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Book Review
Comparative/World
| John Connelly and Michael Grüttner, editors. Universities under Dictatorship. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005. Pp. x, 305. $55.00.
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| Academic freedom is contested terrain, especially within modern societies where universities and their faculties face constant demands to conform to the imperatives of the state or those of other outside entities. Yet, as these essays about dictatorships and higher education reveal, the academy is surprisingly resilient. Even under the most repressive regimes, professors can sometimes preserve a precarious measure of autonomy by insisting on the maintenance of professional standards. That there may be lessons here for contemporary academics is this volume's obvious subtext, as coeditor John Connelly candidly admits. |
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Because these essays emerged from a conference at Berkeley in 2000 that posed some very specific questions, this volume is much more coherent than most such collections. All the contributors recognize—nay, emphasize—the contingent nature of the threat dictatorships posed to the academy. Not only did different regimes make different demands for political conformity, but their requirements shifted over time. Thus, for example, although, as Michael David-Fox shows, Soviet academics enjoyed considerable autonomy during the NEP period of the 1920s, when Joseph Stalin decided to crack down after 1928, the universities were nearly destroyed, only to resurface a few years later as partners in the nation's industrialization. Similarly, according to coeditor Michael Grüttner, the Nazis imposed stringent restrictions on their institutions of higher learning in the first few years of the Third Reich but then relaxed them to recruit scientists, in particular, before the war began. Ralph Jessen tracks the same phenomenon in East Germany, where the massive purges that took place after World War II gave way to inducements—again, for scientists. |
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Traditions mattered. Some systems, like that of Germany, had always operated as part of the state, so that the Nazi takeover did not, at least initially, create a major break. Similarly Chinese intellectuals, according to Douglas Stiffler, had a long tradition of service to the regime. There were other continuities as well. Both tsarist and Soviet universities, for example, sought to develop elite cadres for Russia's bureaucracies and professions, albeit from different political classes. By contrast, as Connelly shows, Poland's long struggle for national independence gave its academic institutions a patriotic oppositional culture that enabled their members to retain considerable autonomy under the postwar communist government and avoid the widespread purges that characterized the other regimes. |
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Those purges—which invariably eliminated political opponents and people from targeted minorities—were ubiquitous, even if their methods varied. Most of the time the state or the ruling party coordinated the dismissals, although sometimes, as Jan Havránek shows for Czechoslovakia, student radicals took the lead. Because of the Spanish Civil War, Francisco Franco's purge, Miguel Angel Ruiz Carnicer notes, was especially ferocious, though the German Democratic Republic, where most professors were former Nazis, eventually eliminated the largest percentage—over eighty percent of the faculty at some schools. The Third Reich got rid of Jews and radicals early on, ultimately purging some twenty percent of its faculties; Benito Mussolini, on the other hand, waited a few years before beginning serious purges and, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat tells us, did not expel Jewish professors until the late 1930s. |
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