The last major ideological purge of a US economics department that I am aware of was about 20 years ago. It was at San Jose State in California where a bunch of radical junior faculty such as Gayle Southworth were removed en masse. This led to some of the tenured radical faculty, like Doug Dowd, to pull up stakes and skedaddle too. There have certainly been individual cases of people being turned down for tenure for political reasons in lots of places, but not wholesale purges.
Two other possible cases come to mind are the clearing out of the Post Keynesians at Rutgers in the early 1980s and the elimination of the graduate program at UC-Riverside, although I may be talking through my hat on that last one, and I don't know that it led to anybody losing their jobs. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 11 May 1998 14:50:24 -0700 (PDT) Richard Marens <parvus at u.washington.edu> wrote:
>
> Ok, the most comprehensive book is probably Mira Wilkins, History of
> Foreign Investment in the US to 1914, and she's got cites to all sorts of
> old works (railroads and the stockmarket both generated a voluminous
> literature in the early years of the century).
>
> A question from me: are there any accounts of the purging of American
> Universities over the last twenty years or so?
>
>
>
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu