But Harvard earned a reputation as a bulwark against McCarthyism by refusing to fire faculty targeted by McCarthy and his colleagues.
When Associate Professor of Physics Wendell H. Furry took the Fifth before a congressional committee in a nationally publicized case, Harvard reprimanded him but said that his refusal to speak was not cause for dismissal.
"We deplore the use of the Fifth Amendment," Pusey said in a later statement of his support for the Corporation's decision in the Furry case. "But we do not regard the use of the constitutional safeguard as a confession of guilt."
But when it suspected that people were presently Communists, or under Communist influence, Harvard was less sympathetic, according to contemporary newspaper accounts and later scholarship.
In the strongest of such cases, Harvard suspended Medical School Assistant Professor of Anatomy Helen Deane Markham when it decided that it could "no longer reasonably believe that she is free from Communist domination."
Her suspension was revoked after about a month and a half when the Corporation decided that she was not presently under Communist influences.
The Private Policy
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