Letter from Berlin

The Not-So-Free University

While the Great Cultural Revolution has become a thing of the relatively distant past in China where it was invented, it survives vigorously in West Berlin’s Free University. Led by small radical cadres, up to now tolerated if not supported by a sympathetic Social-Democratic government and by cowardly professors, it has turned an institution of higher learning into a brainwashing plant and training school for revolutionaries. The once proudly named Free University—now, in the words of Golo Mann, a son of Thomas Mann and a leading modern historian, “Europe’s unfreest university” —has become, as Lord Annas, the Chancellor of London University put it, “an intellectual ruin.”

NM

About the Author

Norbert Muhlen

The Not-So-Free University

While the Great Cultural Revolution has become a thing of the relatively distant past in China where it was invented, it survives vigorously in West Berlin’s Free University. Led by small radical cadres, up to now tolerated if not supported by a sympathetic Social-Democratic government and by cowardly professors, it has turned an institution of higher learning into a brainwashing plant and training school for revolutionaries. The once proudly named Free University—now, in the words of Golo Mann, a son of Thomas Mann and a leading modern historian, “Europe’s unfreest university” —has become, as Lord Annas, the Chancellor of London University put it, “an intellectual ruin.”