Excerpt:
Let's face it. There is nothing hallowed per se about the university. Like any human institution, it can profane its founding principles and grow corrupt and oppressive. As many have pointed out, the prestigious German universities of the 1930s, for example, were sloughs of degraded scholarship and outright propaganda mills, softening up their students' minds for the preposterous theories of National Socialism. Even a presumably master philosopher and teacher like Martin Heidegger, appointed rector of the University of Freiburg, used his considerable intellectual powers and prestige to further the Nazi supremacist dogma. For Heidegger, the function of the university was to provide what he called, in his rector's address, "service to knowledge" as an obligation to the National Socialist state.