Bernhard Huss: "Letter from members of the his…" - Mastodon 🐘

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Bernhard Huss @huss@mstdn.social

Letter from members of the history department at #ColumbiaUniversity

March 20, 2025 To President Katrina Armstrong and the Board of Trustees, As faculty members of the Department of History at Columbia University, we recognize in the recent actions of the Trump Administration a desire to assert political control over the university. Like many other American campuses, Columbia University has seen struggles over academic freedom and the right to protest in the past, including the dismissal of faculty during World War I that led to the resignation of historian Charles Beard; the 1936 expulsion of a student, Robert Burke, after his role leading anti-Nazi protests on campus; the 1968 building occupations; and the campus demonstrations over apartheid and ethnic studies in the 1980s and 1990s. The situation we encounter today is fundamentally different from these earlier campus conflicts. Authoritarian regimes always seek to gain control over independent academic institutions. That is what we see unfolding now. We call on scholars, students, administrators, and staff here at Columbia and around the world to reject such efforts to dominate colleges and universities. Such interventions jeopardize our ability to think honestly about the past, the present, and the future, and to do so with our students, who deserve every opportunity to learn and to think for themselves. Should this control be realized, here or elsewhere, it would make any real historical scholarship, teaching, and intellectual community impossible.

Mar 20, 2025, 04:08 PM··Metatext

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