The Impact of the 1938 Fascist Anti-Semitic Laws on Italian Universities: The Case of Veterinary Medicine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anti-Semitic legislation led in 1938 to the dismissal of tenured university professors of “Jewish race” and their replacement. As to Veterinary Medicine, Abram Alberto Ascoli (1877-1957) in Milan and Michelangelo Ottolenghi (1904-1967) in Sassari were removed from their chairs. Ascoli, a renowned immunologist, was replaced by Luigi Leinati (1895-1992), a veterinary pathologist, preferred to an alternative candidate, Dino Desiderio Nai (1894-1973), a microbiologist. Both Leinati and Nai were Ascoli’s collaborators and also outstanding researchers. Personal relations among Ascoli, Nai and Leinati were basically good, so much so that Ascoli’s reinstatement after WWII went smoothly. Ottolenghi, tenure-track professor of Anatomy of Domestic Animals was replaced by Aldo Tagliavini (1892-1971), who occupied, however, the chair of Pathology and Clinical Veterinary Surgery. Ottolenghi expatriated to Ecuador and Canada, never to return to Italy, and shifted his interests to Public Health. Tagliavini remained in Sassari for only three academic years (1938-1941), then returned to Milan (1941-1971) on the chair of Veterinary Obstetrics and Veterinary Surgery. His scientific personality moved across different veterinary areas, without ever truly excelling. As to the effects of the substitutions on the development of Veterinary Medicine, the two cases are different: Ascoli was replaced by a valid substitute, whereas the removal of Ottolenghi took priority both over the needs of the faculty and over his intrinsic scientific value. Overall, the anti-Semitic legislation, a dark page of the Italian history, represents an example of the damages that political choices may inflict on the quality of teaching and scientific research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".