In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

>> 127 7 The McCarran Committee and the City Colleges Trouble in Brooklyn Harry Gideonse saw “old problems resurfacing” at Brooklyn College after World War II.1 As in the late 1930s, Gideonse thought “a determined ideological minority” was using college facilities for nefarious ends. In the spring of 1949, the student Karl Marx Society invited Henry Winston, the Communist Party’s organizational secretary, to speak. Winston was one of the 11 Party leaders then on trial for conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the government . Just as Gideonse’s administration had, ten years before, barred CP general secretary Earl Browder from campus, so now it told the Karl Marx Society that even an off-campus meeting would violate the “spirit” of the college ’s policy banning speakers who were charged with crime.2 The students said it was unconstitutional for Gideonse to impose “arbitrary rules” that denied them the right to hear speakers of their choice. They held their meeting with Winston; the administration suspended the society and three of its officers for the rest of the school year. A protest meeting precipitated two more suspensions. Thomas Coulton’s history of Brooklyn College snidely describes the meeting: “a noisy gathering . . . , held without prior authorization”; “a sorry-looking group” that met “to hear each other’s speeches.” The student council voted to walk out in protest of the new suspensions ; the administration warned that it would strictly enforce regulations “prohibiting the unauthorized leaving of classrooms.”3 And so the battle escalated. About 200 students, representing ten clubs, walked out and held an off-campus demonstration. The college retaliated by suspending more clubs, including the Harriet Tubman Society, the Young Progressives of America, the Philosophy Club, and Hillel.4 The turmoil subsided as the semester ended, but the next spring (1950), Gideonse resumed his war with the campus newspaper, Vanguard. In April, Vanguard learned that the administration had vetoed the reappointment of a popular history professor as department chair; the professor had been critical of Gideonse. Vanguard reported, against the recommendation of its faculty 128 > 129 to “squelch the expression of any student opinion which does not agree with that of the administration.” Gideonse said, “I hate to ruin anyone’s career, but in your case, I’m prepared to make an exception.” Fifteen years later, the FBI performed a background check preparatory to Taylor’s nomination as staff director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission; Gideonse told the investigators there had been a “remarkable similarity” between Vanguard editorials and “communist literature,” and another administrator condemned Taylor for membership on the student council, which, he said, had “espoused liberal causes such as the rights of the Negro in the South.”10 The ACLU’s Academic Freedom Committee investigated the Vanguard controversy and in April 1951 submitted a report to the Board of Higher Education . The committee concluded that, yes, there had been a technical violation of the administration’s equal-viewpoints rule, but there had been no bad faith: the “thoughts expressed by the writers were preserved,” and it was “difficult to see evidence of intent to distort or weaken the opposing point of view.” It was therefore unfair to revoke Vanguard’s charter; “we regard it as inevitable,” the committee wrote, “that the Vanguard staff should feel itself the victim of serious injustice.” Furthermore, and contrary to Gideonse’s claim that Vanguard was communist dominated, the paper’s editorials had mocked the Labor Youth League’s clumsy propaganda and had predicted Staff of the Brooklyn College Vanguard, locked out of its offices, 1950. (Courtesy of the Vanguard alumni group) 130 > 131 colleagues but buddies, trenchmates. I believe relationships which might have developed under normal circumstances were strengthened immensely by the battle we fought. Many of these relationships have lasted to this day.” The Vanguard community, another alum recalled, “was where we extracted the most pleasure and kicks from the ideas factory that Brooklyn College was for us.”18 The McCarran Committee Despite political pressures and campus rows, the Board of Higher Education did not engage in the same hunt for suspect professors that Board of Education superintendent William Jansen and his aide Saul Moskoff were pursuing against elementary and high school teachers in the years 1950–52. The Board of Education continued to interrogate and fire teachers for insubordination and “conduct unbecoming” and had won Adler I, the Teachers Union’s challenge to the Feinberg Law.19 By the fall of 1952, Adler II, the lawsuit contesting board procedures that...

Share