Thursday, January 31, 2013

Robert Cowen: My First Years at Queens College

I retired from the Math Department in 2008 after teaching for over 40 years.

I came to Queens College in September of 1966 as a lecturer in the Mathematics Department. The Chairman of the department was T. Freeman Cope, an affable Texan who was very conservative. Once, on seeing a male student with long hair, he wondered out loud, whether the student was male or female. I pointed out the George Washington also wore his hair long, but that didn’t seem to make any difference to him.

My politics were radical, I was against the Vietnam War, and found like-minded people on campus, mostly outside of my department. Also, I soon became involved with the new faculty union on campus that represented the lecturers, the United Federation of College Teachers or UFCT. I became a grievance counselor, working under the very able Edgar Pauk, who was grievance chairman at Queens(He later became head of grievances for all of CUNY.) Finally, the SEEK program, for disadvantaged students had just begun at Queens College and frictions were developing between SEEK and the Math Department. I, of course, sided with SEEK.

The first few years under the new collective bargaining agreement between the UFCT and CUNY were difficult. Someone told me that when two parties can’t agree on substance, they often agree on language. I believe that this is what happened here and it led to numerous grievances. However one substantive area of agreement, that fulltime employees in the unit would be eligible to achieve permanent status was not popular with many departments at Queens. Under the new contract, lecturers that were hired for a sixth year received a “certificate of continuous employment.” This was roughly equivalent to tenure. The Sociology Department, on learning of this provision, fired those lecturers who had five years of service to prevent “being stuck” with them. In particular, I remember them firing Janet Henkin, perhaps the most popular teacher in the department.

I was the grievance counselor assigned to Janet and we first had an informal meeting with the Chairman, Nat Siegel and the Assistant Chairman, Charlie Smith. At that meeting Smith complained about the contract and said that they never envisioned lecturers as permanent members of their department and also he would have difficulty writing a letter of recommendation for someone who filed a grievance!

We immediately filed a grievance on his “difficulty.” The grievance was “heard” by the President’s designee, a sharp lawyer from Washington, D.C. He started off by warning everyone that Smith’s alleged statement was a seriously violation of the contract and wouldn’t be tolerated and then went around the table asking if Smith indeed made that threat. Janet and I said he did; Smith and Siegel said he didn’t. We failed to win the grievance or indeed to retain Janet’s job. However, no one would ever threaten a grievant in that way again. Janet had no trouble getting another position; I assume she had good letters of recommendation from the Sociology Department.

In 1967, I went with a group from the College, by bus, to a large demonstration in Washington D.C. My wife and I had tried to go by bus to other Washington demonstrations against the war previously, but the buses hadn’t shown up. It was believed that the bus companies were discouraged from providing buses to antiwar protestors by the FBI. This time I went alone, my wife, Ilsa, stayed home with our new daughter. I remember some very creative signs such as “Johnson pull out like your father should have,” and “No Vietnamese ever called me Nigger,” carried by a black protester. The Pentagon was completely ringed by soldiers with weapons ready and women from the demonstration would run up to individual soldiers and present them with flowers. Even though the protest was entirely peaceful while I was there, I understand that after we left the demonstration turned violent as the more militant protestors engaged in several confrontations with U.S. Marshalls and soldiers “protecting” the Pentagon. There was tear gas used and several arrests. When I returned home I enthusiastically told everyone about the huge demonstration including the wonderful signs. A Korean friend who I told about the “No Vietnamese ever called me Nigger” sign replied that they probably used another derogatory word to substitute for “Nigger.”

The conflict between the Math Department and SEEK centered on whether the Math Department would allow the SEEK program to institute new remedial courses for its students. At the time, in 1968, the Math Department offered only a single semester of remediation for unprepared students and SEEK felt that this was insufficient to make up for the lack of preparation in mathematics that many of its students entered college with. The SEEK program proposed a two semester remedial sequence, instead of the Math Department’s single course and the conflict became especially nasty when Freeman Cope was reported by the student newspaper, The Phoenix, to have made certain racist remarks to a white SEEK instructor and this led to his resignation as Chairman of the Department, under pressure by the College Administration. I thought the SEEK program’s desire for extended remediation made sense, and wrote a letter to the department supporting it and before putting it in everyone’s mailbox, I showed a copy of my letter to the new Chairman, Joe Hershenov. He told me that if I released the letter, I would harm the Math Department’s recommendations for tenure and promotion, including my own! (I released the letter anyway and was awarded tenure soon afterwards.)

The racist comments that Cope made that led to his ouster, were made to a very popular SEEK instructor named Ellen Bindman. The Math Department fired her soon afterwards and I undertook her grievance for the Union. It was both unpleasant and sad. Many members of my Department stopped talking to me. Ellen was killed during a robbery of her house in New Jersey a few years later.

