That's the title of Carlin Romano's Chronicle of Higher Education article that takes a look at Stephen H. Norwood's just-published, "brilliantly researched, utterly thorough and morally upsetting The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (Cambridge University Press).
The book, Romano says, shows how academic leaders got it wrong in the 1930s.
A chilling chronicle of
pro-Nazi enthusiasm, shabby indifference, and amoral tolerance toward
Hitler in elite American academe of the 1930s, this book should exert
direct impact in this season of cracking heads and bones in Tehran. It
relentlessly names names, depositing fact after sordid fact before the
reader in a way that leaves its implications for then and today
overwhelming.
The book chronicles how Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and university after university failed utterly to respond appropriately to Nazi Germany. Quite the opposite.
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."
Writer Romano asks if academic leaders will get it right regarding Iran today. I would be very surprised. More here... (HT: Jonah Goldberg at the Corner)