Universities Under Dictatorship

by John Connelly (Editor)

Dictatorships destroy intellectual freedom, yet universities need it. How, then, can universities function under dictatorships? Are they more a support or a danger for the system? In this volume, leading experts from five countries explore the many dimensions of accommodation and conflict, control and independence, as well as subservience and resistance that characterized the relationship of universities to dictatorial regimes in communist and fascist states during the twentieth century: Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Francoist Spain, Maoist China, the Soviet Union, and the Soviet bloc countries of Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland.

Comparisons across these cases reveal that the higher-education policies of modern dictatorships were characterized by a basic conflict of aims. On the one hand, universities were supposed to propagate reigning ideology and serve as training grounds for a dependable elite. Consequently, university autonomy was restricted, research used for political legitimation, personnel policies subjected to political calculus, and many undesired scholars simply put out on the street. On the other hand, modern dictatorships needed well-educated scientists, physicians, teachers, and engineers for the implementation of their political, economic, and military agendas.

Communist and fascist leaders thus confronted the basic question of whether universities should be seen primarily as producers of ideology and functionaries loyal to the party line or as places where indispensable knowledge was made available. Dictatorships that opted to subject universities to rigorous political control reduced their scholarly productivity. But if the institutes of higher learning were left with too much autonomy, there was a danger that they would go astray politically.

Besides the editors, the contributors are Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Michael David-Fox, Jan Havranek, Ralph Jessen, Gyorgy Peteri, Miguel Angel Ruiz Carnicer, and Douglas Stiffler.

Hardcover

First published October 12, 2005

About the author

John Connelly is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History and director of the Institute for East European, Eurasian, and Slavic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education and From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews. He lives in Kensington, California.

Reviews

[Guppy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was dense and dry. Each essay has a different author, and there were significant differences in style and substance for each of them. Overall, I found this to be an incredibly helpful survey of universities under dictatorship. Many of the same strategies are being deployed by authoritarian regimes, even today. The conclusions also highlight how universities can act both as a force for overthrowing a regime or instantiating and perpetuating it.

I will likely return to my notes from this one pretty frequently. I don't think I'll recommend it broadly, but I will be recommending it to some more politically oriented academic folks in my circle. Overall, glad I read it, but it's hard to recommend to others since it's fairly academic.