and supported its enemies. Randall maintained he was not alone in his view: “Among those many men who have always thought most highly of your perception and judgment [there has been] a state of bewilderment at your public activity and statements of the past few years.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Randall pointed out that university officials were using Hook's writings to advocate for repressive measures. These included administrators from the University of California, who used his writing to help justify the firing of twenty-four faculty members during its loyalty oath crisis of 1949–1951.Footnote ⁹⁶ Randall worried Hook was letting his visceral memories of the heated debates of the 1930s obscure his judgment of the 1950s, when the idea of a Communist threat to higher education was preposterous. Why couldn't Hook see the relevance of the AAUP's traditional view that fitness to teach should be judged on individual behavior? He accused Hook of unintentionally shoring up “forces with which you are far from sympathetic. You ought to realize this—it is the judgment of almost every academic person I have talked with over the past five years.”Footnote ⁹⁷ He complained that Hook was using his brilliance to support academic freedom's most reactionary enemies.

Richard Ashman, a physiologist at Louisiana State, told Hook that his ideas on academic freedom actually mimicked what was so terrible about the repression of non-Communist scholars in the Soviet Union. Ashman concluded, “We are prepared to follow Russia's example in crippling science. I hope you will support the AAUP, instead of giving aid to those who are aiming in the general direction of Hitlerism in the United States. Your voice is rather loud. I hear it often.”Footnote ⁹⁸ He called on Hook to, instead, train his rhetorical sights on more deserving targets, such as the repression commonly experienced by southern scholars aiming to open up a dialogue on civil rights for African Americans. He reminded Hook that, in the United States, violations of academic freedom almost always took place against professors on the political left: “No teacher has ever lost his job for being violently anti-Semitic, for being strongly against labor, for cursing Roosevelt.”Footnote ⁹⁹ With all his influence, Ashman argued, Hook could make a major impact on the national consciousness if he brought this fact to light. Instead, his writing only exacerbated the tendency for left-of-center professors to fear that their politics might put their careers in jeopardy.

Writers from smaller colleges explained that administrators were using Hook's work to justify the repression of any type of activism they considered left wing. Bruce Stewart from Missouri Valley College explained that simply supporting local efforts for racial equality could lead to charges of Communism at his institution. Stewart, who noted he had been falsely accused of Party membership himself, pleaded with Hook to think of faculty at smaller colleges such as his own: “Ignorant trustees exist for you only as an abstraction. I am afraid you have little conception of the part they play in the average small college in the country.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Hook's vaunted commitment to philosophical pragmatism over abstraction, these critics maintained, was failing him; they wanted him to take his pragmatism, with its emphasis on results, more seriously.

Hook never relented in his position. In responses to his critics, he would return to the pragmatic line of reasoning that if faculty members did not do the job of keeping their departments clear of Communists, the state would step in to do it for them. The only way for the academic profession to protect itself from reactionary threats was to follow the example of the American labor movement by aggressively cleaning house of their Communist members.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Once government officials saw the ethical commitment that American academics had toward clearing out subversion in their ranks, the more autonomy the state would grant them. In a letter to one concerned faculty member, Hook explained that he had had conversations with a congressman who assured him that legislators would never even think of interfering with academia if they knew that professors themselves were ensuring that academic integrity was respected.Footnote ¹⁰² For the faculty that complained that he said too little about the repression of civil rights activists, Hook argued that supporting the rights of the members of a subversive political party was probably not a smart way to convince white southerners to abandon Jim Crow.Footnote ¹⁰³ In order for faculty to retain their treasured autonomy, they would need to meet the public's demand by following the entirely reasonable request of barring Communists from academic life.

Hook also blasted his opponents for supposedly underestimating the treacherous nature of the Communist Party and overestimating the supposed “hysteria” against liberals and leftists on American campuses. While Hook wrote relatively little about McCarthyism, he did believe that the task of eradicating the Communist menace needed to be conducted responsibly and rationally, characteristics he thought McCarthy sorely lacked with his “wild, undiscriminating, unscrupulous harangues” against educators.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ On the other hand, for Hook, the reality was that academic freedom had never been so well protected than in the postwar United States. There was no “witch-hunt” or “persecution” of free thinkers on American campuses. This was simply a slogan used by naïve liberals, fellow travelers, and Communists to decry reasonable policies to ensure that members of a totalitarian conspiracy had no place to fester within American universities.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ When the AAUP finally decided to take a firm stance in 1956 against the McCarthy-era dismissals, Hook informed Henry Luce of Life magazine that it represented perhaps the greatest threat to the future of American higher education.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The Communist threat, according to Hook, was real.

While Hook's crusade against campus Communists encountered scathing criticism from fervent civil libertarians and political radicals, he faced a milder form of disapproval from the influential cadre of anti-Communist academics who strongly supported America's Cold War mission. Perhaps the period's most famous Cold War liberal, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., stepped into the period's academic freedom debate, for instance, to argue against a blanket ban on Communists. He believed such a policy set a bad precedent for faculty autonomy, underestimated the intelligence of students to see through attempts at indoctrination, and undervalued the ability of professors to defeat bad ideas through the traditional means of academic debate. Moreover, by 1950, he thought, “a Communist idea has about as much future in this country as a snowball in hell.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

That said, Schlesinger, like Hook, believed talk of a “witch-hunt” was exaggerated. One of the reasons universities should not fire professors such as those at the University of Washington was because it turned these “contemptible individuals,” “wretched non-entities,” and followers of a “foreign nation and totalitarian conspiracy” into political martyrs with far more influence than when they were ignored.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ With friends like these the victims of the academic Red Scare did not need enemies. Although Schlesinger understood that attacks on civil liberties and academics were real, he thought they were overblown. In fact, he believed that there had never been more academic freedom in all of American history than the early 1950s. In a review of several books on academic freedom in 1956, Schlesinger opined that professors complained because:

For Schlesinger, whose views on both domestic and foreign policy probably came closest to embodying the platonic ideal of mainstream 1950s social thought, Cold War liberalism, this might have seemed apparent. It was less so for the academics who fell outside of that consensus. More than any other scholar of the McCarthy era, Sidney Hook helped make sure of that.

As the anti-Communist energy of the McCarthy era subsided, Hook's writing on academic freedom lost much of its mainstream appeal, but we can take away much from his moment of national influence. The impact of his work reminds us of the way that formative experiences from an earlier political moment, such as the traumatic debates over Stalinism in the 1930s, can have an outsized influence on a later period, even when conditions have fundamentally changed. Hook's correspondence also shows the fundamentally contested nature of academic freedom. Even as his work helped lead to the dismissal of scholars who were by all accounts accomplished researchers and teachers, Hook always saw himself as defending academic freedom from its enemies, not restricting its scope. His interlocutors, however, demonstrate that even during periods as repressive as the McCarthy era, no discourse on academic freedom is entirely hegemonic. The term is always up for contestation.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The result of these contests, as the Cold War era dismissals bring into relief, help determine what gets published, what gets taught, who gets hired, and who gets fired. In short, they define nothing less than the nature of higher education itself. The current climate in higher education suggests these debates remain relevant, as Hook's legacy casts a long shadow over the modern university.