Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

The Expulsion of Robert Burke: Suppressing
Campus Anti-Nazi Protest in the 1930s
Stephen H. Norwood*
The expulsion of Robert Burke from Columbia University in 1936 underscores
the risks students faced when they challenged their administrations’
determined efforts to forge friendly ties with the Third Reich
during the 1930s. Columbia expelled Burke for leading one of the largest
campus demonstrations ever staged against Nazism. Its termination of
Burke’s academic career sparked a wave of strikes and protests at New
York City colleges, the most sustained student free-speech fight until the
1960s. The administration’s response to Burke exposes the American
higher education elite’s willful blindness to Nazi antisemitic atrocities at
that time.
Key Words: Anti-Nazi Protest, Campus Antisemitism, Columbia University,
Nazi Germany, Nicholas Murray Butler, Robert Burke, University of
Heidelberg
Robert Burke, Columbia student and New York City Golden Gloves
boxing champion, embodied a muscular anti-Nazism that led him to protest
vociferously Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler’s complicity in
the Hitler regime’s efforts to present a favorable image to the West. This
resulted in Burke’s expulsion from Columbia in June 1936 and the termination
of his academic career. The Butler administration targeted Burke for
leading one of the largest campus demonstrations ever staged against
Nazism. The severe punishment that President Butler inflicted on Burke
underscores the risks students faced when they challenged their administrations’
efforts to forge friendly relations with Germany’s Nazified universities.
Burke’s expulsion sparked a series of strikes and demonstrations at
Columbia and other New York City colleges demanding his reinstatement
that lasted a month into the fall semester. This was the most sustained student
free-speech fight until the 1960s. The protests highlighted significant
differences in how students and administrators in New York City during the
1930s responded to the menace of Nazi Germany. Burke became the plaintiff
in one of the era’s most highly publicized academic freedom cases, in
which Arthur Garfield Hays, an eminent civil liberties attorney, filed suit to
rescind his expulsion.
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