"It’s not so much that people are persecuted because of their
beliefs, but there is a certain trend where careful reasoning, the
search for truth, all the delicacies of having a balanced point of
view, acting on facts, being honest about what you do and don’t
know, your uncertainty, all these values we have in science and
scholarship are at risk."
Isn't this epistemic crisis [0]. I think mistrust in the world
increased to the extent the it got digital, but taking advantage of
crisis, even conjuring untruth, mistrust and polycrisis [1] as a
smokescreen strategy for taking control is also a basic Machiavelli
thing, right?. This (epistemic injury) is more easily done to already
traumatised people. Germans of 1930s, already reeling from recent war,
were vulnerable to a rampage of anti-intellectualism and a bonfire of
knowledge.
One lesser-known and deeply unsettling fact from academic history is that a significant number of professors at major German universities supported the Nazi regime during its rise to power. Far from being passive bystanders, many actively embraced Nazi ideology, joined the party, or participated in the purge of Jewish and politically dissident faculty.
A detailed exploration of this phenomenon can be found in the books “Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany” by Robert P. Ericksen
and “Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft und der Nationalsozialismus” by Richard J. Evans. An accessible summary is also available via the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
And like the head of École Polytechnique (France's top university) once said in an address to the students: “there are 10% of complete idiots in the population, and I see no reason to assume the ratio is any different in here”.
If you have a political power that rewards stupidity, then those people will become empowered everywhere they are, including in the universities.
And with all the trumpist shit going on in US universities right now, I wonder how many professors suddenly feel a need to advertise pro-Donald propaganda in order to keep their funding.
Isn't it just obvious? When the Nazi ideology was widespread, of course it permeated into every domain of the society.
I haven't read the books, but the presentation by this holocaust museum was not informative. For instance, it fails to mention a relevant fact: some people earned their academic position to their activity in the party.
And, most of all, the existence is irrelevant without some prevalence. I would be very surprised if the established scholars that "actively embraced Nazi ideology" were a majority.
From the Vietnam wars to nowadays, there have been US academics that embraced war or actively supported genocides, but I think most academics and students are less heinous or indifferent than the average population. That's why some German scholars were oppressed by their government, even when they were not Jews, and chose to emigrate.
> When the Nazi ideology was widespread, of course it permeated into every domain of the society.
One of the architects of that ideology was Carl Schmitt, who formulated the concept of the Totalstaat or "total state" as a state that did exactly what you say: permeated into every domain of society. He considered a state "total" when it was co-extensive with the entirety of its people's endeavors, co-opting or liquidating any alternative authority such as media, academia, or church. This was a novel concept at the time, especially after the swing to liberal (small and restrained) republics in the late eighteenth century. As a novel concept, the total permeation of the Nazi state into academia and the rest of the spheres of non-governmental authority would have been far from obvious at the time to observers of prior governments, but it was also the intent.
The Nazis were not the only ones to adopt an illiberal, totalitarian stance: the twentieth century saw a huge growth in government authority and its permeation through other parts of human life, like academia, in regimes that rejected other aspects of the Nazi ideology. The Soviet Union comes to mind as an example: the government coopted authorities like academia and liquidated others like churches in order to pervade as far as possible every aspect of society.
The fact that it seems obvious in retrospect that Nazi ideology would permeate academia and every domain of society shows how successful the concept of a Totalstaat was, even in an age that looks back with horror upon the Nazis. The way to counter the spread of government is to put strong limits on government, keeping it out of academia, the media, religion, and so forth completely, with no government funding for any of them. If academia requires government funding, the government of the day will always control academia.
> About a year later, Hilbert attended a banquet and was seated next to the new Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust. Rust asked whether "the Mathematical Institute really suffered so much because of the departure of the Jews." Hilbert replied, "Suffered? It doesn't exist any longer, does it?"
The most recent Veritasium video touched on this — Emmy Noether worked under Hilbert and made significant contributions to general relativity, worked at University of Göttingen (Jewish, and first woman professor) until 1933.
The excellent mathematical history "The Music of the Primes" by Marcus du Sautoy covers this period:
"Within the space of a few weeks, Hitler had destroyed the great Gottingen tradition forged by Gauss, Riemann, Dirichlet and Hilbert. One commentator wrote that it was 'one of the greatest tragedies experienced by human culture since the time of the Renaissance'. Gottingen (and some might argue, German mathematics itself) has never recovered from its destruction by Nazi Germany during the thirties. Hilbert died on St. Valentine's Day in 1943... his death marked the end of the city's position as the Mecca of mathematics."
The central rational for the initial Nazi assault on the Gottingen department of mathematics was its Marxist leanings, with Nazi street protests decrying the 'fortress of Marxism'. Note that 'Landau, who was Jewish, was allowed to stay because he had been appointed before the outbreak of the First World War. The non-Aryan clause in the civil-service law of April 1933 did not apply to long-serving professors or those who had fought in the war.' Later Landau was targeted for his Jewishness, forced to resign, and died in 1938 in Germany after a bried exodus to Britain.
