Jérôme Carcopino, a republican scholar and renowned historian, enforced and sometimes tightened the French state’s exclusion laws when he was rector, and later Vichy’s Minister of Education. As he was convinced that university survival was tied to his own ministerial term in office, this representative of state anti-Semitism aimed at defending university survival against the occupier. In order to do so, he resorted to extensive cleaning up on behalf of state collaboration and an elitist status which played along with the Aryan policy.