Ray Ginger eventually found work in Canada.

In 2000, Ann Ginger wrote a letter to the Board of Overseers demanding an apology for the treatment of her late husband. The response she received, from then-Board of Overseers President Sharon Gagnon, admitted that the University had forced Ray Ginger to resign but stopped short of an apology.

“I would not presume to...second-guess the motives or judgments of individuals in that difficult time,” Gagnon wrote. “It seems clear, however, that Harvard took an action in the case of Mr. Ginger that many thoughtful people today, looking back, would not find appropriate.”

Ann Ginger, now the executive director of the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute in Berkeley, Calif., has spent the past few years trying to get Harvard to issue an apology to her. She calls Gagnon’s response “absolutely unconscionable” and says Harvard should own up to its actions during the 1950s.

“To get a job at Harvard was a big deal. To lose that job for that reason means you’re blacklisted, means you cannot get a decent job anywhere in the United States,” she says. “That is a commission of a crime by Harvard University.”

According to Schrecker, other universities have issued apologies for firing professors accused of being communists during the McCarthy era—but those professors were often tenured, meaning that their universities specifically terminated lifetime contracts.

But since Harvard only let go of non-tenured people—whose employment was not permanently guaranteed—Schrecker says the cases are “muddier” and it is harder to prove the firings were politically motivated.

The University’s approach during the 1950s, Schrecker says, was to conduct its own investigations of any faculty members who came under government scrutiny, and to require graduate students with potential communist ties to “clear themselves with the FBI.”

“When faculty members were brought up and questioned before some of the investigative committees of that period, the University responded,” Schrecker says. “They were afraid of the public repercussions of not responding.”

And Mendelsohn agrees that, for non-tenured faculty whose jobs were more vulnerable, the University did not always allow them to stay as it had done with Furry.

“They were not specifically let go for political reasons,” he says. “They were not kept around.”

The Public Face

The University’s treatment of non-tenured faculty during the 1950s presents a stark contrast not only to the way it is remembered today but also to the image Harvard’s leaders projected at the time.

Conant’s public statements suggested that he would support any faculty member who came under congressional investigation.

But according to Brandeis historian Morton Keller, co-author of Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America’s University, when Furry invoked the Fifth before the HUAC, Conant wanted the Corporation to revoke his tenure.