The Aftermath

Bill Taylor

— I was designated a bad campus citizen. It was just a category that they invented that they said you couldn't receive student honors if you were not a good campus citizen. It never existed before then, and as far as I know it hasn't extended over the years. You know, I moved through all of this, as I recall it, with not a huge amount of time to reflect about what the consequences would be. I mean, when the newspaper's charter was revoked I was outraged as everybody else was. I told a New York Times reporter that the revocation of the charter was evidence that the administration wanted to squelch the expression of any view other than its own. I got called into the president's office the next day and he said he generally hated to ruin anybody's career, but in my case he would make an exception. And I'm sure that had an impact on me but I was by then caught up in the events and I wasn't about to issue an apology or stop talking or do anything else because he was threatening me.

Al Lasher

— And I have a picture that I'll show you which will add a dimension to what I'm about to tell you. This particular time he asked our editor, whose name was Bill Taylor, to visit him in his office alone and we were all standing outside. I'll show you the picture which had to be taken of us standing outside waiting for Bill to come out of Gideonse’s office.

Rhoda Karpatkin

— It was an environment by that time of intimidation, of repressiveness, of the school authorities trying to flex their muscles against the students, and of the students responding, many of us, by being even more assertive, in-your-face. But overall, there was an atmosphere of fear. And I felt it myself. After yet another letter from the school authorities threatening me, I decided that it was better for me to leave Brooklyn College at the end of my third year. I never thought I would leave under my own steam if I came back for my fourth year because I couldn't see myself backing down and I saw things getting worse. And it was that atmosphere that permeated the teachers as well.

Herb Dorfman

— When I left Brooklyn finally, I just didn't go to the campus any more, it was lonely. I really felt I'd been cut off from something. I kept some of my best friends from there, but it wasn't the same. We weren't meeting in the same kind of atmosphere.

Ann Lane

— I don't remember what happened next fall. I think, you know, you hung out together for a while just to sort of mourn and have coffee, 'cause there — it was our life. I'm sure I handed out leaflets and supported candidates.

Bill Taylor

— What was the rest of my campus career like? Oh gosh. I can’t remember. I played out the string, I guess. You know, I still had interesting courses and so on. We published Campus News up until December, and there were other things happening, and so on. I don't have a clear memory of most of the year '51, before I graduated..

Ann Lane

— Bill Taylor went out with Harriet. We were so mad at him. He was going over to the enemy.

Myron Kandel

— Bill Taylor had either started dating or later dated a lady — a young woman — named Harriet Rosen who had become the Managing Editor of "The Kingsman," which of course, we considered to be the scab paper. And they got married and eventually became a very distinguished couple.

Bill Taylor

— Harriet Rosen, who was a freshman at Brooklyn College and came knowing nothing about this background, but having been managing editor of her high school newspaper at Midwood High School, joined the Kingsman. And because she was one of the few people who knew anything about putting out a newspaper, she rapidly rose to become managing editor. By then she began to be aware of what the background was. Anyway, she came to interview me after, ‘cause I ran a story about how I had been labeled a bad campus citizen and stripped of my ability to participate in certain student honors, and she wanted to know how did it feel to be so ostracized. And that's how we met. And we rapidly became friends. And she quit the Kingsman and we got married a few years later when she was in her last year at Columbia Law School. And we were married for forty-three years. She died in 1997. So, yes, that was my friend. .

Ann Lane

— It taught us that we lose and it doesn't mater. We keep on going. But it also taught us that if you don't have any resources, you don't win.

Bill Taylor

— Somebody said to me recently, well, you know, you could have, you know, gone to the ACLU and asked them to sue. But this was in an era before anybody thought that students had any legal recourse.