Expert Witness for Academic World Assails University Fury

Following is the testimony of Dr. Harry Woodburn Chase, representing the academic world at “The Case of Civilization Against Hitlerism,” tried in Madison Square Garden last night:

The offenses of the Hitler regime against education during these last twelve months involve not only racial persecution, they involve also a wholesale attack upon that freedom of the human intellect which is an essential condition of the progress of civilization.

The schools and universities of Germany have not escaped the fury of racial persecution. Scholars and teachers reliably estimated at approximately fifteen hundred in number have been dismissed from educational institutions, under the Nazi regime. The list of names of men so affected includes some of the most distinguished lights of German scholarship. Five Nobel prize winners have either been dismissed or are in exile. While the majority are Jews, there are many who are not. Men are persecuted, in other words, not only for their race, but for their ideas. The list includes every subject, every art, science and profession taught in institutions of learning. Even mathematics has not escaped. It is not safe, apparently, that its truths should be proclaimed by others than those of proper racial origin and political sympathies. Jews have been barred from professional societies.

OPPORTUNITIES DENIED TO JEWISH SCHOLARS

“Non-Aryan” students in the universities have been limited to a number not exceeding the proportion of “non-Aryans” in Germany to the total population of the country, fixed by the law of April 25 at one and one half percent. Jewish students have been expelled from institutions, from clinics, or, in a spirit reminiscent of the Middle Ages, have been obliged to carry especially stamped and colored cards of identification. Educational and professional opportunities are evidently to be systematically denied to a whole race–to a race which has produced scholars, scientists, technicians and professional men whose careers, whose discoveries, who services for the enlightenment of mankind, have been among the most splendid adornments of German scholarship.

But, bad as these things are, the danger to civilization and to the progress of mankind is greater than is indicated even by these dramatic incidents of racial persecution. The universities of Germany have been great, free institutions. Within them, the right to learn and the right to teach have hitherto been unquestioned. They have believed, as universities worthy of the name must everywhere believe, that the upward march of humanity depends in the long run on the freedom of men and to proclaim the truth.

FREEDOM OF OPINION LOST; HISTORY DISTORTED

And now, suddenly, all that is changed. An educational system that arrived at developing the open mind and the free spirit, deliberately and officially is told that intellectual learning is the least important of its objectives. The tragedy of German education is not alone the tragedy of those who have been forced out of institutions of learning. It is also that those who remain must surrender freedom of opinion, independent judgment and deep intellectual conviction. When men of learning must pay the price of teaching fantastic racial pseudo-science, distortions of history, surrender the right to differ on social and economic questions, watch their every utterance lest it gives offense, then universities in spirit cease to exist, and become instead high-pressure instruments of propaganda.

And, with such a change, there ceases to operate one of the great fundamental agencies for the maintenance and the development of civilization itself. Shackled minds belong to barbarism as definitely as do fettered bodies. Consider a generation shaped and moulded by such influence; a generation reared, not in the open sunshine of truth, but in the jungle of prejudice and passion and hatred. Will such a generation, do you think, be fitted to bear its part in those great common objectives for which civilized mankind must seek if civilization is to maintain itself? Is not, after all, this tragedy one which strikes to the very heart of all that man has painfully and slowly learned about those things which condition his own progress?

It is with such an attitude, frankly revealed and already amazingly destructive, that Hitlerism strikes, through education, a major blow at the buttresses of civilization, not alone in this present, but for the long future.

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