Author reveals Butler’s surprisingly dark past

As they walk through the doors of Butler Library, few Columbia students pause to consider the man for whom their university’s pantheon of knowledge is named. An even smaller number consider the darkest hours of that man’s life.

It is precisely those dark, shameful hours that historian Stephen H. Norwood exposes in his latest book, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses. In this groundbreaking work, to be published by Cambridge University Press in May, Norwood uncovers the indifference and complacency towards Nazi atrocities expressed by this country’s educational elite—including Columbia University’s former and generally widely respected president Nicholas Murray Butler, who served from 1902 to 1945.

As late as the late 1930s, in spite of undeniable evidence of the regime’s barbaric racial policies and in defiance of massive student opposition, these academic leaders refused to take a stand against an obvious wrong—in fact, they essentially condoned it.

Norwood devotes an entire chapter of his book to the University’s response to Nazi and Italian fascism, exposing an administration whose president warmly welcomed Nazi officials, suppressed student anti-fascist activism, established foreign exchange programs with fully Nazified universities, cultivated a friendship with Mussolini, and even expressed sympathy for Nazi expansionist policy.

As Norwood stated in a recent interview, “President Butler was perhaps the most politically significant figure in American higher education in the 1930s. He knew exactly what was going on in Europe.” Thus,
Norwood explained that Butler could have made a positive difference. But instead, in its early years, his administration turned Columbia into the first American university to introduce an anti-Jewish quota and “helped the Nazis project a civilized image of themselves to the rest of the world.”

What is perhaps more shocking today is that, according to Norwood, University President Lee Bollinger “has been unwilling to discuss these findings.” Last spring, the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies invited President Bollinger to a conference to discuss the Butler administration’s relationship with Nazism. “Bollinger was invited by mail, email, and fax. Not only did Bollinger fail to attend, he denied ever having received an invitation. In my mind, that’s very sad,” Norwood said. “You really expect more from the leader of one of the world’s most distinguished centers of education.”

Norwood went on to criticize the Bollinger administration’s decision to host Iran’s outspokenly anti-Semitic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “To give a platform to a leader who demands that the state of Israel be ‘wiped off the map’ is the worst form of anti-intellectualism. ... Columbia’s administration should have learned the lessons of the 1930’s.” Leaders like Ahmadinejad “are going to use such opportunities to assuage their image in the West,” he added.

“I want people to understand what happened,” Norwood said. He hopes The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower might finally push our current administration to admit the mistakes of its past, so that similar mistakes will become unthinkable in the future.

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