Carlin Romano: The Shame of Academe and Fascism, Then and Now
[Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review and literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer for 25 years, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.]
How should America's university presidents respond to the savagery in Iran today?
The incarcerated student protesters forced to lick toilet bowls. The imprisoned dissidents beaten to death in holding pens, some with their fingernails torn out. The many murdered protesters, including Neda Agha-Soltan, the now-iconic young philosophy student shot in cold blood. The banning of foreign and domestic journalists from honest coverage or even access to news events. The arrest of professors and shuttering of academic institutions.
Here are a few hints from another era.
Night of the Long Knives. Kristallnacht. Auschwitz. Nuremberg.
Too strong a comparison unless what takes place next in Iran is mass murder?
Granted, vast differences exist between Nazi Germany then and Islamic Iran now. But the vast similarities are also plain. The insistence that state power trumps individual rights. The unaccountable supreme leader. The mass trial. The phony exhortations by rulers to a nonexistent Volk, a unified people. The attacks on and discrimination against women. The existence of militia-like forces, wreaking violence on dissidents. Fascism is fascism.
What's a university president to do? Most of us wouldn't expect the species to be more heroic in the presence of foreign evil than the public at large. The value of that characteristic to fund raising is, after all, unproven. The Dietrich Bonhoeffers, Father Kolbes, and Gandhis come along rarely and tend not to get hired by boards of trustees. The ruling personality bent of many academics—play it safe, take care of friends, advance one's own career and those of like-minded people, do some good along the way—trickles upward.
This time, though, our academic leaders should get it right. Because Stephen H. Norwood's just-published, brilliantly researched, utterly thorough and morally upsetting The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (Cambridge University Press) shows how they got it wrong in the 1930s. A chilling chronicle of pro-Nazi enthusiasm, shabby indifference, and amoral tolerance toward Hitler in elite American academe of the 1930s, this book should exert direct impact in this season of cracking heads and bones in Tehran. It relentlessly names names, depositing fact after sordid fact before the reader in a way that leaves its implications for then and today overwhelming.
Norwood, a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of American Jewish History, attracted media attention when he unpacked some findings in the past. At a conference last year about Columbia University's ties to Nazi Germany, he detailed how its longtime president, Nicholas Murray Butler, invited the Nazi ambassador Hans Luther to campus in 1933, remained friendly with Nazi-run German universities into the mid-30s, and punished Columbia faculty members and students who protested.
Speaking at a 2004 Boston University conference on the Holocaust, Norwood shared other research that now appears in his fully detailed chapter on Harvard's bad behavior. In the updated version, he describes in gruesome detail how prominent "Harvard alumni, student leaders, The Harvard Crimson, and several Harvard professors assumed a leading role in the 10-day welcome and reception accorded the Nazi warship Karlsruhe when it visited Boston in May 1934."...
...Welcome, then, to The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower. Norwood appears to have mined every microfilmed college, labor, and Jewish newspaper, every minor publication of the 1930s, every dusty collection of diplomatic correspondence related to his subject. His findings astonish, especially if you naïvely believe that America's academic leaders must, on the whole, have been on the side of the angels...
...In one remarkable chapter, Norwood exposes how "many administrators, faculty, and students at the elite women's colleges known as the Seven Sisters—Vassar, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard—shared a sanguine view of Nazi Germany and enthusiastically participated in academic and cultural exchanges with the Third Reich." As Norwood shows, the solidarity could only be regarded as bizarre, given that the Nazis were pressuring German women to have a "five-child family," eliminating women from the professions, and imposing a "quota limiting women to 10 percent of those admitted" to universities. Erika Mann, Thomas Mann's daughter, noted in 1937 that not a single female full professor remained in any German university.
Other chapters recount how the University of Virginia's Institute of Public Affairs gave Nazi apologists repeated respectful hearings, how more than a few departments of German amounted to "nests" of Hitler sympathizers, and how Catholic universities and their leaders repeatedly spoke up for Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and even Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, Portugal's dictator...
