The New McCarthyism: UC Berkeley Just Handed Over the Names of 160 Students and Faculty to the Trump Admin
I'm beyond disturbed that my alma mater is wiling to destroy its reputation as the birthplace of the 1960s Free Speech Movement and put students in danger in the process, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes.
The University of California, Berkeley, famous for its Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, included the names of 160 faculty, students, and staff in documents it recently turned over to the Trump administration as part of an antisemitism probe. It’s yet another worrying sign in the federal government’s efforts to use allegations of antisemitism to discipline academia and suppress resistance to its agenda, including its support for Israel.
As a graduate of UC Berkeley and as someone who was a student activist there in the 1990s, I was particularly disturbed that the university named names to the government.
Naming names was one of the hallmarks of the paranoid era of the 1950s in the United States, when Americans were hauled before Senator Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee and interrogated about their political beliefs and suspected allegiance to communism. For those under the anti-communist spotlight, naming the names of other people was one way to avoid being blacklisted or otherwise punished for their real or alleged political beliefs. The spectacle of McCarthyist shaming and persecution signaled to the rest of American society to religiously embrace anti-communism, a legacy that is still strong today.