Description
The "Red scare" of the 1950s created a national crisis that challenged concepts of loyalty and freedom of speech in every corner of American society. The crisis was especially problematic in American universities, where traditions of academic freedom found themselves at odds with political issues stemming from the cold war. The University of Nevada in Reno was no exception. The University before and during World War II was a small (fewer than 2,000 students) school offering basic programs to a largely Nevada-based student body in the nation’s least-populated state. The campus was quiet, secure, traditional, and generally conservative. The postwar years brought booming enrollments and new faculty members, many from outside Nevada, imbued with a sense of the importance of research and of shared academic governance. Soon, the university found itself embroiled in an intense controversy that threatened its academic integrity and even raised concerns about its future as a viable institution. The 1952 appointment of Minard W. Stout as president triggered the crisis. Mandated by a conservative Board of Regents to "clean up" the university, Stout brought to his new job a keen sense of mission and a strident commitment to an authoritarian, top-down chain of command. His subsequent battles with faculty and students over their role in university governance and over the very nature of higher education soon degenerated into angry accusations of faculty Communist sympathies and bitter confrontations over academic free speech, academic freedom, and loyalty. The storm brought the university national notoriety and made the administration of higher education a major issue within Nevada, ultimately involving the state legislature and the courts in an effort to resolve the conflict. J. Dee Kille’s lively and insightful account of the crisis "on the hill" rests on a wide range of archival sources, interviews and oral histories, university records, and published sources. Of vital interest to readers interested in 1950s Nevada, the book also serves as a powerful case study of the devastating impact of McCarthyism, suspicion, and repression on an American university during this turbulent era in the nation’s history.

Reviews
"Well researched and written, Academic Freedom Imperiled provides a portrait of a public university attempting to adjust to change under stress." —Charles H. McCormick, The Journal of American History, December 2005

Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: Dictators and "Reducators"
2: Who Is the Boss, Anyway?
3: Let the Investigations Begin
4: Out with Stout
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Excerpt
"I guess you're wondering what kind of S.O.B. I am." This was exactly the statement with which Minard W. Stout opened his first faculty meeting on September 12, 1952. For the faculty members, whether they had been wondering or not, the remainder of Stout's addresss clarified matters. He stated that "he assumed that all faculty members felt that a president had to be some kind of overbearing character to get to be president.... While that might be true, he would try to make himself clear and understood at all times....To be a president, you might have to rough at times." Upon completion of his speech, he immediately left the room without acknowledging the faculty, neither asking for their reactions nor answering questions. On that late-summer day, the new president of the University of Nevada left no doubt that he was a man on a mission. Stout, in a 1972 interview, confirmed that he had, indeed, been given a mandate by the Board of Regents to "clean things up."