Scholarship
During his tenure at the United States Military Academy, Beukema became the foremost expert of geopolitik at the United States Army. He taught the first college course in the United States on the subject, and was recognized nationally as a leading geopolitician. Beukema concentrated his efforts in the geographic regions of Europe and the Far-East, and devoted most of his attention to Germany. Beukema wrote a series of essay’s critiquing Karl Haushofer, a German professor at the University of Munich. Haushofer was a pioneer in geopolitik thinking, and his teachings were a foundation for Adolf Hitler’s framework for Nazi ideology. Beukema writings reveal geopolitik as an instrument of state power and the Nazi’s use of geopolitik as a pretext for expansion and world domination. Beukema's teachings ensured that Academy graduates had a solid knowledge of economics, geography, and politics, and their relationship to national power. Because of his focus on Nazi Germany, Beukema earned a reputation as a leading "saber rattler" several years before the onset of World War II. Each year, the Academy presents the Herman Beukema Memorial Award to its top political science graduate.
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Famous quotes containing the word scholarship:
“Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo- scholarship which actually destroys its object.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)