In the Fall of 1968 trouble between the SEEK program and Queens College became acute. SEEK proposed a list of faculty members that they intended to hire to the College. The College rejected 15 on the list and sent letters to all 15 informing them that they were not going to be hired by the College and that if they set foot on campus they would be libel to arrest! The Union found out that all 15 had arrest records (evidently the College had been working with the police to identify potential “trouble makers.”). Fourteen of these were black students who had been arrested in April at Columbia during a sit in at Hamilton Hall and the 15th was a black woman who had been arrested during a civil rights march in the South. I recall vividly the step two grievance (at the Chancellor’s level) for the woman arrested in the South. Vice Chancellor Mintz offered to allow her to work for SEEK for one year but then she would have to leave. When we rejected this offer, he told us that this was only the second time that a College President’s decision would be overturned and asked us, derisively, what it was that we wanted. Edgar Pauk, head of the grievance committee at Queens answered, “What do we want? We want Justice.” It was exactly right.

Throughout the fall of 1968 there were demonstrations by the SEEK program. I remember trying to join a SEEK demonstration and being told politely that: “it was only for us.” (This, I regarded at the time, and still regard as being unfortunate.)

In the spring of 1969, recruiters from the Dow Chemical Company (the makers of Napalm) and General Electric were met with angry demonstrations from antiwar students and faculty, principally, SDS. Also a popular activist English teacher, Sheila Delany, was denied tenure. In April students occupied administrative office of the Social Science Building to protest the presence of recruiters on campus. The number of students occupying the building dwindled to less than 50 and most people expected that the protest would die out over spring vacation. Shortly before spring break, the Administration called the police on campus to arrest the remaining protestors. At the time of the police raid there was one faculty member present, Henry Lesnick, from the English Department. (It was considered important to have a faculty member present since Columbia students had been beaten by police during demonstrations the year before.) The Dean of Faculty, Dean Hartle, warned Henry if he didn’t leave the building, he would be brought up on charges by the College, of conduct unbecoming a faculty member. Henry stayed and was arrested along with 38 students and taken to jail.

The next day there were 500 students and faculty occupying the Social Science building and the Academic Building where most of the Administration offices were. Trying to cool things down President McMurray called a meeting of the college community in Colden Auditorium. The audience was very angry because of police being called on campus and the subsequent arrests. At one point McMurray offered to ask the Judge to be lenient if students would call off the protest. The audience responded by shouting “blackmail.” It was definitely not a good meeting from the administrations standpoint. As I was leaving the meeting I saw Professor Louis Finkelstein, chairman of the Art Department and a confidant of President McMurray. He was known to be liberal and I asked him what McMurray was thinking when he called police on campus even though the demonstration was petering out. At first he accused me of “Monday morning quarterbacking,” but then explained, that McMurray was meeting with the SEEK committee, of which he was a member, and they were afraid that if they didn’t call the police when the white students misbehaved, they wouldn’t be able to call the police if the black students misbehaved! It finally made sense to me why they were so anxious to call the police before the occupation ended. My friend, Henry Lesnick, wasn’t brought up on charges, as Dean Hartle threatened, but he was let go shortly afterwards by the English Department after being at Queens for only two years. During a union grievance meeting I attended, The English department maintained that he was not sufficiently committed to his research (he was a Blake scholar), as shown by his activist activities. He had difficulty obtained another teaching position and worked, I think, as a lineman for the telephone company for a few years. He finally got a job teaching at Hostos Community College where he developed an internationally recognized HIV/AIDS curriculum.

The highlight of the semester for me and other radicals on campus was the “Counter Commencement.” During the Commencement ceremony in June, a large group of faculty and students, in full academic regalia, got up and marched out of the regular commencement ceremony. Many in the audience booed and a few cheered as we went to an alternate location where we held our own commencement with Dr. Benjamin Spock as featured speaker. It was a good way to end a difficult year.

In retrospect, I think the two biggest failures of the antiwar movement on campus were our inability to forge an alliance with the black students struggling against the same repressive administration. Also we never did the hard work necessary to expand our movement to workers on campus. A few faculty members tried. Professor Frank Rosengarten sought out campus workers and tried to win them to an antiwar position. On the other hand many members of “the New Left” were hostile to unions in general, accusing them of racism in keeping blacks out of the skilled trades. Also the hostilities engendered by the UFT’s strike in 1968 pitting the largely white teachers union against the largely black community school board in Ocean-Hill Brownsville was still fresh in everyone’s mind.

If there is a lesson to be learned from all of this, I think it is that power structures recognize their enemies and will do all they can to keep them apart; only by uniting those “enemies” can a serious challenge by mounted to defeat those in power. The fact that at Queens, the SEEK program, the faculty union and the antiwar movement never came together to challenge the Administration allowed the Administration to deal with them separately and thus maintain its hegemony.

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