Academia: Waiting for Heideggers

Thursday's Child Has Far to Fall

As the end of the Weimar-era democracy approached in Germany, there was a noticeable transition in institutional leadership across the country—in universities, in churches, in non-political civil society groups—towards the Nazi Party, a development that the Nazis mindfully encouraged in a variety of ways. Indeed, you might argue, as Shari Berman notably has, that the highly active associational life of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s actually accelerated the fall of Weimar democracy by intensifying social and political divisions.

As Berman notes, it was not just that associational life and civic institutions expressed and thereby intensified political division, but also that they gave the Nazi Party an established set of organizations with considerable reach into social and culture life that the Nazis could effectively seize via replacing the leadership of those institutions with people sympathetic to their aims or worldview, which then intensified the totalitarian force of Nazi power within Germany after Hitler seized supreme political authority.

If you look at how that transition worked within specific institutions—universities, most notably—you see that in many cases that it took no coordination or controlling attention for it to happen. Sometimes it was that an ambitious existing faculty member within the institution who had already achieved some measure of respect or notability saw an opportunity to move into a leadership position, leveraging some kind of re-alignment towards Nazism. The classic example might be Martin Heidegger, who already had a strongly established international reputation and had taught an extraordinary series of students at Marburg and then at Freiburg, where he had been appointed as Husserl’s successor. In April 1933, Heidegger was appointed Rector at Freiburg; two weeks later he joined the Nazi Party. There’s still an ongoing argument about whether Heidegger’s philosophical thought led him to Nazism as a doctrine well before he became Rector or whether his personal ambition led him to calculatedly join the Party and then to calculatedly back its doctrinal preferences (at which point the debate ends, because he was and acted as a Nazi for a time).

In any event, it happened similarly elsewhere. In institutions and associations, someone stepped forward to make the outward look of the institution favorable to Nazi interests. That in turn required gradual and then sharply forceful remaking of the inward life of the institution for that someone to hold their place and stay on the safe side of power. In short order, faculty were forced to retire, to quietly recede and become as close to invisible as possible, or to at least outwardly pretend support for the new values and culture of the institution. Or to flee Germany altogether—and failing any of those, to eventually face persecution and death at the hands of the Nazi state. In other places, like Poland, the Nazis didn’t waste any time destroying an existing intelligentsia.

This kind of turn can begin anywhere, anytime—like right this moment, here and now—wearing the mask of pragmatism and accommodation: let’s not make waves, let’s not use words or make speeches that draw attention, let’s make friendly connections to state legislators, let’s rename that program, let’s quietly defund that one center. Let’s not grant tenure to that person. Let’s encourage that professor to retire. Let’s look for a leader who is acceptable to interests that really hate the university and its values. Let’s take the money for an independent institute that pushes far-right economic philosophy. Let’s take away some governance from faculty, because they tend to provoke our enemies too much. Let’s compromise. Let’s be realistic.

That transition is already well underway in many American public universities located in states dominated by strongly conservative Republican legislatures and governors. Speeches are being quietly buried, people are being pushed out of the limelight, leaders are being chosen for their ability to toe the political line. The rules of ambition and promotion within the organization are being changed, the definitions of professionalism are being shifted. I understand that many people concerned about “cancel culture” believe that some of these behaviors have also taken hold in universities and other civic institutions trying to placate activists on the left, but at the least, you would think that people taking that position would be far more worried about anything of the sort coming from government rather than loose agglomerations of like-minded individuals.

So two things to watch in the coming year, as the frightful new possibilities of some form of national authoritarianism in the United States begin to fully congeal. First, watch the leadership of secular private universities and colleges. Watch what the shapers of leadership and ambition do—the recruiting and headhunting firms that vet top-level appointments, the advice of legal staff and risk management experts, the language used by human resources professionals, the kind of professionalizing rhetoric that emanates from large-scale associations like the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Watch the shift in descriptive language, watch the gestures and moves. Watch the most ambitious, most on the make, most in the public eye leaders to see where their frames and moves relocate. Do they stand and fight or do they become ever more insistent that as society moves so too the university must move to be part of it? Does the university president who yesterday argued for more attention to the diverse expressions of religious faith within the classroom argue tomorrow for more attention to the case for carrying guns or the case for restrictions on abortion? Look at the leaders who have always had the most calculated sense of how to play to their most powerful clients (their richest board members, their state-level political leaders, their biggest grant recipients, the movers and shakers in their community) and watch what they do next. Watch the people who have made no bones about wanting to rise to the top, who have been driving at every moment to get onto a bigger and more powerful stage.

Second, watch what happens to formal efforts to write mission statements, declare values, make policies. Watch where money that can be moved gets moved to. Watch the names of things. Watch for the moments where leaders say in meetings, “We shouldn’t say it that way”. Watch for disavowals. Watch for deferrals to lawyers about what can and cannot be done or should or should not be said. Watch for what the always cautious culture of administrative power becomes markedly more cautious about. Watch for people who have been forthright in private who become suddenly reticient. Watch for new procedures that are blatantly designed to create obstacles to particular kinds of action or public commitment.

And if you do not want to just watchfully wait, consider this possibility. Ask that your institution write a mission statement, a values declaration, a promise for the future that no matter what happens, your institution stands for democracy, for freedom, for rights, for openness, for truth. For elections where every vote is counted, for a society where every member is treated equally and fairly, for more knowledge, for a government that can meaningfully act to secure a better future. Make it as specific as possible while staying on the safe line of 501 c 3’s requirement for non-partisanship. Put as many barbs in it as possible. Make it as irritating as it can be to the worst possibilities ahead of us.

Imagine you’re a Weimar university of 1925 trying to most indelibly poison your institution’s image for the prospect of Nazis in 1933 in a way that can’t be walked back. Imagine you’re trying to make the Martin Heideggers of tomorrow absolutely stuck with layers and layers of anti-Nazi messaging that will take them years to root out and overcome. Ask for it to be chiseled in the cornerstones and in the endowed names of buildings. Pretend we are all Kevin McAllister and we are going to set all the traps against tomorrow’s authoritarian accomplices that we can devise: legal restrictions, unbreakable contracts, requirements for a majority of living alumni to approve certain changes. Some of those will be inconvenient annoyances for doing ordinary business right now, but that’s what preparing to be ungovernable entails.

That is what we now must do. Watch for those who will come forward with the aim of making us easier to deliver on a platter to some future monstrosity, and block their path whenever they step forward. Start building the foundations for a maze, a moat, a fortress, a barricade, for becoming as hard to seize as possible. Time for the ivory tower to take on new meaning.

Image credit: Photo by Nikola Knezevic on Unsplash