Until the advent of Anglo-American campus illiberalism, the collapse of academic resistance to Hitler in the 1930s appeared almost incomprehensible. It is only now, when the universities of our own time seem sometimes to be intent upon destroying their own raison d’être, that we can begin to understand how the intellectual elites of Germany, the cultural vanguard of the era, could have succumbed to the most monstrous doctrine of modern times. The story of this self-immolation is salutary for us because, though we know how the story of the German university ended, we do not know how far the betrayal of science and the humanities with which we are now confronted almost daily in our own academic institutions may yet have to go. Perhaps only the prospect of the catastrophe that a century ago befell some of the world’s greatest centers of learning—a catastrophe from which they have even now not fully recovered—will bring today’s intelligentsia to its senses.

The origins of the German universities, like others in medieval Christendom, lie in the requirement for a literate elite, initially clerical and imperial, but increasingly tailored to the administrative needs of the autonomous kingdoms and principalities that arose on the ruins of the Holy Roman Empire. Because these states were numerous, the distinctively pluralistic and localized German pattern of academic life diverged from the centralized institutions of France or England. The Reformation and the Westphalian settlement, based on the idea that each state should follow the faith of