Academic Freedom Imperiled
The McCarthy Era at the University of Nevada

The "Red scare" of the 1950s 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. J. Dee Kille's account of the crisis "on the hill" rests on a wide range of sources.

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.