By John Connelly, Michael Grüttner
Dictatorships ruin highbrow freedom, but universities want it. How, then, can universities functionality lower than dictatorships? Are they extra a help or a possibility for the method? during this quantity, best specialists from 5 international locations discover the numerous dimensions of lodging and clash, regulate and independence, in addition to subservience and resistance that characterised the connection of universities to dictatorial regimes in communist and fascist states through the 20th century: Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Francoist Spain, Maoist China, the Soviet Union, and the Soviet bloc international locations of Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland.
Comparisons throughout those instances show that the higher-education guidelines of recent dictatorships have been characterised by way of a simple clash of goals. at the one hand, universities have been speculated to propagate reigning ideology and function education grounds for a liable elite. as a result, college autonomy used to be limited, examine used for political legitimation, body of workers guidelines subjected to political calculus, and plenty of undesired students easily positioned out in the street. nonetheless, sleek dictatorships wanted well-educated scientists, physicians, lecturers, and engineers for the implementation in their political, financial, and armed forces agendas.
Communist and fascist leaders hence faced the fundamental query of no matter if universities will be obvious essentially as manufacturers of ideology and functionaries unswerving to the get together line or as locations the place quintessential wisdom was once made on hand. Dictatorships that opted to topic universities to rigorous political keep an eye on lowered their scholarly productiveness. but when the institutes of upper studying have been left with an excessive amount of autonomy, there has been a chance that they'd move off target politically.
Besides the editors, the participants are Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Michael David-Fox, Jan Havránek, Ralph Jessen, György Péteri, Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer, and Douglas Stiffler.