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From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 24, 12 June 1950, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The administration of Brooklyn College, headed by “liberal” President Harry D. Gideonse, has just succeeded in perpetrating its most flagrant violation of academic freedom to date.
The issue, which has enraged virtually the entire campus, developed over the suspension of the college newspaper Vanguard. Involved is the right of a student body to publish and control its own newspaper, free of administrative censorship, and the right of students as citizens to put out their own independent publications. The affair has been accompanied by student protest meetings and the largest petition campaign in the school's history. Here is the story.
Vanguard, like all other extracurricular organizations on campus, requires a faculty adviser in order to function legally. On May 12, Vanguard’s adviser, Dr. Julius Portnoy of the Philosophy Department, resigned on the ground that the staff has been rejecting his advice.
Usually such a resignation is preceded by a search for a new adviser so that the paper might appear uninterruptedly. But it is clear, in the light of other evidence, that Dr. Portnoy did not want the paper to appear. As a matter of fact, the Gideonse administration was out to “get” Vanguard.
Just two weeks previously a news item very embarrassing to Gideonse hit Vanguard’s front page. It revealed his intervention in the election of a chairman for the History Department. Gideonse had refused to give his approval to the chairman elected by the department, Professor Jessie Clarkson, and threatened to appoint a man of his own in his stead if the department faculty continued to vote for Clarkson. In opposition to this bludgeoning attitude, the department elected Professor Arthur C. Cole, a friend of Clarkson and no puppet of Gideonse’s,
It was known that Gideonse wished this story kept out of Vanguard. When it was published, he was intent on teaching the staff a “lesson.” The administration may even have initiated the resignation of Vanguard’s faculty adviser in order to crack down; in any case. it utilized the resignation to suspend the paper immediately.
There followed a series of student attempts to get another faculty member to serve, against pressure exerted by the administration to prevent this. Most faculty members refused the spot; a few did accept only to pull out under the squeeze from above. The staff finally obtained Professor Bernard Grebanier of the English Department.
The four faculty members of the Faculty-Student Committee on Publications closeted themselves with Grebanier, excluding the four student members from the confab. When Grebanier left the room, the student members were invited in, and a vote was taken. The faculty contingent on the committee voted solidly against him, making a 4–4 tie; the FSCP then adjourned, refusing to hear any further nominations.
Since the appearance of Vanguard for the week was thus effectively stopped, half the members of Vanguard’s staff, financed by money collected from individual students and student organizations, on Friday, May 19, issued a four-page publication entitled Draugnav (spell it backward). Its masthead declared it to be "an independent publication. Published whenever occasion demands, by a group of individual persons representing only themselves. This is not a Brooklyn College publication.” Five hundred issues were distributed at the college gates.
The administration cracked down! Six students were suspended, one for five days, five for three days, and 50 staff members were officially reprimanded. As a result of the suspension some of the students will “overcut” and thereby fail a number of courses. Notations will be placed on permanent record cards, making it harder for them to get jobs.
The students broke no administration rules in publishing a newspaper representing themselves. Gideonse’s only charge was “conduct unbecoming a student.” If the action were allowed to go unchallenged it could set a precedent for action against any student group with which the administration disagrees. The college president’s move was so obviously undemocratic and dangerous in its implications that the New York Post editorially criticized him.
The students reacted. A group of non-Stalinist clubs, the Democratic Coalition Committee, together with the Eugene V. Debs Society, held a meeting on Monday, May 22. (The DCC consists of the Socialist Club, Young Democrats, Young Liberals, Student LID and Students for Democratic Action.) Four to five hundred students came to voice their protest against the administration. Proposals were made to contact the American Civil Liberties Union and Workers Defense League to help turn the public spotlight on what is happening.
The behavior of the Stalinist student section was scandalous. The initiative for the defense of student rights had been taken by the socialist and liberal groups. The Stalinists, reacting to their isolation from the broad campus struggle, responded by attempting to disrupt the rally. They repeatedly took the floor to demand the dissolution of the DCC and the formation of a new organization to include them and their propaganda. These “demands” were accompanied by long speeches on the Marshall Plan and “the victory of the people’s forces in China.” But their attempts to prevent the rally from functioning met with failure, and their rule-or-ruin tactics earned them the well-deserved hostility of student opinioh which previously had been either sympathetic or neutral.
The Young Republicans conducted a petition campaign to protest against the Vanguard suspension. More than 1,800 signatures were attached to it.
In the midst of what might have developed into the most advanced expression of united student protest in defense of academic freedom since pre-war days, news was released that Vanguard now had an adviser – the same Dr. Portnoy who had originally resigned! But the paper was not to be published for the remainder of the terms, and there is some doubt whether it would appear next term.
This “solution" does not resolve the question of the students’ suspensions, nor the question of who will control the paper.
The suspensions have been contested. They will be brought to court if necessary. The issue is so clear-cut, the administration so crude in its attack on students’ rights, that there is a good chance that the suspensions will be rescinded. On this point, the student body and the clubs will continue to give their fullest support.
On the broader issue of Vanguard control it is necessary for the stulents to raise the question of putting their own paper under their own control, through a student majority on the Faculty-Student Committee on Publications or through the abolition of the faculty adviser system.
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