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MCCARTHYISM ON THE CAMPUSES  
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Corey Robin
September 15, 2025
Jacobin
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_ The University of California, in a move with strong echoes of
McCarthyism, has turned over to the Trump administration dossiers on
160 faculty, students and staff under investigation for antisemitism.
_

Judith Butler is among the University of California faculty being
investigated for alleged antisemitism, screen grab

 

Judith Butler is one of 160 faculty, students, and staff members at UC
Berkeley whose name the University of California has turned over
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administration to help with the federal government’s investigation
into alleged antisemitism on the Berkeley campus.

Let’s slow that statement down so we can understand its components
more clearly.

Since February, Donald Trump’s Department of Education (DOE) has
been investigating
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including Berkeley and other University of California (UC) campuses,
for their handling of alleged antisemitism on their campuses. In
March, the Justice Department announced
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separate but parallel investigation of the UC campuses.

In July, a House congressional committee called
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to testify about alleged antisemitism on their campuses. One of the
summoned was the chancellor of the City University of New York or CUNY
(I’ll come back to that). Another was the chancellor of Berkeley.
All three were put through the ringer by a group of rabid Republican
representatives. None showed much resistance or said much to defend
the rights of faculty, students, or staff.

At the same time, the Trump administration has been withholding a
half-billion dollars in federal research grants from University of
California Los Angeles (UCLA), which the president of the entire UC
system, James Milliken, former chancellor of CUNY (I’ll come back to
that), is trying desperately to get back.

So when the Department of Education demanded that Berkeley turn over
the names, UC complied. That happened, according to various
press reports [[link removed]], on August 18 — nearly a
month ago.

Since then, Berkeley’s top lawyer has sent individual letters to
each of the 160 faculty, students, and staff — including Butler —
informing them that their names have been handed over to the Trump
administration.

But what does that mean? Handing over names? It has a menacing ring,
but it’s easy to lose sight of actuality amid the aura.

According to Berkeley’s lawyer, the Department of Education has
“required production of comprehensive documents, including files and
reports related to alleged antisemitic incidents.” Because the DOE
investigations is ongoing, the lawyer adds, “the University may be
subject to additional production obligations.”

When UC hands over names, in other words, they are not just handing
over a list of names and nothing else. They are handing over —
sorry, “producing” — “comprehensive documents, including files
and reports” that, for whatever reason, involve or mention the names
of these individuals. Because of “additional production
obligations” — love that language; as if they’re a photocopy
shop — UC may have to produce many more such documents.

According to a Berkeley spokesperson, these documents may even involve
only these individuals’ “potential connection to reports of
alleged antisemitism” at Berkeley. Got that? Just their “potential
connection” to those alleged incidents.

As Butler explains
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various articles, none of these individuals who have received a letter
has the slightest idea what specific conduct, action, or statement
they are being alleged to have committed, done, or made (though they
have an idea that whatever it is, it involves Palestine
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makes clear, it may simply be that the names of these faculty, staff,
or students have only a “potential connection” to reports of other
people’s alleged antisemitism.

We come back to CUNY. For the last several years, the institution has
been engaged in multiple investigations of alleged antisemitism on its
many campuses in New York. Its chancellor
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the institution
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have agreed to a definition
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antisemitism that could force investigations into anyone from Zohran
Mamdani to the former head of the Jewish Theological Seminary
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leading human rights experts and organizations in Israel to . . . me.

In the last three months, four adjunct instructors at Brooklyn
College
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been fired, and administrators have additionally called in for
questioning five full-time faculty and one staff member.

At any time, the Trump administration could ask CUNY to hand over
“comprehensive documents, including files and reports” that simply
involve these individuals’ “potential connection” to reports of
alleged antisemitism.

Let’s be clear about the consequences of handing over these
comprehensive files.

Butler, in their comments
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the press [[link removed]],
rightly invokes the experience of McCarthyism. But just so we’re
clear about what that means, concretely, let’s remember the
specifics of how McCarthyism worked.

Think of it, as the historian Ellen Schrecker explains in her
invaluable study _Many Are the Crimes
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as a network (“Redbaiters, Inc.” is the title of her second
chapter) of government officials, private investigators, institutional
leaders, and politicians.

The investigations of politically suspect people often begin, under
pressure from the government, working with activists in various
right-wing organizations, in the private sector, and in what we call
civil society, that is, universities, churches, labor unions,
nonprofits, and so on.

This being America, the investigations are often subcontracted to
other private outfits and law firms, which specialize in these sorts
of things, combining a combination of hyperideology and
pseudoproceduralism. Reports are generated, kept for safekeeping in
the file cabinets — now, computers — of those institutions.

The government — back then, it was invariably the FBI — gets ahold
of those reports, which compose part of an individual’s FBI dossier.
Those reports circulate back into the private sector and civil
society. More important for our purposes, they also wind up in the
hands of congressional committees, which often work with those private
investigators and professional activists I mentioned above.

From there, you get the famous hearings we remember from the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), McCarthy’s committee, and
other committees. Plus the intense media coverage, which, if it
hasn’t happened already, ruins people’s lives. Not to mention all
kinds of other collateral effects — passports revoked (Paul
Robeson), employment denied, possible criminal trials and punishments
(if you refuse to answer questions or happen to slip up and commit
perjury), and more. Today we’d have to add the very real possibility
of violence or, at a minimum, sustained harassment and threats.

All of this, we should remember, because of one’s exercise of
political speech. Back then, the speech could have been anything from
voicing support for the Soviet Union to advocating war against fascism
prematurely (that was a thing) to organizing to desegregate the blood
supply of the Red Cross (that, too, was a thing). Today it could mean,
as Mamdani reminded [[link removed]] us
last weekend at Brooklyn College, standing up for the basic human
rights of Palestinians.

Any of us on college campuses has reason, in other words, to be
concerned about these campus investigations of alleged antisemitism;
the fact that Berkeley has handed over files on Butler and 159 other
faculty, staff, and students; what might come of it; and whether
something similar is happening in our own academic institutions. Or
has happened already.

In my book
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fear, I argued that regimes of fear critically depend on two types of
individuals: careerists and collaborators. Today the word we hear is
“complicity.” What all of these words are meant to suggest is that
regimes of fear are never simply top-down affairs. They have a strong
bottom-up component as well.

Unfortunately, in our discourse today, including on the Left, that
bottom-up element is often construed to be a mob of racist randos on
social media or rubes in the red states. But that’s a comfort and a
conceit. The truth is that collaborators are particular agents,
trusted with discrete responsibility and concrete power at various
levels, in multiple institutions, making choices, sometimes for the
best of reasons, with consequences that they may not intend but that
are likely to result anyway.

_Corey Robin is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from
Edmund Burke to Donald Trump
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a contributing editor at Jacobin._

_Jacobin [[link removed]] is a leading voice of the American
left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and
culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches 75,000
subscribers, in addition to a web audience of over 3,000,000 a month.
Subscribe [[link removed]] to Jacobin magazine._

* McCarthyism
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* First Amendment
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* Academic Freedom
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* University of California
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