Big Man on Campus?: Hitler and the American University

Abstract

Big Man on Campus?Hitler and the American University Robert Cohen (bio) Stephen H. Norwood . The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ix + 350 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.99. The cover of Stephen H. Norwood's The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower shows a mortarboard bedecked with a Nazi flag. This image linking U.S. campuses to the swastika is dramatic, but it is also tendentious and unbalanced—and so is Norwood's historical narrative, which has at its core a scathing indictment of Depression-era America's universities for cozying up to Nazi Germany. Norwood contends that U.S. universities helped to legitimate Hitlerism by maintaining amicable relations with Nazi Germany long after the barbarous nature of the Nazi regime had become apparent. Although accurate on many of the particular incidents with which it deals, this study is misleading on account of its narrow scope and failure to confront a large number of actions by American academic leaders that challenge the author's claims. Norwood's indictment of American academics starts at the top—with Harvard University. He portrays Harvard President James B. Conant as playing a key role in this legitimization process. Conant welcomed representatives from Nazi Germany to Harvard's ceremonies, including its tercentenary celebration in 1936, and in turn supported Harvard's participation in academic processions hosted by Germany's Nazified universities. Norwood accuses Conant of repeatedly missing opportunities to criticize the Nazi regime and saying nothing about its increasingly brutal anti-Semitism. Conant also proved indifferent to efforts to rescue persecuted Jewish scholars from Germany. A chapter on Columbia offers a similar indictment of its president, Nicholas Murray Butler, with the added accusation that he sought to suppress anti-Nazi dissent on his campus and punished students and faculty who engaged in such dissent. The elite women's colleges of the Northeast known as the Seven Sisters—Vassar, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard—come off on Norwood's pages as embracing Nazi Germany through exchange programs that sent students to Germany and had them returning to sing Hitler's praises. He condemns the University of Virginia for allowing its [End Page 163] Institute of Public Affairs Roundtable to give a "respectful hearing for Nazi Germany's apologists" (p. 133). Norwood depicts the American universities' German departments as "Nazi nests" (p. 158) and U.S. Catholic universities as engaging in a "flirtation with fascism" (p. 196). After more than 200 pages depicting academe's callousness and stupidity in refusing to think critically about Nazi Germany, there seems a hopeful sign of change. Norwood begins his last chapter on the Nazi era by stating that, "only in late 1938, after the Kristallnacht pogroms in Germany, did American universities become significantly involved in protest against Nazism" (p. 220). Yet even here Norwood finds academic community leadership wanting because the "initiative" behind these protests "came largely from students" rather than faculty or university presidents (p. 220). He chastises campus officials for not going far enough in their anti-Nazi actions, since they "remained unwilling to press for strong retaliatory measures against Germany" and refused "to assume much responsibility for raising funds to bring refugees from Nazism to their campuses" (p. 220). To his credit, Norwood roots his narrative in extensive evidence from university archives. His indictment is at points powerful, as The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower offers the most detailed and devastating account ever written on American university ties to Nazi Germany. A jury reading only this prosecutor's brief against the university for complicity with the Nazis would surely bring in a guilty verdict. But Norwood's brilliantly provocative book—despite its valuable revelations about academic indifference to Hitlerism—is in its way a kind of case study of the historiographical problems that emerge when a historian assumes the role of prosecutor. It is at times breathtakingly one-sided, argumentative, selective in its use of evidence, chronologically constricted, and out of touch with the political dynamics of isolationism, the American Left, and the Popular Front—which did so much to shape campus discourse on the international crises...