Ellen Schrecker

Ellen Schrecker is an American historian and author who has written extensively about McCarthyism and American higher education. Her latest book, The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s, to be published by the University of Chicago Press in December 2021, provides the first comprehensive analysis of American higher education’s most turbulent decade. Her previous books include No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986), The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (3d ed. 2017), Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998), and The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the University (The New Press, 2010). She has also written for such publications as The Nation and the Chronicle of Higher Education and edited Academe, the American Association of University Professors’ magazine, as well as two collections of essays. And she wrote a Chinese cookbook. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard, taught there and at NYU and Princeton, before ending up at Yeshiva University from which she retired as a full professor.