Red Scare at City College

Today, as I watch the daily news in disbelief, as our president issues and signs oppressive executive orders and attempts to suppress academic freedom at colleges and universities, I am reminded of my undergraduate days at City College (known as CCNY) in the mid-1950s and the witch hunts of the McCarthy era—a reign of terror labeled the “Red Scare.”

In the 1950s, CCNY was tuition-free. The students, mainly from New York City's working-class families, commuted long distances to the college daily by bus and subway. I was part of the second class of “girls” to enter this formerly all-male enclave.

The CCNY campus, which was often called the “Acropolis” of New York, consists of five majestic Gothic buildings, complete with turrets, hundreds of grotesque gargoyles, and a stone tower, amidst city streets atop a hill in Harlem. One enters the campus through a huge arch. The grey terracotta stone buildings encircle a large quad. I loved the old Gothic buildings, which were considered replicas of buildings at Cambridge University in England. (A taste of Ivy for the urban poor!)

The shadow over my childhood in the Bronx in the 1940s was my mother's continuing angst about her Russian-born parents who had returned to the Soviet Union to partake in the building of Stalin's Soviet utopia, never to return to America. Most evenings during my last year of high school, my parents and I sat in horror as we listened to the radio re-broadcasting the trial of the Rosenbergs, the so-called “commie spies” who had given our secrets to Russia, led by the fiery prosecuting attorney Roy Cohn.

That year, I joined with many others, appalled by the persecution of the Rosenbergs, marching in front of the courthouse waving “Free the Rosenbergs” placards. In my first year of college, I took part in the sad memorials at CCNY after they were both electrocuted. My mother was particularly upset by the trial and later executions. She confided in me that she imagined her father being s