People should be somewhat cautious in applying these historical examples to the USA today - indeed, the corruption of the American academic system began long ago in the 1980s, when Bayh-Dole legislation initiated the corporatization of research via the exclusive licensing of tax-payer funded research to private interests, who then stopped financing their own proprietary industrial research centers like Bell Labs. Now American universities are packed with shady entrepreneurs who routinely cook data and found startups in the hope of large financial payouts via acquistion by large corporations. This has lead to rampant fraud, a culture of secrecy and distrust, and various other ills.
"Now in retrospect, the whole development is a
decisive demonstration of the damage done to
academic and mathematical life by any subor-
dination to populism, political pressure and pro-
posed political principles."
Readit News
[0] https://academic.oup.com/book/26406/chapter/194768451
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20210209-the-greatest-s...
A detailed exploration of this phenomenon can be found in the books “Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany” by Robert P. Ericksen and “Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft und der Nationalsozialismus” by Richard J. Evans. An accessible summary is also available via the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-role-o...
This isn’t just a historical footnote—it’s a sobering reminder of how institutions of knowledge can be wrong.
If you have a political power that rewards stupidity, then those people will become empowered everywhere they are, including in the universities.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion
I haven't read the books, but the presentation by this holocaust museum was not informative. For instance, it fails to mention a relevant fact: some people earned their academic position to their activity in the party.
And, most of all, the existence is irrelevant without some prevalence. I would be very surprised if the established scholars that "actively embraced Nazi ideology" were a majority. From the Vietnam wars to nowadays, there have been US academics that embraced war or actively supported genocides, but I think most academics and students are less heinous or indifferent than the average population. That's why some German scholars were oppressed by their government, even when they were not Jews, and chose to emigrate.
One of the architects of that ideology was Carl Schmitt, who formulated the concept of the Totalstaat or "total state" as a state that did exactly what you say: permeated into every domain of society. He considered a state "total" when it was co-extensive with the entirety of its people's endeavors, co-opting or liquidating any alternative authority such as media, academia, or church. This was a novel concept at the time, especially after the swing to liberal (small and restrained) republics in the late eighteenth century. As a novel concept, the total permeation of the Nazi state into academia and the rest of the spheres of non-governmental authority would have been far from obvious at the time to observers of prior governments, but it was also the intent.
The Nazis were not the only ones to adopt an illiberal, totalitarian stance: the twentieth century saw a huge growth in government authority and its permeation through other parts of human life, like academia, in regimes that rejected other aspects of the Nazi ideology. The Soviet Union comes to mind as an example: the government coopted authorities like academia and liquidated others like churches in order to pervade as far as possible every aspect of society.
The fact that it seems obvious in retrospect that Nazi ideology would permeate academia and every domain of society shows how successful the concept of a Totalstaat was, even in an age that looks back with horror upon the Nazis. The way to counter the spread of government is to put strong limits on government, keeping it out of academia, the media, religion, and so forth completely, with no government funding for any of them. If academia requires government funding, the government of the day will always control academia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hilbert
https://youtu.be/lcjdwSY2AzM?si=qVZdS1QTBgmMTX9r
"Within the space of a few weeks, Hitler had destroyed the great Gottingen tradition forged by Gauss, Riemann, Dirichlet and Hilbert. One commentator wrote that it was 'one of the greatest tragedies experienced by human culture since the time of the Renaissance'. Gottingen (and some might argue, German mathematics itself) has never recovered from its destruction by Nazi Germany during the thirties. Hilbert died on St. Valentine's Day in 1943... his death marked the end of the city's position as the Mecca of mathematics."
The central rational for the initial Nazi assault on the Gottingen department of mathematics was its Marxist leanings, with Nazi street protests decrying the 'fortress of Marxism'. Note that 'Landau, who was Jewish, was allowed to stay because he had been appointed before the outbreak of the First World War. The non-Aryan clause in the civil-service law of April 1933 did not apply to long-serving professors or those who had fought in the war.' Later Landau was targeted for his Jewishness, forced to resign, and died in 1938 in Germany after a bried exodus to Britain.
People should be somewhat cautious in applying these historical examples to the USA today - indeed, the corruption of the American academic system began long ago in the 1980s, when Bayh-Dole legislation initiated the corporatization of research via the exclusive licensing of tax-payer funded research to private interests, who then stopped financing their own proprietary industrial research centers like Bell Labs. Now American universities are packed with shady entrepreneurs who routinely cook data and found startups in the hope of large financial payouts via acquistion by large corporations. This has lead to rampant fraud, a culture of secrecy and distrust, and various other ills.
Saunders Mac Lane
"Now in retrospect, the whole development is a decisive demonstration of the damage done to academic and mathematical life by any subor- dination to populism, political pressure and pro- posed political principles."
https://www.ams.org/notices/199510/maclane.pdf
The scientists came here or were kidnapped by the Soviet Union.