Richard Ingham's blog

Poland's universities under occupation The existence of academics under repressive regimes, the subject of my previous blog postings, most often involved dismissal or collaboration with the authorities, as in Vichy France, Fascist Italy, and the USA under McCarthyism. But sometimes a more uplifting picture emerges, as in the case of Polish universities under Nazi occupation between 1939-1945. Despite the murderous persecution academics had to endure at this time, when all higher education in Poland was forbidden, they secretly kept university life going until the Liberation. I recently read Adam Redzik's graphic account of this time. Though terrifying in its depiction of what staff and students had to endure, it ultimately conveys an inspiring message of hope that no regime, however blindly barbaric, can trample into the dirt the educational aspirations of young people and those who wish to lead them to self-realisation through hig...

Reforming the university in fascist Italy Writing about the vicissitudes of universities in 1950s America and in Nazi-occupied France (see previous posts) made me wonder if anyone had looked at the broader picture, of how higher education copes with totalitarian regimes more generally. It turns out they have. A 2005 book, Universities under Dictatorship , edited by Stuart Connelly and Michael Grüttner (Pennsylvania University Press), brought together a number of studies of higher education systems in countries as diverse as Czechoslovakia under communism and Spain under Franco. In  most cases, the book deals with regimes that took power after a period of violent struggle or even large-scale war.  Almost inevitably, in this kind of context the university system in each country was rapidly and drastically transformed. The exception was Italy, where the previous regime was not overthrown by civil war or foreign conquest, and where the introduction of fascism was car...

Collaborating with McCarthy I happened to see that Ellen Schrecker, the veteran Professor of History who in the 1980s exposed the truth about how United States academia fared under McCarthyism, retired earlier this year. Her landmark study of how US universities responded to the McCarthyite challenge - by fully embracing it and implementing witch-hunts on the campus - deserves careful study today. The intolerance, and also the sheer hypocrisy, of those who ran the US universities at this time is noteworthy. In 1953, the presidents of 37 leading US universities urged faculty members to cooperate with the House Unamerican Activities Commission and other witch-hunt committees.  By a truly Orwellian distortion, they turned academic freedom of speech into a requirement for academics to speak against anyone, including themselves, who was suspected by the regime. Only in this way, it was claimed, could academics demonstrate they were 'worthy' of free speech. To quo...

Academics in an occupied country I have been fascinated to read recently an account of what happens to universities in what had been a democratic country, which find themselves under pressure from a government that takes its orders from an unelected power based abroad. New policy objectives laid down by the new masters rapidly affected many areas of university life, and gave many academics a crisis of conscience over how they could be compatible with traditional university values. Others, however, seized the opportunity to further their careers by endorsing the policy objectives imposed from outside and transmitted by government ministers. Does this sounds like a description of English universities complying with the higher education policies of Brussels? Surely not. It's in a book,  Les Savants sous l'Occupation , by Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis (Editions du Seuil, 2004),  that describes what happened to universities and research institutions during the Nazi occupation ...