Copied from: George Anastaplo, "Legal Education, Economics, and Law School Governance: Explorations," South Dakota Law Review (Vol. 46, 2001): pp. 102-315.
page 300
Addendum 111 [A Letter to the Editor, submitted by John A. Murley, Professor of Political Science, Rochester Institute of Technology, to The Bulletin ot the Atomic Scientists (December 2000).]
I read with interest your profile of George Anastaplo (The Bulletin ot the Atomic Scientists, November/December 2000). You are correct. It was not only well-known scientists and members of the Arts and Letters community who were forced either to kowtow to McCarthy anti-Communism hysteria or to lose their careers. We will never know how many young men and women just beginning their careers in the 1950s were thus affected.
Today a similar danger is posed by the McCarthyism of the Left. Political Correctness regarding race, gender, and class intimidates education and professional decision-making throughout Academia in this country. Anastaplo has continued his refusal to be intimidated, this time by the reckless charges of racism that were leveled against several members of the Loyola law faculty in 1995-1996. (This is reported in the Chicago Tribune Magazine, November 26, 2000.)
The most recent consequence of Anastaplo's resistance to intimidation may be seen in the elevation last spring of two other faculty members in the Loyola School of Law to the newly created positions of Research Professor. This was done at a time when George Anastaplo was likely the only member of that faculty with a national reputation as a legal scholar. It sometimes seems that he had published as much as, if not more than, all of the the rest of the then-active faculty of that law school combined.
George Anastaplo demonstrated how one responded properly to McCarthyism in the 1950s. He has now shown us how men and women of good will in Academia might properly respond to the threats posed by Political Correctness today. Your readers may be interested in the collections compiled by George Anastaplo about these matters for Volumes 42 and 43 of the South Dakota Law Review (1997, 1998). There is also the article about him in Leo Strauss, The Straussians, and the American Regime, Kenneth L. Deutsch and John A. Merely, eds. (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).