Introduction
Overview
The Red Scare at CUNY is a comprehensive guide to archives documenting anti-communist political repression of faculty, staff, and students at CUNY, primarily from the 1930s-1960s. Organized by repository, it highlights relevant collections within CUNY, evaluated by the authors in consultation and collaboration with archivists at Brooklyn College, City College, Hunter College, and Queens College in 2025. Each entry is accompanied by a description that incorporates information from finding aids and other published research. These collections include faculty personal and professional papers, student activist materials, and oral histories. The guide also includes collections from other repositories within New York City and New York State, as well as an abridged bibliography of published writings on higher education, the Red Scare and McCarthyism.
Authors and Audience
This guide was researched and authored by archivists of the CUNY Cultivating Archives and Institutional Memory Project, an initiative administered by CUNY’s Office of Library Services to explore, unify and increase awareness of CUNY’s vast archival collections. Photos, publications, and other historical records found in CUNY archives illustrate CUNY’s relationship to broader social and political currents within New York City and beyond. The guide is one of several projects aimed at increasing awareness of research materials that provide context to people, events, and ideas that have shaped CUNY’s past, present, and future.
This guide is a resource for anyone interested in the history and legacies of the Red Scare and McCarthyism in higher education, and the issue of academic freedom more broadly. While not an exhaustive inventory of every record pertaining to this topic, this guide is meant to help direct researchers toward collections of interest.
Historical Context
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, students and faculty from City College, Hunter College, Brooklyn College, and Queens College – the four senior colleges in New York City before their consolidation as the City University of New York (CUNY) – were part of a broad base of leftist intellectuals and dissidents responding to the economic conditions of the Depression, the growing threat of fascism, and political repression by their schools’ administrations. They demonstrated and organized against heightening militarism abroad, social and economic injustice at home, and fascism everywhere. This was met with backlash. During World War II, fears of Communist subversion coalesced into a series of investigations into the personal beliefs and associations of New York City’s public school and municipal college teachers. The first attempted investigations were conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (also known as the Dies Committee), a federal organ established in 1938 to root out disloyal and subversive organizations from American life. These were not initially supported by New York’s Board of Higher Education (what is today the CUNY Board of Trustees), but in 1940 British philosopher Bertrand Russell was fired from City College after protests that he was a “Godless advocate of free love and Communism,” published in the Catholic Diocese’s Tablet and reprinted by William Randolph Hearst.[1] In the wake of the Russell controversy, a new series of investigations was authorized by the state legislature that would impact the life of professors at New York City’s public universities for years to come.
From September 1940 to December 1941, the New York State Legislature's Joint Committee to Investigate Procedure and Methods of Allocating State Moneys for Public School Purposes and Subversive Activities (commonly referred to as the Rapp-Coudert Committee after the two chairing Senators) interrogated more than five hundred faculty, staff, and students at New York universities. The New York State Board of Higher Education then collaborated with the government to suspend, expel, fire, and dismiss students and faculty accused of communist subversion. Over fifty teachers and staff members were fired because of the committee’s investigations. Historian Carol Smith has called this "the largest political purge of faculty in the history of the United States,” only ending when the United States entered World War II as an ally of the Soviet Union.[2] However, this was not the end of the story; the techniques utilized by the Rapp-Coudert Committee—a process of private interrogations followed by public hearings—were to find new life in the next wave of anti-communist investigations known as McCarthyism.
In 1949, a fateful law for the cause of academic freedom was passed by the New York State legislature. The Feinberg Law, named for state senator Benjamin Feinberg, built upon previous anti-subversive laws that made membership in an organization advocating for the violent overthrow of the government “prima facie evidence of disqualification for appointment or retention” for public-school teachers and professors.[3] The law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Adler v. Board of Education on March 3, 1952; in September, the investigations returned to New York’s public colleges.
Beginning in September of 1952, several CUNY professors were targeted in federal investigations conducted by the U.S. Special Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act, also referred to as the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) or the McCarran Committee. Led by Senator Pat McCarran, the committee was authorized to investigate the operation of the Internal Security Act of 1950, which required Communists and Communist organizations to register with the federal government. A number of professors at the municipal colleges were dismissed by the Board of Higher Education for their decision to plead the Fifth Amendment. While the Supreme Court overturned the New York laws prohibiting employees from belonging to the Communist Party in Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), it was not until the 1980s that the Board of Trustees formally apologized for these actions and granted financial restitution to a few of the victims. The resolution stated: “They were dismissed during and in the spirit of the shameful era of McCarthyism, during which the freedoms traditionally associated with academic institutions were quashed.”[4] The Board of Trustees vowed that such actions would never happen again.
Notes
Goldstein, Robert J. (2016). Little ‘Red Scares’: Anti-Communism and Political Repression in the United States, 1921-1946. Routledge, pp. Xxii. https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781317104148_A26854738/preview-9781317104148_A26854738.pdf↑
Smith, Carol. (2011). “The Dress Rehearsal for McCarthyism”. Academe Magazine, 97(4). https://www.aaup.org/academe/issues/2011-issues-1/dress-rehearsal-mccarthyism ↑
From the original, NY Laws of 1949, ch. 360, §2. Quoted in Heins, M. (2013). Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge. NYU Press, pp. 76. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qfmg6 ↑
Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. (1980, March 24). Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. CUNY Central Archives. https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.41095742↑