Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] THE EXPULSION OF ROBERT BURKE 93
tion to influence American public opinion against Nazi Germany, but chose
not to do so until 1937. 7
During the spring semester of 1934, the Spectator repeatedly condemned
Butler for terminating the appointment of Jerome Klein, a talented
fine-arts instructor who had been a member of the faculty for seven years,
because he believed Klein had initiated a petition opposing the administration’s
invitation to Ambassador Luther. To protect the participants from
administration retaliation, those circulating the petition arranged the signatures
“in a large circle, so none would be first.” As a result of “a student’s
careless error,” however, Klein’s campus mailbox appeared as “the return
address for the petition.” Klein was discharged shortly afterward, and was
never again able to secure academic employment. 8
The next semester the Spectator further angered Butler, a longtime
admirer of Benito Mussolini, by denouncing Columbia’s Casa Italiana as a
leading center for the dissemination of Fascist propaganda in the United
States. The Social Problems Club picketed Butler’s mansion and his Low
Library offices, demanding that he answer this charge, and distributed fliers
on campus condemning Butler’s refusal to meet with student delegations to
discuss the issue. 9
The Spectator several times complained that the administration was
attempting to censor it. In March 1935, Spectator editor-in-chief James
Wechsler assailed Columbia authorities’ efforts to “smash the [Spectator’s]
outspoken policy and make it an administration rubber stamp.” 10 The
7. Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, 78-79, 84-85, 101.
8. George Klein to Stephen H. Norwood, November 10, 2006; Norwood, The
Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, 85-87. Jerome Klein was the Columbia fine arts
department’s only specialist in modern painting. When he was informed of his termination,
it was too late to apply for a college or university position for the next
year. A majority of the fine arts faculty opposed his termination.
9. Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, 79, 89-93; Columbia Spectator,
November 13, 1934.
10. The New York Times, March 10, 1935; James A. Wechsler, “The Education
of Bob Burke,” The Student Advocate, October-November 1936, 12. The Times,
reporting on the convention of the National Student Federation (NSF) in Washington,
D.C., in late December 1933, remarked that student government leaders in the
nation as a whole were inclined “to leave controversial questions, in college and
out, to the decision of older and presumably wiser heads” (that is, administrators
and faculty members). When Columbia Spectator editor-in-chief Arnold Beichman
introduced a resolution at the NSF convention “in favor of a free college press,
unhampered by faculty censorship,” it “was defeated by a large majority.” The
convention was also unwilling to support another resolution Beichman proposed,
asking that the session “go on record as opposing the holding of the Olympic