Adam Knowles (#3: Democratic Institutions)

(University Zürich)

Comparisons between the fall of Weimar Germany and the Trump era, now in its second iteration, have always been uneasy. The question for me since 2016 has been: what is the starting point for the comparison between the US and Weimar? This question is even more difficult when it comes to universities. Knowledge production in Germany in 1933 existed within a much different power nexus then the US in 2025. All of the universities Nazified in 1933 were fully public institutions with negligible tuition costs. They were, without a doubt, male-dominated strongholds of cultural elites, yet the particular pressures facing the neoliberal university of the present were foreign to them. Comparing early Nazi German with the neoliberal regimes of the present is difficult, yet we can read them alongside one another.

Firstly, I take it as axiomatic that the modern nation state requires the university as a site of knowledge production. Secondly, for me the most important story of the US university in 2025 is not about elite universities such as Harvard, Columbia, Yale, or Penn. In a country with approximately 4,000 accredited colleges and universities, what is far more important for me are the regional state schools and community colleges that carry out the lion’s share of higher education. These very schools have been under attack by state legislators for decades and the recent wave of anti-CRT and anti-trans legislation are merely the acceleration of those attacks.

The sociologist Melinda Cooper tells a portion this history in her 2017 book Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. Faced with student protests in the 1960s against the Vietnam war, the burgeoning neoliberal counter-revolution under then Governor of California Ronald Reagan recognized a distinct problem, namely: state universities, which were virtually tuition free, seemed to be serving as sites of political, personal, and sexual transformation. The neoliberal technocrats and thinktanks were thus faced with a dilemma: how to undermine the emancipatory aspect of universities without simultaneously undermining their academic quality. The answer was astoundingly simple: increase the costs of universities and introduce federally-backed loans to place the risk solely on the borrower. By tying students to the familial home, the heteronormative family unit could be used both as a driving force of conservatism and as a neoliberal guarantor for the costs of education.Simultaneously, the burden of costs motivated students to pursue the study of “useful” knowledge. This is a simplified version of a complex story, but it sets the stage for the evolution of the American university as we know it today.

That brings me to Nazi Germany—where the political forces affecting universities are often misunderstood. Let me offer a few observations about the Nazification of German universities to be read alongside our shared institutional present:

1. The faculty purges were swift and brutal, with estimates ranging between 3,000, 6,000 primarily Jewish faculty removed by 1938.
2. Nazification was indeed driven by law changes from above, but also by the entrepreneurial, creative energy emerging from below. These academic entrepreneurs were not opportunists. They were dedicated proponents of the Nazi racial cause.
3. The humanities—German Studies, History, Philosophy, above all—were a driving force behind the Nazification of German universities. These disciplines Nazified the curriculum and faculty out of conviction and provided the regime valuable ideological support.
4. The most troubling moment of universities under National Socialism was after 1936. The political pressure on universities caused a swift decline in the quality of German universities. After 1936 a higher degree of autonomy helped to create both a better university and a better fascist university. That observation is intended to evoke a sense of disease.

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