Draugnav
Rhoda Karpatkin
— So Vanguard was shut down. And the way it was done is, we walked in one morning to, you know, leave our coats there and the door was locked and the locks had been changed. So there we were all were, massed in the hall, and we decided then to publish Vanguard off campus, which we did.
Al Lasher
— He shut us down. And we said, "Okay. We'll put out our own goddamned paper." Right? So we created a paper called Draugnav, Vanguard backwards, and we published a couple of issues of it — raised the money ourselves, wrote it ourselves, handed it out on campus, and we were restored to life.
Myron Kandel
— So we put out this paper and we handed it out. We raised the money ourselves and we handed it out at the campus gates, I remember.
Gene Bluestein
— When Draugnav was published I wrote the editorial about the issue with ROTC. See, Brooklyn hadn’t had a ROTC, partly because they didn’t trust us. They wouldn’t give us one. But Gideonse was trying to get one. And one of our best professors, Phyllis Levine — she was a philosophy professor, a wonderful one — she tipped us off that ROTC was in the works. And so we got the scoop and I wrote the editorial called “Give ‘Em Guns,” which of course Gideonse immediately put up on his bulletin board and maligned me terribly, the Communist writer of this editorial.
Rhoda Karpatkin
— We reversed the name so we called it Draugnav. And we published an issue off campus and distributed it free on campus. And for that the editors were suspended and the distribution was made virtually impossible.
Harry Baron
— I was suspended for conduct unbecoming a student. I put out a gypsy newspaper and that's a no-no. You can't do that. Bylaws said you must have a faculty advisor. If you don't have a faculty advisor you can't put out a newspaper.
Gene Bluestein
— We used to visit my wife's parents in Connecticut, weekends. And her cousin called Sunday, and said "When are you going back?" And I said, "Well, this afternoon 'cause Monday is classes." He said, "Don't hurry." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "You've been suspended." I said, "How do you know?" He said, "I read it in the New York Times." And it's true. There was an article in the New York Times and an editorial. Our editor, Arthur Lack, was working at the Times part-time so we had the full support. So they suspended us for three days. There were five of us, including Marvin Wexler, who was an administrator — a money person. And I think Norman Gelb, Harry Baron who was the managing editor, and several others whose names I've probably forgotten.
Harry Baron
— I ran around to all my instructors saying, hey, I think I'm over cut in your classes. They were all very sympathetic. I wasn't even supposed to be on the campus, but I had to take care of important business. I was a senior. I wanted to graduate. And the irony of it is that I was awarded the faculty-student award. The staff had voted me this award which I was to receive at graduation. And they deprived me of this award. And they also deprived me of a silver Student Council key.
Rhoda Karpatkin
— I never was suspended, although I was on probation a good deal of the time. The best I could do was to try to conceal as much of it from my parents as possible. And many was the day I left school early and raced home to grab the mail before they got home from work because I knew what was going to be in it.
Herb Dorfman
— Gideonse found me. He sent people around. So I came into his office. He made a lot of threats, you know, and so forth. And I left. And I expected any day to get a letter saying, you know, you're suspended or whatever. Nothing specific came out of that.
Ann Lane
— Were we scared? Probably we thought it would be wonderful if they did something dramatic to us. By the '60s I knew going to jail was not a good thing to do, was not a happy experience, but at that point I was nineteen years old, eighteen years old. Communists were going to jail. Grown-ups were going to jail. People were getting fired. Our teachers were getting fired. They were getting fired at City College. We knew there was a real right-wing attack in the country.
Harry Baron
— Oh, there were a lot of faculty people who were on our side. A lot. Well, some of them were outspoken. I mean, like Harry Slochower who was our guiding star.
Rhoda Karpatkin
— The suspension — I think it would probably be true today too — a disciplinary suspension of a student at Brooklyn College, somebody who was dependent on getting that degree to go on and make something of himself — you needed that degree. And a disciplinary suspension was a very, very serious thing. All the rest of us were put on disciplinary probation and we then went through the process of trying to defend ourselves.