For Sam Kaplan ‘57*, the UMass Amherst Department of English “was the very heart of [his] education.” Alongside learning literary criticism and poetry, Kaplan served from 1954 to 1955 as the editor of UMass Amherst’s literary magazine the Quarterly.
An offshoot of the Collegian and a predecessor of today’s Jabberwocky, the Quarterly ran from the 1930s until the late 1950s. A statement in the Fall 1950 issue declared its mission:
We have sought to give recognition to those departments of the university which do not usually produce material for a literary publication. We are dedicated to a literature that is modern and fresh, but yet expressing the universal and timeless ideas of man. Above all, the QUARTERLY is your magazine—and ours.
In 1954 the University suspended publication of the Quarterly for reasons that may be lost to history. The UMass Amherst Special Collections and University Archives do not have the 1954 edition in their holdings, but contemporaneous sources from the Collegian shed light on the suspension, noting “allegedly improper articles,” "improper taste,” “alleged obscenities,” “supposedly obscene material,” and “four letter words.”
The suspension of the journal in fall 1954 was a major move by the UMass administration, and as the Collegian noted soon after, it “was carried out without any reasons for the suspension ever being presented to any member of the staff.”
Any First Amendment issues were complicated by the fact that the Fall 1954 issue had been sent to 350 high schools across the state in connection with a writing contest. Robert Hopkins, Dean of Men and by all accounts the one who made the decision to suspend, explained that the administration feared “possible off-campus protests” and that the publication was suspended “to protect the University from objectors.”
Naturally, the suspension raised questions about censorship. The Collegian surveyed students and faculty about administrative oversight of student publications; there was talk of the university establishing a “Good Taste Code”; and the Quarterly staff stated “a censored press is worse than no press at all.”
Kaplan recalls that “There were months of weekly hearings that threatened the expulsion of many staff members, but we convinced a three-man faculty committee to vote on the side of freedom of speech and we all survived and graduated. The vote was 2-1, with the deciding vote cast by the head of the ROTC unit on campus.”
The Quarterly was allowed to resume publication in spring 1955. A statement by the Quarterly's editors in the returning issue is plain-spoken and point blank: “It has come to a sorry day when the university president must take the time to edit. [...] We think he is not only wrong to claim that the Quarterly is vulgar but also hypocritical to maintain that his privilege to edit material is not censorship.”
The Collegian wanted to cover the story in the next day's edition, which had already been sent to its printer, but it was late in the paper's deadlines, the staff had scattered, and there was no one to do the interviewing and write the story. I was one of the paper's editors, the senior reporter, a principal source, and available, but the basic principles of journalistic decorum obviously ruled me out. In the end, however, there was no one but me, and so I wrote the story under the meticulous scrutiny of Wendell Cook, another editor, a close friend, and a man of undeniable honor. It took us many hours in a largely deserted, hollow-sounding Mem Hall to revise every syllable and then revise again, but around midnight we had produced what we thought was an honest, unbiased account, and someone volunteered to carry the copy to our printer halfway across town in time for the front page to be remade.
Everyone involved pledged secrecy, the story bore no byline, and we all waited to be revealed as faithless traitors of journalism's holiest codes. The next day I wandered around campus full of both anxiety and curiosity and discovered no one suspected anything, not even Art Musgrave, who taught journalism and had worked for two big-city dailies. It was our triumph of romantic virtue over cynicism: we had proven that newspapers and reporters were capable of objectivity, even about themselves. It still can give me a chill to remember how devoted we were that night, scrubbing every word of any hint of our anger about the suspension.
* “but I identify with ’56” – S. K.
If you happen to recall more details of the Quarterly controversy, or wish to share a memory of your time in the Department of English at UMass Amherst, send a note to @email
