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NY Times, Nov. 28 2017
Vera Shlakman, Professor Fired During Red Scare, Dies at 108
By SAM ROBERTS
Vera Shlakman, an influential 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.
Her death, which was not widely reported at the time, was confirmed by
her friend Ellen J. Holahan.
Dr. Shlakman was the last survivor among more than a dozen teachers at
New York City’s public colleges who were ousted by the Board of Higher
Education during the early stages of the Red Scare wrought by Senators
Pat McCarran and Joseph R. McCarthy.
A 42-year-old assistant professor when she was fired in 1952, Dr.
Shlakman neither taught economics again nor wrote a sequel to her
groundbreaking 1935 book on female factory workers.
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?”
