The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (review)

The case advanced in this account of American academic indulgence toward Nazi Germany is clinched. By inviting Nazi propagandists to promote their cause on campus, accepting them on faculties, participating in student exchanges with German universities that had fired their non-Aryan professors and had permitted ideological indoctrination, and scorning outraged undergraduates who protested the atrocities of the Third Reich, the presidents of the Ivy League, of the Seven Sisters, and of other colleges and universities failed until Kristallnacht to recognize the threat that the Third Reich posed to the life of learning (and thus to the very marrow of civilization).

Norwood’s constitutes a serious indictment. Two of the most influential presidents—Columbia’s Nicholas Murray Butler and Harvard’s James Bryant Conant—look especially bad; Norwood pursues Conant into the postwar era when, as U.S. High Commissioner and then as Ambassador to the Federal Republic in the 1950s, he endorsed and justified the brief, commuted jail sentences that notorious war criminals enjoyed. Though the language adopted in this book is not explicitly moralistic, the tone is certainly—and understandably—prosecutorial. Defenders of business-as-usual relations with German academicians and officials were granted a respectful hearing until late 1938; those who challenged the slack that American higher education cut the Third Reich often had to struggle to be heard, and were sometimes punished.

The enormous research that Norwood conducted in mostly university archives, numerous newspapers (especially the campus press), and other sources is admirably ingenious and reassuring. As a diligent record of denial, misjudgment, and worse (such as apologetics for an unsheathed dictatorship), The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower is invaluable. But it is also frustratingly, unreflectively empiricist. Norwood’s focus on “just the facts,” like Dragnet’s Sgt. Joe Friday, is overly sedulous, disregarding what ought to be inevitable questions. What liaisons should American universities have had with counterparts operating under regimes that might be comparable to Germany’s (the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and military dictatorships in much of Europe during the interwar period)? How, for that matter, should American universities have behaved toward democracies that were, after all, imperialist and colonialist? Even if the special cruelty of Nazi Germany is granted, what should be the attitude of American academic institutions toward nations that are morally repugnant? Is there any difference between the pretense of normality that was adopted in 1933 and, if the policy continued, in 1936? (Norwood seems to see none.)

Though some academics quickly and forthrightly appreciated the unprecedented menace that Nazi Germany represented, a touch of anachronism mars this volume as well. The “captains of erudition” (Thorstein Veblen’s sardonic phrase) of the 1930s were simply not equipped for the sort of impassioned political action that drew some of their successors into the civil-rights and antiwar movements three decades later. The struggle to de-legitimate and isolate Nazi Germany suffered from the cramped, and even prissy, definition of civic responsibility that then influenced university administration and nearly all of the professoriate. But it is also a little unfair of Norwood to blame them for failing to act on the greater sensitivity to injustice that marked the 1960s. By then, Nazism itself had become inscribed in public discourse as the signature of evil.