Dr. Ellen Schrecker, professor of history and world-renowned authority on McCarthyism, will be taking what she terms a “lifelong sabbatical” to write another book and pursue further research in her field of expertise at the end of this Spring 2013 semester.
Dr. Schrecker had a varied and fascinating career path before coming to Yeshiva University. She was initially drawn to the study of history from exposure to her father’s work; he managed a historical library and wrote a number of books. Dr. Schrecker majored in history at Radcliffe College of Harvard University, the women’s college for the then-all-male Harvard, intending to become a secondary school teacher. When Dr. Schrecker’s thesis adviser recommended her for a fellowship, she attended graduate school at Harvard and ultimately received her PhD in Modern European History.
Interestingly, the first book Dr. Schrecker wrote was not historical; it was a Chinese cookbook. Her husband had been a historian of China, so when the family moved to Taiwan with two small children, a Chinese lady lived with them as a nanny. Mrs. Chiang was also a terrific cook, and while she would work, Dr. Schrecker remembers following her around the kitchen: “She’d be throwing things into the wok and I’d be running after with a measuring spoon trying to intercept it and write recipes out of it.” Her newfound knowledge became a published cookbook thanks to an agent referred by a friend who served as a food critic for the New York Times.
After receiving her PhD, Dr. Schrecker worked for Harvard in an administrative capacity for some time. She then taught Freshman Composition for eight years at the university, an experience she “enjoyed enormously.” In these seminar courses, Dr. Schrecker first taught the topic which would become her specialty: American history of the 1950s, the period in which she grew up. At this point she realized that there was no existing book on McCarthyism, a term that refers to the anti-communist fervor inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy but has come to describe unfounded allegations of disloyalty. So, she decided to fill the gap and thus was born No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities.
Dr. Schrecker moved to New York following her years at Harvard and taught at universities such as The New School and New York University. At this time, she retrained herself as an American historian; in fact, she notes, “The first American history course I taught, not counting what I was doing when I was teaching Freshman Composition, was a graduate course.” She spent a year working for the New York Council for the Humanities, following which Dr. Schrecker taught at Princeton University. Finally, she came to Yeshiva University, where she has taught ever since.
At this stage Dr. Schrecker produced her most popular work, The Age of McCarthyism: A Short History with Documents, then publishing a general study of McCarthyism titled Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. She also joined the American Association of University Professors, which was concerned with issues of academic freedom—precisely what her first book on McCarthyism had discussed. Dr. Schrecker was selected to serve as faculty editor for the Association’s journal, Academe, a position she loved. Her favorite issue, she recalls fondly, “was one on academic freedom around the world, and I found somebody in Algeria, and somebody in Brazil, and somebody in China, and it was just great!”
In the wake of the September 11th tragedy, Dr. Schrecker’s work took on greater contemporary significance. As concerns about civil liberties proliferated, she was flooded with questions. It was then that Dr. Schrecker realized the unique influence she could have on public discourse: “Although other people could edit a magazine, nobody else was McCarthyism.” As the global authority, Dr. Schrecker fields questions from journalists as distant as Greece, and has been featured in a range of documentary films.
Dr. Schrecker will continue her study of academic freedom in her latest project, this time becoming the first historian to address academic freedom in the 1960s. She collects oral history interviews, many containing politically sensitive information that cannot be found in archives. Dr. Schrecker says of her project, “What I want to do is look at the kinds of political activities faculty members were involved with, and also at the ways in which the movements of the 1960s affected their work, and their disciplines, their teaching.” Dr. Schrecker particularly enjoys this vast project because she lived through the period herself – even volunteering for SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a student civil rights organization] – and has the opportunity to interview her own colleagues and friends.
This type of historical scholarship is critical, Dr. Schrecker maintains, in understanding the state of society and the political sphere. She remarks, “I’ve always seen my work as a kind of intervention in a broader political discourse. So, for example, when I looked at McCarthyism in the universities, I am looking at the ways in which the universities have been affected by American politics and how they are very much not isolated from society, but very much a part of society.” Because political issues are often controversial, Dr. Schrecker finds it critical to be scrupulous in her research, examining a range of political viewpoints. Ultimately, this history affects present issues of academic freedom and shapes not just the university, but American intellectual discourse more broadly. She asserts, “I feel that, as a historian, if you don’t know your own history, you really have no handle on what is going on in the present.”
Dr. Schrecker reflects positively on her 26 years at Yeshiva University. She remarks that in comparing Yeshiva students to Harvard students, the main difference is that YU does not have a hockey team. Dr. Schrecker has enjoyed teaching a broad range of subjects to YU undergraduate students. She observes, “Compared to my colleagues at other schools, that have bigger history departments that allow them to specialize, they may have more depth, but I have a lot of breadth!” She attests to the comparable intellectual ability across genders, praising the strength of students on both the Stern and Yeshiva College campuses. When Dr. Schrecker joined the faculty in 1987, the history department had three professors in all, and she takes pride in the growth of the department and the high quality of the major. “It has been a trip,” Dr. Schrecker recalls with a smile, “I have been very lucky…I will certainly miss both my students and my colleagues.”
We at Yeshiva University will deeply miss Dr. Schrecker as well. We express the utmost gratitude for all she has given to the history department and the university community at large, and wish her the best of luck in her future endeavors.