Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] THE EXPULSION OF ROBERT BURKE 101
Goebbels, scheduled to deliver “the chief address”; SS chief Heinrich Himmler;
racial ideologist Alfred Rosenberg; education minister Rust, who
wielded dictatorial control over Germany’s universities; and economics
minister Hjalmar Schacht. At the festival, Rust gave a speech in which he
denounced Jews as “an alien race” that did not belong in German universities.
The Times noted the conspicuous absence of the Union Jack among the
foreign flags displayed because the British universities had declined to send
delegates, and editorialized: “In England academic freedom lives. In Germany
a wreath should be laid on its grave.” 35
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) considered Columbia’s
expulsion of Burke an egregious violation of free speech. Arthur Garfield
Hays, the ACLU’s world-renowned general counsel, agreed on July 30 to
represent Burke in a lawsuit against Columbia for reinstatement. 36 An
ardent anti-Nazi like Burke, Hays had in March 1933 urged secretary of
labor Frances Perkins to remove immigration restrictions preventing Jewish
and other anti-Nazi political refugees from entering the United States, and
had represented defendants in the Reichstag Fire trial in Berlin and Leipzig;
because Hays was a Jew, the Nazis had required him to speak in court
through German lawyers. The New York Times noted that Hays’ “reputation
as the forensic champion of civil rights in the twentieth century was second
only to Clarence Darrow,” whom he had assisted in the Scopes and Ossian
Sweet trials during the 1920s. 37 To Columbia’s attorney John Godfrey
Saxe, however, Hays was just “one of the agitators of the American Civil
Liberties League [sic].” 38
Several metropolitan daily newspapers, in and outside New York, criticized
Burke’s expulsion. The liberal New York Post, in an editorial entitled
“While Goebbels Beams at Columbia’s Representative,” published on the
last day of the Heidelberg festival, declared that the expulsion “will draw
35. London Times, June 29, 1936; The New York Times, June 28, 1936; Steven
P. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German
University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 57-58; Norwood,
The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, 67-68. The Manchester Guardian reported on
the third day of the festival that Rector Groh had sent a “telegram of greeting” to
Hitler, praising him as “the liberator of the German spirit and the protector of German
culture.” The Manchester Guardian, June 29, 1936.
36. Dismissal of Bob Burke, 12.
37. The New York Times, March 22, 1933, and obituary of Arthur Garfield
Hays, The New York Times, December 15, 1954.
38. J. G. S[axe], Memorandum for Committee on Legal Affairs, March 10,
1937. Subject: Robert Burke v. University, Central Files, Columbia University
Archives—Columbiana Library, Low Library [hereafter, CUACL], Columbia University
[hereafter, CU], New York, N.Y.