Requiem for the University

A brilliant professor’s famed “Hitler lecture” would not fly today.

The classroom was so packed that there was barely standing room. It was so popular that students not enrolled in the course and even enrolled in other schools came to hear it: the final lecture in the basic course on European history, at the University of Illinois, Chicago, some 60 years ago, known as the Hitler lecture. The lecturer was Robert L. Nicholson, not everyone’s favorite professor, but surely the most memorable. A European historian of some distinction, Nicholson had published several well-received books on medieval history. But his passion was contemporary politics. He was a vociferous anti-isolationist, believing that a destructive strain of American isolationism had almost resulted in the Nazis winning the war. His intellectual mission was to see that America never fell into that trap again, and that his students understood the evils of totalitarianism, of both the left and the right. He would invite speakers from communist consulates in Chicago to lecture to the class and then eviscerate them with probing intellectual incisions, exposing their hypocrisy and duplicity. He never proselytized or expected his students to reflect his politics, although he hoped they would. Rather than incorporate his politics into his teaching, he would write long political statements on the blackboard and not comment on them. “Bricks for Bricker,” he wrote one day in jubilation as Ohio Sen. John Bricker, author of the ill-fated isolationist Bricker Amendment, went down to defeat. He was the sort of adviser who told you directly and without qualification what the world was like. When a Jewish student told him that he wanted to become a history professor, Nicholson affirmed the decision and then explained the blunt realities of the job market for a member of the Jewish faith. Today, that would be considered a micro-aggression, discouraging someone from choosing a career, and result in some spoiled student running to the office of diversity and inclusion with a complaint. In...