Mediocrates
08-16-2011, 08:28 AM
A review by Carlin Roman of The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses by Stephen H. Norwood.
At the 25th reunion that year of the Class of 09, writes Norwood, President James Bryant Conant, who'd sailed the previous year to Europe on a Nazi ocean liner, feted Ernst Hanfstaengl, "one of Hitler's earliest backers" and his foreign-press chief. In the summer of 1935, Harvard allowed its student band to perform regularly on a Nazi ship. In 1936, Conant dispatched a delegate to help celebrate the 550th anniversary of the Nazified University of Heidelberg, despite its bonfire of "un-German" books in 1933. Conant allowed the German consul in Boston to place a laurel wreath, swastika affixed, in one of Harvard's memorial chapels. Conant continued to maintain until Kristallnacht, Norwood writes, that Nazi universities remained part of the "learned world" and should be treated politely. In the 1950s, Conant, then U.S. ambassador to Germany, drew repeated denunciations from Congressional officials for his efforts to free Nazi war criminals, including some of the most bestial.
And who knew that the "stiff-armed Nazi salute and Sieg Heil chant" was "modeled on a gesture and a shout" that Hanfstaengl had used as a Harvard football cheerleader?
After Norwood's 2004 talk, The Boston Globe reported that David S. Wyman, the leading scholar of America's response to the Holocaust, put current Harvard administrators on notice: "Harvard should issue an apology without excuses and say, 'We as an institution would never conduct ourselves like that again.'" At the time, Harvard spokesman Joe Wrinn issued a statement that said, "Harvard University and President Conant did not support the Nazis." Wrinn also urged: "If there are new facts, they should be added to the archives of history and the dialogue of those times."
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.
Norwood begins shrewdly in his opening chapter, "Germany Reverts to the Dark Ages: Nazi Clarity and Grassroots American Protest, 1933-1934." Offering one citation after another, he demonstrates that within months after Hitler came to power, on January 30, 1933, the news that Nazis were beating Jews in the streets, degrading them, banishing them from public life or yanking them off to torture cellars and early concentration camps was widely reported. Public figures outside of academe were already condemning Hitler.
On March 7, 1933, Norwood relates, Boston's The Jewish Advocate declared that Germany's entire Jewish population of 600,000 was "under the shadow of a campaign of murder." Days before, the London Daily Herald had predicted the Nazis would launch a pogrom "on a scale as terrible as any instance of Jewish persecution in 2,000 years." On April 7, the Nazis enacted the law expelling Jews from the civil service, which included all professors. By spring 1934, the Manchester Guardian correspondent Robert Dell opened his book, Germany Unmasked, by quoting a diplomat in Berlin: "The conditions here are not those of a normal civilized country, and the German government is not a normal civilized government and cannot be dealt with as if it were one."
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Do such differences make the moral challenges that face our university presidents today subtler, or more clear-cut? Columbia President Lee Bollinger's highly publicized invitation to (and confrontation with) Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad two years ago reflected some of the changed circumstances. Bollinger adopted a halfway strategy unseen in Norwood's pages. First he invited the morally reprobate foreign leader and let him speak (upholding the courtesy and free-discussion principles of academe that were supposedly of great importance to Conant and others). Then he confronted him critically, in person, before an audience—something Conant and most of the academic leaders in Norwood's pages fought hard to avoid. Showing how controversial such strategies remain, Bollinger took heavy criticism (and some praise) for his choices.
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shame-of-Academe-and/47938
At the 25th reunion that year of the Class of 09, writes Norwood, President James Bryant Conant, who'd sailed the previous year to Europe on a Nazi ocean liner, feted Ernst Hanfstaengl, "one of Hitler's earliest backers" and his foreign-press chief. In the summer of 1935, Harvard allowed its student band to perform regularly on a Nazi ship. In 1936, Conant dispatched a delegate to help celebrate the 550th anniversary of the Nazified University of Heidelberg, despite its bonfire of "un-German" books in 1933. Conant allowed the German consul in Boston to place a laurel wreath, swastika affixed, in one of Harvard's memorial chapels. Conant continued to maintain until Kristallnacht, Norwood writes, that Nazi universities remained part of the "learned world" and should be treated politely. In the 1950s, Conant, then U.S. ambassador to Germany, drew repeated denunciations from Congressional officials for his efforts to free Nazi war criminals, including some of the most bestial.
And who knew that the "stiff-armed Nazi salute and Sieg Heil chant" was "modeled on a gesture and a shout" that Hanfstaengl had used as a Harvard football cheerleader?
After Norwood's 2004 talk, The Boston Globe reported that David S. Wyman, the leading scholar of America's response to the Holocaust, put current Harvard administrators on notice: "Harvard should issue an apology without excuses and say, 'We as an institution would never conduct ourselves like that again.'" At the time, Harvard spokesman Joe Wrinn issued a statement that said, "Harvard University and President Conant did not support the Nazis." Wrinn also urged: "If there are new facts, they should be added to the archives of history and the dialogue of those times."
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.
Norwood begins shrewdly in his opening chapter, "Germany Reverts to the Dark Ages: Nazi Clarity and Grassroots American Protest, 1933-1934." Offering one citation after another, he demonstrates that within months after Hitler came to power, on January 30, 1933, the news that Nazis were beating Jews in the streets, degrading them, banishing them from public life or yanking them off to torture cellars and early concentration camps was widely reported. Public figures outside of academe were already condemning Hitler.
On March 7, 1933, Norwood relates, Boston's The Jewish Advocate declared that Germany's entire Jewish population of 600,000 was "under the shadow of a campaign of murder." Days before, the London Daily Herald had predicted the Nazis would launch a pogrom "on a scale as terrible as any instance of Jewish persecution in 2,000 years." On April 7, the Nazis enacted the law expelling Jews from the civil service, which included all professors. By spring 1934, the Manchester Guardian correspondent Robert Dell opened his book, Germany Unmasked, by quoting a diplomat in Berlin: "The conditions here are not those of a normal civilized country, and the German government is not a normal civilized government and cannot be dealt with as if it were one."
----------------------------------------------
Do such differences make the moral challenges that face our university presidents today subtler, or more clear-cut? Columbia President Lee Bollinger's highly publicized invitation to (and confrontation with) Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad two years ago reflected some of the changed circumstances. Bollinger adopted a halfway strategy unseen in Norwood's pages. First he invited the morally reprobate foreign leader and let him speak (upholding the courtesy and free-discussion principles of academe that were supposedly of great importance to Conant and others). Then he confronted him critically, in person, before an audience—something Conant and most of the academic leaders in Norwood's pages fought hard to avoid. Showing how controversial such strategies remain, Bollinger took heavy criticism (and some praise) for his choices.
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shame-of-Academe-and/47938