The decade following World War II revealed the United States as a deeply divided country. Although some Americans saw the victory as an opportunity to push for social change either in electoral politics or civil rights, many others moved from a focus on Nazism to a fear of Communism as a threat to the “American way of life.” American colleges and universities were not spared this conflict. Instead, they became centers of the struggle to define the future of the country and key locations for the debates about the relationship of liberty and security that helped define Cold War America. Indeed, the Cold War threw American higher education into crisis; for administrators, faculty, staff, and students the fear of communism forced the questions of academic freedom and free speech onto the agenda in new ways. Politicians and the Press attacked colleges and universities as hotbeds of extremism and dissent; across the country administrators sought to contain the attacks and control their campuses.
At the University of California in general, and at UCLA in particular, the crisis emerged from the UC Regents’ 1949 demand that all faculty and staff sign an oath declaring that they were not members of the Communist Party as a condition of employment. By insisting on an ideological test, the Regents claimed the right to determine what could be thought and taught as “true.” In response, students and faculty, both supporters and opponents of the oath, organized. Some faculty refused to sign the oath and lost their positions, other faculty signed but sought to aid the non-signers, and others supported the oath and viewed the non-signers as either foolish troublemakers or as dangers to the institution. Students divided in their position on faculty as well; but they added new dimensions to the debate as they argued over the nature not only of academic freedom but of the free press. In all, members of the campus community had to confront two separate questions: what was a university for and how should you respond to a crisis? Campus in Crisis: The Cold War Conflict over Academic Freedom at UCLA takes up these issues.
Although it has been 70 years since the Regents’ Loyalty Oath, these issues have never gone away. The battle over the Oath not only disrupted the University of California for a decade but it laid the seeds for future movements for free speech and academic freedom at UC. As recent debates over outside speakers and academic freedom show, academic freedom and its purposes remain profoundly contested. It is our hope that Campus in Crisis will help clarify both the stakes and the history of both academic freedom and free speech at UCLA; and thereby at colleges and universities more widely.