I've been wondering lately on this blog about selective activism among academics, and have been particularly intrigued by moments when academics seem spontaneously and collectively to ignore, deny, rationalize, or even celebrate things that really cannot be ignored, denied, rationalized, or celebrated--things that go far beyond partisan bickering and ideological posturing, and that touch on truly basic and elemental aspects of what is it to be human, and humane.

So I was most intrigued by Carlin Romano's review of Stephen Norwood's new book, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower. Excerpt:

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."

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.

[...]

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."

The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower continues like that: chapter and verse of journalists and diplomats reporting anti-Semitic violence, public figures such as Einstein and La Guardia denouncing the Nazis, grass-roots activists successfully fomenting a boycott of German goods and services—while the leaders of America's universities "remained largely silent." Worse, the latter sometimes defied the anti-Nazi boycott, trading exchange students with Nazi universities, "warmly receiving Nazi diplomats and propagandists on campus."

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.

Silence and complicity of this sort strikes me as more mysterious and terrible than the more expressive, protest-oriented forms of academic groupthink one is accustomed to see anatomized and debated these days--perhaps because they are so much more obviously indicative of how individuals can take on the burden of collective lies. This isn't to say that loud collective outpourings of opinion and sentiment (think about academia's issues with the war in Iraq, or with the Bush administration generally, or even with that strawman entity it calls "conservatives") don't get caught up in things like intellectual dishonesty; they absolutely do. But it is to say that the unspoken aspects of group behavior are at once harder to grasp and immensely revealing; if outpourings tell us what a group wants the world to see in them, the silences tell us something about what they may not even be willing to see in themselves.