“During my time, Brooklyn College was just a pink-brick Georgian building and a campus we were not allowed to walk on. The library, La Guardia Hall, with its clock tower, dominated the whole scene. On either side for the library were sunken gardens: one had a lily pond; the other had a rose garden. Whitman, the performing arts center, opened in my senior year. Before that, all the way back to Flatbush Avenue was open campus. Behind the college, where Avenue H and Nostrand Avenue meet, there used to be experimental gardens with all kinds of plants and flowers and a little pond where biology majors worked on plant genetics. Walking around the campus you felt like you were in an all-American out-of-town college, not in Brooklyn, New York.”

-Karl Bernstein

Quote taken from “It Happened in Brooklyn: An Oral History of Growing Up in the Borough in the 1940’s, ‘50’s, and ‘60’s” by Harvey Frommer and Myrna Katz Frommer, 1993, Harcourt Brace & Company, Florida

Map of the Brooklyn College area

In 1949, Professor William R. Gaede, Dean of Faculty, and some of his students made a study of the Brooklyn College student body. Of the 600 questionnaires, 579 were returned. The results reveal much about what the Brooklyn College student body was like at that time. In 54% of the homes, a language other than English was spoken. Of the 579 responses, 126 reported having one foreign-born parent and 312 reported having two foreign born parents. This meant that roughly 76% of the students polled were second-generation immigrants (Table 1, Gaede 5). Moreover, only 21.2% of their fathers and 8.2% of their mothers had attended school past secondary school. A large number hadn’t even attended high school (Gaede 2). However, an impressive 71.5% of students polled reported having an older sibling who was college educated (Gaede 2).

These numbers seem to indicate that a generation of immigrants had been working hard for years to send their children to college; it was part of the American dream. Murray Horrowtiz notes that “the college’s population through into the early 1950’s was predominantly composed of first generation Americans, the children of working-class and middle class parents” (Murray 82). Their fathers most commonly worked as retail merchants, garment industry workers, salesmen, laborers, and craftsmen while their mothers were often homemakers (Gaede 2). This demographic makeup would already begin to change in the late 1950’s, with an increasing number of students coming from native-born middle-class families (Murray 82).

By 1955, 99% of the students at Brooklyn College were from Brooklyn (Coulton 5). This is probably on account of the fact that Article 125, Section 6201 of the New York Education Law stated that admission was open to citizens who were residents of the city. Section 6204 allowed this law to be waived for foreign exchange students, twenty-five being the maximum (Coulton 5). So for its entire immigrant heritage, the Brooklyn College student body was “the most homogenous group to be found on any American campus of comparable size” (Kilcoyne 36). 80% were first generation Americans and 90% of them had never lived outside of New York City (Kilcoyne 36).

College was the way to succeed; an almost unconscious action done by anyone whose immigrant parents insisted it was necessary. Jim Sleeper, whose comments are documented in It Happened in Brooklyn: An Oral History of Growing Up in the 1940’s, ‘50’s, and ‘60’s, said:

“To go to college most anywhere else, you really had to have money. But the large concentration of socialist immigrants in New York

It Happened in Brooklyn: An Oral History of Growing Up in the Borough in The 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, by Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer

believed you should be able to get a college education without having to pay for it. There was a very unusual coming together of certain forces in New York City in the thirties, forties, and fifties. The values of immigrants’ socialists combined with FDR’s political clout to make this a city with incredible resources and tremendous virility. That really stamped Brooklyn. A unique set of public colleges was created, among them, Brooklyn College.” -Jim Sleeper

Donna Gefner, who attended Brooklyn College around the same time, commented: “for those of us from European backgrounds, this [Brooklyn College] was a great opportunity.” At that point in time, registration was twenty-five dollars and college was free after that (Frommer 219). College afforded a “sense of community, of excellence, of loyalty, and fondness” (Frommer 219). Students recalled, “There was a real sense of excellence among the faculty” (Frommer 219). The students who were at Brooklyn College were serious about their education as were the faculty. Shelly Strickler remembered (Frommer 221):

“I have to admit I got a first-class education. You went to public school, to high school, and then on to Brooklyn College. And you would be successful.” -Shelly Strickler

Brooklyn College, for all its inner-city homogeneity, did welcome some first generation immigrants. Solomon Aidelson told of how her came to America t the age of twenty-two. He was a Holocaust survivor, desperate for a secular education. Capitalizing on a generous grant from the Ford Foundation, Aidelson went to Brooklyn College. He said: “It was a difficult and worrisome period, but it was also wonderful” (Frommer 22). At this point, Brooklyn College’s student body was 85% Jewish (Coulton 8).