Academic Freedom

Red Baron is an old man, so only a few things in the news can still excite him. These include the civil war in South Sudan and the fight for academic freedom in the USA.

I find the war in South Sudan, for various reasons, more atrocious than the Ukraine war and totally insane in a world full of bloody conflicts. Perhaps I will get around to explaining my reasons for this "choice" to my readers.

What concerns me at the moment are the defensive struggles of many American universities against the Trump administration's influence on their research and teaching.

Paul Krugman wrote a clever essay that takes the tone that the Trump administration is taking up arms against the elites:

 
Above all, Trump clearly feels rage toward people who, he imagines, think they're smarter or better than him.

And he and the movement he leads, composed of people possessed by similar rage, are seeking retribution. Retribution against whom? Yes, they hate wokeness. But three months in, it's obvious that the MAGA types want revenge not just on their political opponents but on everyone they consider elites - a group that, as they see it, doesn't include billionaires, but does include college professors, scientists, and experts of any kind.

Krugman even draws a parallel between Mao's Cultural Revolution and what is currently happening in the US.

Once you've seen the parallel between what MAGA is trying to do and China's Cultural Revolution, the similarities are everywhere. Maoists sent schoolteachers to do farm labor; Trumpists are talking about putting civil servants to work in factories.

The Cultural Revolution was, of course, a huge disaster for China. [...] The Trumpists are surely the same. Their rampage will, if unchecked, have dire economic consequences.

Right now we're all focused on tariff madness, but undermining higher education and crippling scientific research will eventually have even bigger costs. But don't expect them to care or even to acknowledge what's happening. Trump has already declared that the inflation everyone can see with their own eyes is fake news.  

Why science, when I say what is true?

Krugman covers a lot of ground here. As I wrote before, I would like to limit myself to the situation at universities.

What always upsets me is when authorities interfere with university teaching, especially when it comes to liberal ideas.

Todd Wolfson, a Rutgers University professor, called the Trump administration's demands "arguably the greatest incursion into academic freedom, freedom of speech, and institutional autonomy that we've seen since the McCarthy era. "

Kris Manjapra, professor of history at Tufts University, said, "We are witnessing a series of challenges to academic freedom and the rise of what seems to be a fascist coalition, and we are clearly seeing the beginning of reprisals against different institutions that are essential to the functioning of our democracy."

Not all American universities stiffened their spines but caved in when they received note of cut funding, an attitude David North described as an American Trumpian version of what the Nazis called "Gleichschaltung" - the official subordination of intellectual and cultural life to Nazi ideology.

Another of those terrible German words, Sabine Hossenfelder used when
she reasoned about the Trump Administration's pressure on American universities.

Red Baron knows of many historical attempts to decree what should be taught.

At the beginning of the 19th century, triggered by a stupid political murder, the Carlsbad Resolutions, instigated and implemented by the Austrian Chancellor Klemenz von Metternich in 1819, were a theatrical means of suppressing the national and liberal aspirations in Germany at the time. These Resolutions included press and book censorship, police supervision of the universities, the closure of gymnasiums, and the banning of student fraternities. Liberal and nationally minded lecturers were threatened with being banned from their profession.

University lecturers who spread teachings that were thought to be hostile to public order or undermined the foundations of the existing state institutions, such as the natural scientist Lorenz Oken, were dismissed, and some were even arrested, such as historian Ernst Moritz Arndt and the Father of Gymnastics (Turnvater) Friedrich Ludwig Jahn.

Nevertheless, the University of Freiburg tried several times to win Oken as a professor. When the government finally agreed to the appointment after much insistence, Baden's interior minister, Ludwig Georg Winter, referring to Karl von Rotteck and Carl Theodor Welcker, could not resist the remark, "Yes, you could still use Oken in Freiburg; you probably don't have enough liberals yet."


When, in November 1833, Ernest Augustus of Hanover, King by the Grace of God, suspended the liberal Hanoverian constitution by executive order, seven professors at the University of Göttingen protested against this dictatorial act on grounds of conscience. The king dismissed the "Göttingen Seven" and expelled three from the country.

Commemorative stamp (©Stefan Klein and Olaf Neumann)

A broad public at home and abroad followed the events. It supported the "Seven", whose courageous act made a decisive contribution to the emergence of a bourgeois civil society and the creation of democracy in Germany.

Strangely enough, when the Nazis came to power in 1933, the majority of the student body was National Socialist. There were no liberal student protests. On the contrary, in Freiburg students eagerly marched behind their university teacher Martin Heidegger, who exhorted them to follow him in invoking the forces of blood as the only preservers of German culture: "The essence of the German university only comes into clarity, rank and power when first and foremost and at all times the leaders themselves are led - led by the relentlessness of that spiritual mission that forces the fate of the German people into the imprint of its history."

Rector of the University of Freiburg, Martin Heidegger, with the chain of office
framed by taller colleagues and students in vollem Wichs (full regalia)
at the opening of the winter semester 1933/34 (©BZ)

"The Führer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: From now on, every thing demands a decision and every action demands responsibility."

And the Scholl siblings? Hans and Sophie were students at the Munich university and members of the White Rose, a resistance group against the National Socialist dictatorship, which was essentially based on Christian and humanist values. Academic freedom was not their primary goal. It had ceased to exist in 1933, when all German universities were gleichgeschaltet (brought into line).

Convicted of Wehrzersetzung (undermining the fighting spirit of the German army), Hans and Sophie Scholl were sentenced to death on February 22, 1943, and hanged on the same day.

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