Pork Choppers, Presidents, and Perverts: The Response of Two University Presidents to Attacks on the Privacy and Academic Freedom of Professors by the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, 1956 to 1965

In the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, several states followed the lead of Joseph McCarthy and formed committees to investigate Americans considered to be potentially subversive within states' governments. Students and professors fell victim to the "lavender scare," as public universities forced them to make concessions to their civil liberties. However, no investigation resulted in a large-scale, statewide purge of educators and students quite like that produced by the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (FLIC). With appropriations from the Florida legislature from 1956 to 1965, FLIC investigators interrogated students, faculty, and staff at four public universities in Florida who they deemed a threat to their McCarthy-like versions of democracy and morality. As fears of communism reached hysterical levels, leaders of FLIC rationalized that "decency" itself was at risk. FLIC was able to parlay those fears into the justification for their actions and thus operated as virtually untouchable for over a decade.