Radical professor Oakley Johnson on his dismissal from City College, and the larger assault on left wing teachers and students.

‘Meaning of the New Attack on Militant Teachers and Students’ by Oakley C. Johnson from the Daily Worker. Vol. 9 No. 259. October 29, 1932.

Dismissal of Oakley Johnson and Others Shows Boss Offensive Brought to Colleges by Crisis

MY recent dismissal from the Evening Session staff of the College of the City of New York would be of no special consequence to workers and intellectuals if it had not a definite political significance. With 15,000,000 people in the United States out of work, including thousands of teachers and other white collar workers–a general condition of very high political significance–the routine of firing one or another individual is not worth noticing. But in my case, as in that of Professor Leo Gallagher recently, there were demonstrable political causes for dropping me from the faculty list, even though I had been teaching satisfactorily at this college for two years.

THE FIRST STEP

The immediate cause was my sponsorship of the Liberal Club the second semester of last year, after the administrative authorities had persuaded the previous faculty adviser to resign. I, too, was propagandized by Dr. Paul H. Linehan in an effort to detach me from the Club. He suggested to me smilingly, on several occasions, that the Liberal Club is a ‘wild crowd,” that I ‘didn’t have to act as adviser’ to them, that I hadn’t ought to ‘bother myself with them.’ The meaning of these maneuvering lies in the fact that the Liberal Club could not legally exist, with the right of meeting in the college halls as do other campus clubs, unless a faculty adviser could be secured. When Dr. Linehan and President Robinson–to put the actual explanation in a nutshell–found they could not persuade me to set the Liberal Club adrift, they fired me.

As a result, the Liberal Club was denied permission to meet on Oct. 5, the first regular meeting scheduled for the current term, and the Club with its several hundred sympathizers was compelled to gather on the street–which the Club did, at Amsterdam Ave. and 138th St., with myself and several National Student League and Liberal Club members as speakers. Incidentally, the adviser of the Social Problems Club of C.C.N.Y. (the Day Session students’ club) has resigned, it is reported “on pressure of other business,” and as a result City College students, both day and evening, have at one stroke been robbed of the right of free speech.

DURING the time I served as adviser of the Liberal Club, insisting on their right to distribute leaflets, to get editors of the Daily Worker and other working-class leaders as speakers, and to carry on a campaign against student fees, I was continually annoyed by objections and complaints from Dr. Linehan. He disliked the phrasing of the announcements of the Club’s meetings, complained that the Liberal Club was “more active than all the other college clubs put together,” and accused the members of the Liberal Club of dishonesty in the use of their student questionnaire on the issue of tuition fees at a supposedly free college. His antagonism to every assertion of independent student opinion and his rage at the persistence and courage of the Club members were unmistakable.

DR. ROBINSON ORDERED DISMISSAL

On top of these facts is the final definite information, conveyed to me orally by Professor A. D. Compton, head of my department, that he had nothing to do with my dismissal, but that President Robinson himself had directed that my name be crossed out. In the face of this, and in the face of my successful twelve years’ teaching in three universities, it is absurd to state, as the college administration does, that my dismissal is due to ‘reduced enrollment’ and the return of two instructors from leaves of absence. The truth is, the enrollment would have been much greater than the present teaching force could take care of if hundreds had not been turned away–in the interest of Mayor McKee’s ‘economy’ program at the expense of teachers, students and workers.

MY sponsorship of the Liberal Club is not the only cause for President Robinson’s displeasure. For several months I have taken part in revolutionary activities which he would stop if he could. I was on the committee which the Protection of the Foreign Born sent to Washington, D.C., to protest against the Dies Bill and other proposed anti-alien laws. I spoke before the House of Representatives Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, and condemned, on the basis of our school-book and educational traditions in favor of political asylum, the entire Doak anti-alien program.”

In reply to the question, “Are you a Communist?” asked by one of the Congressmen, I stated that at the next election, in common with hundreds of other college teachers and students, I was going to vote Communist for the first time. This declaration, reported in the World-Telegram and other New York papers, must have come to the surprised attention of City College’s president. I did not anticipate, when I opposed Secretary of Labor Doak’s persecution of the. foreign born, that within half a year he and Ralph M. Easley would launch an attack on the entire school system of the United States. Yet this reverberation of the political revolt in American colleges. is the clear meaning of Doak’s recent decree against foreign-born students who work their way through school, and of Easley’s campaign to use the Doak order in kicking out radical college teachers and students. My dismissal is an incident in the fascist efforts to suppress every vestige of free speech in American colleges.

ASSISTED also, in the John Reed Club signature campaign among intellectuals in protest against the Dies Bill, I was a member of the delegation which visited Secretary of Labor Doak in Washington, to demand the release of Edith Berkman, and I investigated and publicly reported on the Kentucky mine strike and the Detroit-Dearborn massacre activities which did not endear me, certainly, to the Tammany-controlled capitalist administration of City College.

