David Price extends our knowledge of how far the House Un-American Activities Committee - a committee (1938-1975) of the U.S. House of Representatives - and the FBI were willing to go to harass American academics in the name of security.

But why anthropologists? Race is the trigger. HUAC and the FBI particularly disliked anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, chairs of the anthropology department at Colombia because they regarded race to be a social construct and not a scientific predictor of anything significant such as character or intelligence. This in an era when there was a popular storm to try and prevent the Red Cross from accepting blood donations from African-Americans because this would result in black blood mixing with white. The FBI thought anthropologists who resisted the South's view of race had an unfortunate tendency to join organizations which favoured equality and protested against inequality.

The reach of HUAC and the FBI extended to Canada, particularly to the political science, sociology and anthropology department at Simon Fraser University. The FBI rarely opened files unless they received information or denunciations about the persons concerned in the file. It would be interesting to know where the information on Simon Fraser came from - the RCMP?

One of the depressing revelations in Price's book is how members of the academic community were prepared to denounce each other to the FBI. The same was true in Canada with the RCMP security branch. Another source of information in both countries was the Office of University Registrars' who were pressured to open the universities' files on students and faculty. But on reading this book, it is hard not to wonder whether matters will be any different this time around during the war on terror. The circulation of blacklists of faculty members who are insufficiently patriotic or who oppose the war in Iraq does not breed confidence. Will those in area studies programs such as Middle Eastern studies replace anthropologists as a popular political target?

Donald C. Savage is a consultant in higher education, former executive director of CAUT and an adjunct professor of history at Concordia University in Montreal.