Academics
Mike Lutzker
— Early on we found out a lot about the quality of the faculty. It was really an extraordinary faculty. And aside from piles of notes that I probably still have somewhere in the attic of a former house, I remember an awful lot about what went on in those classes. I was a history major and the History Department was fantastic, some of the German refugees — the US was privileged to have German refugee scholars teaching in the US and particularly at Brooklyn. They held us to German standards and worked our behinds off, but we learned an awful lot. As a sophomore I learned about Max Weber and his thought. It was an exciting place to be.
Rhoda Karpatkin
— The teachers were so smart, really different from the high school teachers I had — who I felt were very good — and so enthusiastic. I remember in my first year English Literature class the teacher, whose name was Goodman, reading Chaucer aloud. Well, it was the most phenomenal experience. And it was the Chaucer, but it was also the teacher and the sheer joy he got reading that to the students. And almost all of my teachers were like that.
Bill Taylor
— I took Political Science, the basic Political Science course, with a woman named Elza Dehas — who looked strikingly like Mrs. Roosevelt except she was older — and was a very good teacher. And there were other good people in the Political Science department. I don't think I had courses with Belle Zeller but she was a considerable presence on the campus at the time. There was a good course in New York City government which I remember taking. There was a great History department and I took a course in Asian Studies with a guy by the name of Hi Cublyn. And there were other wonderful professors like Clarkson and Robinson and Arthur Kohl.
Mike Lutzker
— We did have radical professors. I took a course with Professor Frederick Hughing, an English course. He did point out once where his former students had sat who volunteered to fight in Spain. There's one course where — I don't remember that much what we read — oh, he had us read Vanzetti's statement prior to the Sacco-Vanzetti execution.
Al Lasher
— There were teachers there that were thought to be Communists. And I will tell you, in point of fact, there were teachers there who were Communists. And my own feeling, then and now, was so what?
Bill Taylor
— And then eventually, I took Harry Gideonse’s course in Economics. It was called Economics 45. And that introduced me to Friedrich von Hayek who I hadn't heard of at the time. In more contemporary, conservative times he has become something of a cult hero among conservative economists. And Gideonse was featuring him way back in the beginning of the '50s.
Herb Dorfman
— And, of course, the outstanding person everybody talks about is the guy whose name I can't remember. "No Voice Is Wholly Lost" he wrote, and, oh, I'll think of his name in a little bit. I think it was probably the English Department. It may have been Literature or something like that. He drew parallels ranging over thousands of years between one piece of literature and another. He was famous for this course, and he showed the links — he compared "Oedipus Rex" to "the Brothers Karamazov," for example. And each one of us had to write an essay showing, not that anymore, but something else. So we were reaching and stretching and pulling. The funny part of it is, you know, it was nice. It was interesting. What the hell is his name, a very famous guy? Everybody took his course. Slochower. We all took the course and we all wrote these funny essays.
Bill Taylor
— The sort of cult hero of the college was Harry Slochower. Do you know the name Harry Slochower? He taught a course in German literature and we read "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann. And he became a famous court case because he refused to answer questions, and the Supreme Court, by a five-four vote, upheld his suit against the college firing him. But by that time he had such a good lay practice in psychology that he decided not to go back to the college.
Ann Lane
— Harry Slochower was a most beloved teacher. He was the first teacher who taught us all how to read literature as not just plot but it had meaning, symbolism and metaphors and all that stuff. Nobody did that before. Before that, we would take literature courses and read and talk about who did what to whom, like you were watching a traditional, conventional movie. And so it was a very shocking thing. And then there was the bad guy, Gavonier, who fingered people. He was also one of our teachers. So we immediately took sides on the teachers.
Harry Baron
— We all loved him and he was brilliant. He was afraid of no one. As a matter of fact, Harry Slochower was fired by Gideonse. Slochower took the case to the Supreme Court and won and got back pay.
Ann Lane
— Harry Slochower was not — I mean, he was radical in terms of literary texts. He was not a radical. I mean, maybe he was politically, but we never had that. He was the teacher who called us in when we were meeting one day, the first time I ever read Dostoyevsky, and he said, "How many of you read the assignment for today?" And he said, "You cannot stay in my class — if you haven't done the readings you're excused from class." And to be thrown out of Harry Slochower's class was the greatest humiliation.
Harry Baron
— When you got on Vanguard, you had the word — take this course. Take this guy. He's terrific.