The brazen abuse of the educational system in the interest of capitalist politics should not be a matter of surprise. The popular illusion that the schools are detached from governmental corruption must be dispelled. The schools under capitalism are a capitalist institution, and are a means of perpetuating capitalism by imposing its ideology on the children of workers, and by discouraging all revolutionary thinking. The capitalist bias of the courts and the police are well understood by most workers and intellectuals, so that there is no question among us when we see workers in hunger demonstrations clubbed by policemen, or watch the steady attempts of the courts to send nine innocent Negro children to the electric chair: We know that here the face of capitalist justice is in plain view. But when colleges are involved, we are apt to forget that capitalism is boss among them, too.

AT this time, the crisis sharpening from week to week, we see that not only is the school system openly used as a weapon against revolutionary workers and their sympathizers but that the degeneration of education itself proceeds at an amazing rate. Everyday cuts in teachers’ wages are announced, schools are reduced in force and equipment, a month or so is cut from the school year, departments and even whole schools are closed down, all in the interest of “economy.” The continuation high school, for instance, on 42nd St. near Third Ave., is to be closed to all adults above the age of 17; the Garfield, New Jersey, teachers have not been paid since last April; teachers in Flint, Michigan, receive contracts for one month only, since the schools may have to be closed at any time; Chicago teachers get paid, like miners and share-croppers, in “scrip”; thousands of teachers are unemployed. Along with this, students are forced to pay even higher tuition, or are turned away for “lack of space” or with a dozen other such excuses. “ACADEMIC FREEDOM”

In this crisis, along with the decrease in the extent and quality of education, comes a sharp increase in open fascist actions. “Academic freedom,” which has never been more than an abstract phrase, now becomes frankly a jest. Max Weiss, former student at C.C.N.Y. and now leader of the Young Communist League, is not allowed to address students at the college. The Forum Club of the University of Pittsburgh is closed down because it arranges a debate between one of the university professors and Scott Nearing. The C.C.N.Y. Liberal Club, robbed of a faculty advisor and forbidden to meet without one (and every faculty member too terrorized to accept the post), is in effect arbitrarily dissolved. The Social Problems Club likewise. Ditto in college after college throughout the country.

Why this suppression? In the New York Times of October 2 the meeting of the International University Conference is announced, at tended by Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, Dr. James Rowland Angell, and other university presidents, to discuss “The Obligations of the Universities to the Social Order.” If university presidents are interested in the “widespread unrest of our time,” as their announcement states, why are they unwilling to allow university students to discuss the same questions? Even if they cannot meet, as do the presidents, in the Waldorf-Astoria? Intelligent teachers and students will guess that this grave “conference” is indeed called to carry out the obligations” of the universities to the capitalist social order.

THE expulsion of Scott Nearing from the teaching field took place early in the World War period. Then–to name only the most outstanding cases came the dismissal of John E. Kirkpatrick from Olivet in 1926, of Sol Auerbach from the University of Pennsylvania in 1927, of Professor Wesley Maurer from Ohio State University in 1928, of Bernhard J. Stern from the University of Washington in 1920, and of Professor Herbert Adolphus Miller from Ohio State University in 1931. Now we have not only my own case, but the more important instance of dropping Professor Leo Gallagher from the law school of Southwestern University. Gallagher, acting as an International Labor Defense Attorney, defended the five young people who astounded the Olympic Games crowd by staging their splendid “Mooney protest run” under the very noses of Vice-President Curtis and other imperialist chieftains gathered there.

ATTACK TEACHERS, STUDENTS

The Doak-Easley labor haters, not satisfied with their attacks on the bonus marchers and their persecution of the foreign-born, back ed by the whole imperialist capitalist regime of Hoover, are on the eve of a greatly intensified attack on all proletarian-minded teachers and students. What will be the reply of students to this attack on their rights? What the reply of teachers, who have for so long been the docile servants of capitalist exploitation and are only now beginning to realize their class identity with wage-workers?

The flocking of intellectuals to the John Reed Clubs, and the enthusiastic response of writers and professionals to “Foster and Ford Committee” invitations, indicate the road that students and teachers should follow. Not the road of quiet submission, however ‘dignified,” according to oily administrators, submission is supposed to be. Fellow teachers! You who are supposed to teach young men and women, do not be yourselves misled! If you see students denied the right of free expression, stand up for them. The present is no time for cowardice. You may spoil your chances for promotion, which grows ever more remote for all teachers you may lose your jobs, which a ruthlessly being eliminated by the capitalist rulers–but have courage, and show it. We are in a period of struggle and vast changes impend. Show that teachers, too, are fit members of the revolutionary vanguard!

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1932/v09-n259-NY-oct-29-1932-DW-LOC.pdf