Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] THE EXPULSION OF ROBERT BURKE 113
in union campaigns among undocumented immigrant garment workers. He
died there in 1988. 74
The Columbia administration has never apologized for expelling
Burke, preferring to bury the matter. It continues to reject appeals to posthumously
grant Burke his Columbia College diploma or an honorary
degree. The Columbia Spectator, to its credit, in 2006 published my article
“Burke’s Expulsion: Columbia’s Shame,” in which I urged Columbia’s
administration to award Burke his degree. 75
Robert Burke was a righteous gentile of the 1930s, so horrified by
Nazi barbarism that he was willing to sacrifice his hard-earned college education
to challenge it directly. He displayed all the qualities of the “unsung
heroes” that Martin Gilbert identified in his book The Righteous: “dislike of
Nazism and its racial doctrines; a refusal to succumb to them, a refusal to be
bullied, even by superior force; an unwillingness to allow evil to triumph.”
Robert Burke believed that his most important priority was to awaken students
and the public to the menace an increasingly powerful Nazi Germany
posed to democracy and civil liberties, to the Jews, and to all humanity. He
never looked back after the campaign to reinstate him as a Columbia student
failed. Burke’s son Stephen recalled him saying: “I made my stand and
then I moved on.” When Burke’s son John graduated from Columbia in
1966, he honored his father by presenting his diploma to him. 76
*Stephen H. Norwood is professor of history and Judaic studies at the University of
Oklahoma. Norwood’s most recent book, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower:
Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (2009), was a finalist for the
National Jewish Book Award for Holocaust Studies.
74. Terry Burke to Norwood, August 7, 2010; Stephen Burke, telephone interview
by Norwood, September 26, 2009.
75. Columbia Spectator, December 11, 2006. I have continued to press Columbia
to admit that it wronged Burke—in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, in a
plenary address to the Fortieth Anniversary Conference on the Holocaust and the
Churches in Philadelphia in 2010, in Inside Higher Ed, the Chronicle Review, and
the Jewish Press. Jerusalem Post, April 3, 2008; Elizabeth Redden, “In Search of
Skeletons,” Inside Higher Ed, November 27, 2006; Stephen H. Norwood, “Columbia
University and Free Speech,” Chronicle Review, April 2, 2010, B18; Jewish
Press, December 8, 2006. A slightly expanded version of my plenary address was
published as Stephen H. Norwood, “In Denial: American Universities’ Response to
the Third Reich, Past and Present,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 4 (Fall 2011):
501-509. The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies has endorsed my
appeal to grant Burke his degree.
76. Martin Gilbert, The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (New
York: Henry Holt, 2003), 437; Terry Burke, telephone interview by Norwood; Stephen
Burke, telephone interview by Norwood.