Mussolini required loyalty oaths from all academics. Those refusing were fired. [View all]

"On October 8, 1931, a law went into effect requiring every Italian university professor to sign an oath pledging their loyalty to the government of Benito Mussolini. Out of over 1,200 professors in the country, only 12 refused. All of them were immediately fired." www.chronicle.com/article/what...

— Stephanie M. Lee (@stephaniemlee.bsky.social) 2025-03-21T22:45:07.833Z

"On October 8, 1931, a law went into effect requiring every Italian university professor to sign an oath pledging their loyalty to the government of Benito Mussolini. Out of over 1,200 professors in the country, only 12 refused. All of them were immediately fired."

original article: https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-autocrats-want-from-academics-servility
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In the years that followed, the Twelve paid for this act of conscience. Gaetano de Sanctis, the classicist, went blind during his years in the wilderness, and would never finish the book that was his life’s work. Others, like the linguist Giorgio Levi Della Vida and the art historian Lionello Venturi, were forced into exile. Mario Carrara, a doctor of forensic medicine in Turin, was jailed. Carrara, along with the chemist Giorgio Errera, wouldn’t live to see the end of the regime.

The price for the country was, however, steeper than any of these individual tragedies. As Giorgio Boatti recounts in his book on the loyalty oath, Preferirei di No, the signing of the oath by the vast majority of professors represented the surrender of Italian intellectual life to the regime. It signaled to the rest of the country that there would be no resistance in the world of Italian ideas. What followed — the 1938 racial laws, the deportation of thousands of Italian Jews to their deaths in the camps, a bloody war, the German occupation — would forever be on the moral accounts of every professor who capitulated.

The oath has been on my mind because it did not directly dictate anything about the research programs of any of its signatories, nor the content of their lectures. The professors vowed only loyalty to the king and the fascist regime, to perform their academic duties in the interest of producing loyal citizens, and not to belong to any opposition organizations. By demonstrating their assent in this way, however, the professors themselves created a political environment in which freedom of thought, of speech, and of conscience, was relinquished.