Dean Barnett looks at the strange case of the Nazi at Fairleigh Dickinson University: Springtime for Fairleigh Dickinson.

DURING HIS BRIEF AND UNHAPPY tenure as the president of Columbia University, Dwight Eisenhower and the faculty did not always enjoy the warmest of relations. At one particularly contentious meeting, a Columbia scholar proudly informed Eisenhower that the university boasted “some of America’s most exceptional physicists, mathematicians, chemists and engineers.” The then-retired General was unimpressed. He was more concerned that the faculty consist of “exceptional Americans.” “Dammit,” he snapped, “what good are exceptional physicists … exceptional anything, unless they are [also] exceptional Americans.”

The Eisenhower formulation, that being a good American should be paramount and scholarship should come second, is hardly a popular notion in academia: consider, for instance, the case of former Fairleigh Dickinson University Professor Jacques Pluss.

Until recently, Pluss was an adjunct member of FDU’s history department where he was by all accounts a popular and well received instructor in the one class that he taught. As his former student Heather Tierney put it in an email, “He taught well and carried himself well.” Tierney’s comment reflects a consensus amongst Pluss’ students.

But some of Pluss’s activities outside the classroom were eye-raising. Pluss was—and still is—an officer for the National Socialist Movement. Pluss is a Nazi, a genuine bona-fide Hitler-adoring, Jew-hating Nazi. The National Socialist website that advertises his title as an officer of the Movement features images of Adolf Hitler and swastikas and urges visitors to “come and join the fight!” A phone call to the Movement’s office is received by an answering machine whose greeting shrieks, “Wake Up, White America!”