In 1953 Conant stepped down from the presidency and was replaced by Nathan M. Pusey ’28, a public foe of McCarthy. Unlike Conant, a scientist who took part in the Manhattan Project, Pusey did not have a background in national security and did not believe professors should be fired for taking the Fifth.

“Under Pusey, there was probably less danger to communists on the Faculty then there would have been if Conant had stayed,” Keller says.

McCarthy thought so too, telling the press that Pusey was a “rabid anti-anti-Communist.”

When McCarthy publicly demanded that the new University President fire Furry, Pusey said in a press conference, “Harvard is unalterably opposed to Communism. It is dedicated to free inquiry by free men.”

But under Pusey’s watch, many non-tenured faculty found their jobs in jeopardy.

“There were these public statements which were good,” Schrecker says. “But on the other hand, the University’s behavior was to essentially collaborate with many of the anti-communist investigations.”

She says this was common for university leaders at the time.

“There was a lot of hypocrisy about academic freedom,” she says.

Reuben says the understanding of academic freedom has changed since the 1950s, when it often meant that faculty could publish or speak freely only within their own field.

“That was a much more limited notion of academic freedom than our current conception of free speech,” she says. “From the perspective of many people at the time, they weren’t violating faculties’ academic freedom.”

According to Reuben, the more modern understanding of intellectual liberties developed in the 1960s.

“In part I think it was a response to the political repression of the ’50s,” she says. “People started thinking that universities should protect all kinds of speech, not just scholarly speech.”

Leading the Way

The national security concerns during the Cold War, and the government-initiated probes of communist activities, led leaders at Harvard and other universities to take precautions that many historians, with the benefit of hindsight, call unnecessary.

“Universities, like the rest of society, over-responded to the threat of communism,” Reuben says.