Scientific institutions have a long history of anticipatory obedience

Time for a little history lesson. Within months of the election of Adolf Hitler in 1933, Jewish staff of the German Chemical Society, including some high-profile members, were asked to resign in an act of what historian Ute Deichmann has called anticipatory obedience. All ‘non-Aryan’ members were expelled over the next few years. ‘It is one of the most notable phenomena in academia in 1933 that the severest measures of National Socialist policies against science were carried out under a high degree of silence and with the frequent consensus of scientists,’ Deichmann has written.