Columbia rolled out red carpet for Hitler ambassador in 1933

Yesterday is today with Columbia University Dean John Coatsworth's defense of the red carpet rollout for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This week's events are not new in the anals of Columbia University says David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies director Dr. Rafael Medoff. In 1933 the University located in the city of New York invited Nazi Germany’s ambassador to the United States, Hans Luther, to speak on campus. The University also hosted a reception for the ambassador of Nazi Germany by invitation of then Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler.

Dr. Medoff indicates that the administration of Columbia and other like-minded American centers for higher learning were quite taken by the government of "the new Germany" under Adolf Hitler. Medoff writes that the Nazi ambassador, "represented 'the government of a friendly people,'......He was 'entitled to be received ... with the greatest courtesy and respect.' Ambassador Luther's speech focused on what he characterized as Hitler's peaceful intentions. Students who criticized the Luther invitation were derided as 'ill-mannered children' by the director of Columbia’s Institute of Arts and Sciences."

An outspoken student leader who dared question the presence of the Nazi ambassador on campus was promptly dispatched by the jack boot of politically motivated expulsion from the University.

Medoff relates the following narrative complete with the familiar memes we hear today from Univeristy liberals;

"Academic relationships have no political implications," President Butler claimed. Many Columbia students and faculty members disagreed. More than one thousand of them, including Nobel Laureate Harold Urey and world-renowned anthropologist Franz Boas, signed a petition opposing the decision to participate in Heidelberg. The student newspaper, The Spectator, also opposed it. Students held a "Mock Heidelberg Festival" on campus, complete with a bonfire and mock book burning. "Butler Diddles While the Books Burn," their signs proclaimed.

That was followed by a student rally in front of Butler's mansion. Butler was furious that a leader of the rally, Robert Burke, "delivered a speech in which he referred to the President [Butler] disrespectfully." As punishment, Burke was expelled from Columbia. He was never readmitted, even though he had excellent grades and had been elected president of his class, and even though Columbia’s own attorney later acknowledged that “the evidence that Burke himself used bad language is slight.”

This is how liberal academia deals with viewpoints that deviate from their own foolish presuppositions. The air of respecting divergent points-of-view so they may be scrupulously examined quickly dissipates once the criticism is leveled at their own folly.

While eventually repudiating his enthusiasm to publically speak out against the Nazis in the late 1930's (Probably around the time Hitler was invading Poland) Butler was unable to undo the damage he had done by legitimizing Hitler's new Germany by feting its ambassador on campus years earlier.

Dr. Medoff's article appears here.

It is said those who refuse to learn the lessons of history are destined to repeat its mistakes. I wonder if they teach that at Columbia?