I wrote my first book on McCarthyism and philosophy, Time in the Ditch (2001) because I thought the victims of the postwar Reds Scare should be memorialized, and its ongoing effects identified. But wasn’t one book on the topic enough? How did I come to write The Philosophy Scare?
Time in the Ditch assembled such evidence as was then available concerning political pressures on philosophy during the McCarthy Era, and suggested that philosophers needed, in its words, to “break their strange silence” about what had happened. It was therefore not a definitive treatment; it aimed merely to provoke discussion. There was some of that, most notably among philosophers of science. When it died down, I got back to my real work, which is that of an historian of philosophy who takes seriously the fact that philosophy went somewhere new and different after Kant—not just to the gutted a priori of the logical positivists.
But around ten years ago, something happened. I was in my office at UCLA, enduring another lonely office hour. Office hours make it impossible for me to do serious work, because someone may always come in; but no one ever does, unless it is just before a major assignment is due. So you’re all by yourself. What to do?
I was, of course, surfing the Web. The California sun was shining in my windows, the UCLA Marching Band was practicing down in Sunset Canyon, and all was peaceful, though rather loud. Until I got to a web page about the history of UCLA. It had a few paragraphs about UCLA’s first chancellor, who took office in 1952 but is, I learned, kind of a secret: he is not commemorated anywhere on campus because he basically fled office seven years later just ahead of a football scandal. His name almost knocked me out of my chair: Raymond B. Allen.
I knew about Allen, or thought I did—I had written about him in Time and the Ditch. He was academic America’s leading Red hunter during he early Cold War. As president of the University of Washington in 1948-49, he orchestrated the firing of several Communist professors, most prominently philosopher Herbert Philips. A year or two after that, Allen left the University to become the director of a Cold War think tank. I had always assumed this meant that he had been hounded out of academia by professors irate at his high-handed violations of academic freedom. Not so: at his last faculty meeting at Washington, they had given him a standing ovation. He spent only about six months at the think tank before assuming the chancellorship of UCLA.
The question was too obvious to ignore: Was there any connection between Allen’s fame as a Red hunter and his becoming the first chancellor of UCLA?
My next stop was the UCLA Archives.