| This study examines how the academic and social conventions of collegiality gradually undermined the ability of the University of Heidelberg to preserve its tradition of intellectual diversity and to defend the principles of academic freedom and self-governance against Nazi Gleichschaltung in 1933.;Key analytical concepts for this thesis are drawn from the works of Barrington Moore and Irving Janis which suggest that when highly cohesive policy-making groups are confronted by external threat, they may subordinate the long-term interests of institutions to the desire to maintain group cohesiveness. They often censor dissenters, ignore discrepant information, neglect contingency plans, and ostracize non-conformists.;During the Weimar era, the University of Heidelberg was characterized as a "bulwark of young democracy," with important professors playing critical roles in establishing republican parties and framing the Weimar Constitution. This highly cohesive faculty viewed collegial solidarity as the necessary condition for governing the university and for nurturing the cosmopolitan intellectual diversity which distinguished Heidelberg from other German schools.;Because local reactionaries perceived the University of Heidelberg as a symbol of the Republic, the University was viciously attacked throughout the Weimar era. Between 1919 and 1933 the Heidelberg faculty evolved a pattern of response to political controversy which gradually favored the preservation of collegiality over the principled defense of academic freedom, especially after the pacifist E. J. Gumbel joined the faculty in 1924. Fearing that Gumbel's political writings would intensify attacks against the university, erode Heidelberg's reputation for tolerance, and damage collegiality, faculty leaders acceded to public demands to investigate Gumbel's fitness to teach. Although they first upheld Gumbel's academic freedom, their published report on the case, motivated by the desire to preserve collegial solidarity, condemned Gumbel's non-conformism and laid the groundwork for a series of controversies which ended in Gumbel's dismissal, fuelled the expansion of Heidelberg's Nazi Party, destroyed both the moral and legal basis for protecting the faculty from the consequences of the Nazi personnel purges in April 1933, and resulted in the University's subsequent Gleichschaltung. |
