Columbia University’s Nazi Tradition

Columbia is back, for the first time since 1936, to expelling students for nonviolently protesting Columbian support for genocide

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War

According to Columbia Magazine, published by Columbia University’s Office of Alumni and Development, but ultimately named for a brutal imperialist mercenary, in 1933 while Nazis in Germany were burning books by Jews, Columbia’s president — and 1931 Nobel Peace Prize recipient— Nicholas Murray Butler “welcomed Hans Luther, the German ambassador to the United States, to Morningside Heights, insisting that he be accorded ‘the greatest courtesy and respect.’” Columbia’s Daily Spectator newspaper “denounced what it saw as Butler’s courtship of the German government and its universities.”

Butler — “a longtime admirer of Benito Mussolini” — mocked protests of his relations with Nazi Germany. In 1934, Butler “fired Jerome Klein . . . a promising young member of the fine arts faculty, for signing an appeal against the Luther invitation; and he expelled Robert Burke, a Columbia College student, for participating in a 1936 mock book burning and anti-Nazi picket on campus.”

Or, as a 2006 column by Stephen H. Norwood in the Columbia Spectator tells it, “Butler had Burke expelled for leading pickets protesting the Columbia administration’s insistence on sending a delegate and friendly greetings to a major propaganda festival the Nazi leadership orchestrated in 1936 in Germany, the 550th anniversary celebration of Heidelberg University. Although he was a fine student and had been elected president of his class, Burke was never readmitted. [Columbia provost Alan] Brinkley and former associate dean Michael Rosenthal . . . show little sympathy for Burke and trivialize Columbia administration actions that helped Nazi Germany enhance its standing in the West. Although the Nazis had expelled Jews from university faculties and the professions, and savagely beat Jews in the streets, Butler joined with the presidents of Harvard and Yale to plan how to deflect criticism of their decisions to send university representatives to Heidelberg. No British university would send delegates. Butler selected professor Arthur Remy as Columbia’s representative, who pronounced the reception at which Josef Goebbels presided ‘very enjoyable.’ . . . Butler’s insensitivity to Nazi outrages against Jews was influenced by his own anti-Semitism. Columbia spearheaded universities’ efforts to sharply restrict Jewish admissions. Butler strongly supported Harvard president James Conant, an early supporter of anti-Jewish quotas, when he invited Nazi academics to Harvard’s tercentenary celebration later in 1936.”

Now, in 2025, Columbia is back, for the first time since 1936, to expelling students for nonviolently protesting Columbian support for genocide — and this time not just threatened genocide but a genocide actively happening and available in reports, photographs, and videos in real time, already identified and condemned by the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and numerous human rights groups and governments.

Is Columbia bowing to U.S. fascist demands to ban speech and assembly against the genocide in Palestine because a small fraction of its funding comes (or came) from the U.S. government?

Or does Columbia have a strong loyalty to whoever is engaged in mass murder?

Or — and this seems the most likely — is Columbia fiercely committed to whatever powerful people deem proper at the moment, even if at one time it’s anti-Semitism and at another time it is a Palestinian genocide with advocacy of peace denounced as “anti-Semitism”?

It’s rather a shame to have institutions of so-called higher learning be run by people so dedicated to avoiding thought, no matter the cost to humanity.