Read entire article at The Chronicle of Higher Education
How should America's university presidents respond to the savagery in Iran today?
The incarcerated student protesters forced to lick toilet bowls. The imprisoned dissidents beaten to death in holding pens, some with their fingernails torn out. The many murdered protesters, including Neda Agha-Soltan, the now-iconic young philosophy student shot in cold blood. The banning of foreign and domestic journalists from honest coverage or even access to news events. The arrest of professors and shuttering of academic institutions.
Here are a few hints from another era.
Night of the Long Knives. Kristallnacht. Auschwitz. Nuremberg.
Too strong a comparison unless what takes place next in Iran is mass murder?
Granted, vast differences exist between Nazi Germany then and Islamic Iran now. But the vast similarities are also plain. The insistence that state power trumps individual rights. The unaccountable supreme leader. The mass trial. The phony exhortations by rulers to a nonexistent Volk, a unified people. The attacks on and discrimination against women. The existence of militia-like forces, wreaking violence on dissidents. Fascism is fascism.
What's a university president to do? Most of us wouldn't expect the species to be more heroic in the presence of foreign evil than the public at large. The value of that characteristic to fund raising is, after all, unproven. The Dietrich Bonhoeffers, Father Kolbes, and Gandhis come along rarely and tend not to get hired by boards of trustees. The ruling personality bent of many academics—play it safe, take care of friends, advance one's own career and those of like-minded people, do some good along the way—trickles upward.
This time, though, our academic leaders should get it right. Because Stephen H. Norwood's just-published, brilliantly researched, utterly thorough and morally upsetting The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (Cambridge University Press) shows how they got it wrong in the 1930s. A chilling chronicle of pro-Nazi enthusiasm, shabby indifference, and amoral tolerance toward Hitler in elite American academe of the 1930s, this book should exert direct impact in this season of cracking heads and bones in Tehran. It relentlessly names names, depositing fact after sordid fact before the reader in a way that leaves its implications for then and today overwhelming.
Norwood, a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of American Jewish History, attracted media attention when he unpacked some findings in the past. At a conference last year about Columbia University's ties to Nazi Germany, he detailed how its longtime president, Nicholas Murray Butler, invited the Nazi ambassador Hans Luther to campus in 1933, remained friendly with Nazi-run German universities into the mid-30s, and punished Columbia faculty members and students who protested.
Speaking at a 2004 Boston University conference on the Holocaust, Norwood shared other research that now appears in his fully detailed chapter on Harvard's bad behavior. In the updated version, he describes in gruesome detail how prominent "Harvard alumni, student leaders, The Harvard Crimson, and several Harvard professors assumed a leading role in the 10-day welcome and reception accorded the Nazi warship Karlsruhe when it visited Boston in May 1934."...
...Welcome, then, to The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower. Norwood appears to have mined every microfilmed college, labor, and Jewish newspaper, every minor publication of the 1930s, every dusty collection of diplomatic correspondence related to his subject. His findings astonish, especially if you naïvely believe that America's academic leaders must, on the whole, have been on the side of the angels...
...In one remarkable chapter, Norwood exposes how "many administrators, faculty, and students at the elite women's colleges known as the Seven Sisters—Vassar, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard—shared a sanguine view of Nazi Germany and enthusiastically participated in academic and cultural exchanges with the Third Reich." As Norwood shows, the solidarity could only be regarded as bizarre, given that the Nazis were pressuring German women to have a "five-child family," eliminating women from the professions, and imposing a "quota limiting women to 10 percent of those admitted" to universities. Erika Mann, Thomas Mann's daughter, noted in 1937 that not a single female full professor remained in any German university.
Other chapters recount how the University of Virginia's Institute of Public Affairs gave Nazi apologists repeated respectful hearings, how more than a few departments of German amounted to "nests" of Hitler sympathizers, and how Catholic universities and their leaders repeatedly spoke up for Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and even Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, Portugal's dictator...