What Autocrats Want From Academics: Servility

Since Trump’s inauguration, the university community has received a good deal of “messaging” from academic leadership. We’ve received emails from our deans and university presidents; we’ve sat in department meetings regarding the “developing situation”; and we’ve seen the occasional official statement or op-ed or comment in the local newspaper. And the unfortunate takeaway from all this is that our leaders’ strategy rests on a disturbing and arbitrary distinction. The public-facing language of the university — mission statements, programming, administrative structures, and so on — has nothing at all to do with the autonomy of our teaching and research, which, they assure us, they hold sacrosanct. Recent concessions — say, the disappearance of the website of the Women’s Center — are concerning, they admit, but ultimately inconsequential to our overall working lives as students and scholars.

History, however, shows that public-facing statements are deeply consequential, and one episode from the 20-year march of Italian fascism strikes me as especially instructive. On October 8, 1931, a law went into effect requiring, as a condition of their employment, every Italian university professor to sign an oath pledging their loyalty to the government of Benito Mussolini. Out of over 1,200 professors in the country, only 12 refused.

Today, those who refused are known simply as “I Dodici”: the Twelve. They were a scholar of Middle Eastern languages, an organic chemist, a doctor of forensic medicine, three lawyers, a mathematician, a theologian, a surgeon, a historian of ancient Rome, a philosopher of Kantian ethics, and one art historian. Two, Francesco Ruffini and Edoardo Ruffini Avondo, were father and son. Four were Jewish. All of them were immediately fired.

In the years that followed, the Twelve paid for this act of conscience. Gaetano de Sanctis, the classicist, went blind during his years in the wilderness, and would never finish the book that was his life’s work. Others, like the linguist Giorgio Levi Della Vida and the art historian Lionello Venturi, were forced into exile. Mario Carrara, a doctor of forensic medicine in Turin, was jailed. Carrara, along with the chemist Giorgio Errera, wouldn’t live to see the end of the regime.

The price for the country was, however, steeper than any of these individual tragedies. As Giorgio Boatti recounts in his book on the loyalty oath, Preferirei di No, the signing of the oath by the vast majority of professors represented the surrender of Italian intellectual life to the regime. It signaled to the rest of the country that there would be no resistance in the world of Italian ideas. What followed — the 1938 racial laws, the deportation of thousands of Italian Jews to their deaths in the camps, a bloody war, the German occupation — would forever be on the moral accounts of every professor who capitulated.

The oath has been on my mind because it did not directly dictate anything about the research programs of any of its signatories, nor the content of their lectures. The professors vowed only loyalty to the king and the fascist regime, to perform their academic duties in the interest of producing loyal citizens, and not to belong to any opposition organizations. By demonstrating their assent in this way, however, the professors themselves created a political environment in which freedom of thought, of speech, and of conscience, was relinquished.

With every suggestion that we might continue to teach the art of Kara Walker and Faith Ringgold without publicly speaking about racial justice, that we should continue to think and write about Claude Cahun or Caravaggio without defending our queer and trans students, I am reminded of the absolute failure of such bargaining in the face of past authoritarianism. If our work as historians can teach us anything, it must be this.

We are not yet in a moment like 1931. And in fact, the words ringing in my ears these past weeks have been those of a warning penned by the socialist historian Gaetano Salvemini in 1925. From France, where he fled under threat of a lengthy jail sentence for his political activities, Salvemini penned an extraordinary letter of resignation to his former colleagues at the University of Florence. Admitting that, prior to his arrest, there was no direct pressure on what he said in his classroom, he cautioned his colleagues that such a test was dangerously shortsighted:

Our teaching and research only matter under general conditions of freedom and dignity. These conditions do not exist under the threat of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, deportation, or suspension of medical care. As academics, we do our work because we hope it will matter in the world, from our colleagues developing new vaccines, to those investigating histories of American colonial power. To pretend otherwise is, as Salvemini wrote, to reduce our intellectual work to either “the servile adulation of the dominant party, or mere erudite exercises.”

It may seem prudent now to keep our heads down and hope this storm passes. History tells us this is unlikely. Free inquiry and the public exchange of our findings pose a real threat to authoritarian government. If we continue to preemptively change our language, pretend that the deep inequities of class and race and global power that shape our world are not relevant to the governance of our institution, or demonstrate to both Trump’s agents and the public that we will fold under the slightest pressure, we will find ourselves, perhaps not so long from now, without any dignity left to protect.