Dear Commons Community,
Vera Shlakman, an economics professor who was fired by Queens College after she refused to tell Senate investigators whether she had ever been a card-carrying Communist — a punishment that brought an apology three decades later — died on Nov. 5 at her home in Manhattan. She was 108. Dr. Shlakman was the last survivor among more than a dozen faculty members at New York City’s public colleges who were ousted by the Board of Higher Education during the Red Scare wrought by Senators Pat McCarran and Joseph R. McCarthy. As reported in her New York Times obituary:
“Dr. Shlakman was a 42-year-old assistant professor when she was fired in 1952, Dr. Shlakman neither taught economics again.
Thirty years later, 10 of the fired professors, including Dr. Shlakman, were indemnified with pension settlements after receiving an apology from college officials.
“They were dismissed during and in the spirit of the shameful era of McCarthyism, during which the freedoms traditionally associated with academic institutions were quashed,” the trustees of the City University of New York declared in a resolution adopted unanimously in 1980. The trustees had succeeded the Board of Higher Education.
No one doubted Dr. Shlakman’s political leanings.
She had been named for the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich. Emma Goldman, the anarchist, was a regular guest in her family’s home. Dr. Shlakman was vice president of the college division of a Teachers Union local that was rebuked for being dominated by Communists.
But when she was summoned before a public hearing of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, led by Senator McCarran, a Nevada Democrat, Dr. Shlakman invoked her constitutional guarantees of free speech and privilege against self-incrimination when asked about her membership in the Communist Party.
“Do you believe that a member of the Communist Party can be a college teacher?” Robert J. Morris, the subcommittee counsel, asked Dr. Shlakman at the hearing, held on Sept. 24, 1952, at the United States Court House in Foley Square in Manhattan.
She replied, “I think that any teacher must be judged on the basis of his performance in the classrooms; that if a teacher follows professional standards in the classroom, and is a scholar, he is entitled to teach as any citizen.”
As an economist, Dr. Shlakman seemed to suggest that “communism” had become an overwrought term. She cited one example of what, by her reckoning, had once been branded radical but became an accepted staple of American life while leaving democratic institutions intact.
“When the United States Post Office began to carry packages,” she said, “this activity was viewed as a challenge to private enterprise’’ and “a kind of socialistic or communistic activity.”
Pressed about whether being a Communist would close a teacher’s mind to any deviation from the party line, she replied that similar speculations had been raised against devout Roman Catholics.
“We don’t condemn people now — at least I assume we don’t — on the basis of guilt by association,” she said.
As far as the committee and college administrators were concerned, though, by refusing to respond to the question about party membership, Dr. Shlakman became a “Fifth Amendment Communist.”
She was fired from her professorship 12 days after the hearing under two New York regulations. One, authorized by the State Legislature in 1949, barred the school system from employing anyone who belonged to what was deemed a subversive organization.
The other, a provision of the city charter enacted to thwart corruption, provided that a city employee’s refusal to testify about his or her official conduct, because doing so might be self-incriminating, was grounds for dismissal.
Both provisions would be declared unconstitutional in the late 1960s. But they were enforced in Dr. Shlakman’s case, and as she told her fellow professors after she testified, her firing had left the academic community with a choice.
“It must either grovel and accept the standards of orthodoxy prescribed by the McCarrans and the McCarthys, and those who have capitulated to them,” she wrote, “or it must resist.”
She recalled that educators had resisted earlier congressional inquiries into reading requirements for college courses. “Is the dismissal of teachers,” she asked, “easier to accept than the burning of books?”
But profiles in courage were few and far between during the McCarthy era.
The British economist Mark Blaug, a former student of Dr. Shlakman’s, wrote in an essay in 2000 that she had been “scrupulously impartial and leaned over backward not to indoctrinate her students” — which was why, he added, as a college tutor he had endorsed a student petition demanding her reinstatement.
Less than 24 hours later, he said, the Queens College president ordered him to resign or be dismissed.
“For a day or two, I contemplated a magnificent protest,” wrote Professor Blaug, who died in 2011, “a statement that would ring down the ages as a clarion bell to individual freedom, that would be read and cited for years to come by American high school students — and then I quietly sent in my letter of resignation.”
After leaving Queens, Dr. Shlakman was unemployed for a year.
She then worked as a secretary and a bookkeeper and taught intermittently. She was placed on an F.B.I. watch list because she was, as an F.B.I. file put it, “reportedly” a member of the Communist Party from 1944 to 1946 and had invoked the Fifth Amendment before the subcommittee, according to Marjorie Heins’s “Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge” (2013).
In 1960, Dr. Shlakman started teaching again at Adelphi University in its School of Social Work. In 1966 she was hired by the Columbia University School of Social Work, where she taught full time until she retired as professor emerita in 1978.”
A sad chapter in the history of our country and the New York City Board of Higher Education.
Tony
