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WASHINGTON
SCENE:
TIME
TO START BEING MUCH MORE AFRAID
CORRUPTING AND CO-OPTING ACADEMIA
Another not so little plot from the neo-cons and
the
Israeli-Jewish lobby
"I want Noam Chomsky to be taught at
universities about
as
much as I want
Hitler's writing or Stalin's writing.
These are
wild and extremist ideas
that I believe
have no place in a university."
Daniel
Pipes
"Anybody who
knows anything about anything is suspect.
Unless you
have the right views you are not
allowed to speak, and if you do,
you do so at your peril."
Rashid Khalidi
Neo-Cons Enlist Congress in the Assault on
Middle East Studies
Neoconservative
critics have long charged
Middle Eastern
studies departments with
anti-American bias. Now they've enlisted
Congress in their
crusade.
Salon.com,
by Michelle Goldberg*, Nov. 6, 2003 | On Oct. 21,
the House of Representatives unanimously passed a
bill that could require university international studies departments to
show more support for American foreign policy or risk
their federal funding. Its approval followed hearings
this summer
in which members of Congress listened to testimony about the
pernicious influence of the late Edward Said in Middle Eastern studies
departments, described
as enclaves of debased anti-Americanism. Stanley Kurtz, a
research
fellow at the Hoover
Institution, a right-wing think tank, testified,
"Title VI-funded programs in Middle Eastern Studies (and other area
studies) tend to purvey extreme and one-sided criticisms of American
foreign policy." Evidently, the House agreed and decided to
intervene.
Emboldened by its dominance of Washington, the right is trying to
enlist government on its side in the campus culture wars. "Since they
are the
mainstream in Washington think tanks and the right-wing corridors of
Congress, they figure, 'Let's translate that political capital to
education,' says Rashid Khalidi, who was recently appointed to
the
Edward Said Chair of Arab studies at Columbia University.
It's not surprising that they started with Middle Eastern studies. There's a
particular enmity between hard-line supporters of Israel -- who, with
the extraordinary ascension of neoconservatives in the Bush
administration, now dominate the American right -- and
academics who specialize in studying the Arab and Muslim
world. That
enmity burst into open conflict after Sept. 11, when conservatives saw
an opportunity to accuse Middle East academics not just of biased
scholarship but of representing a kind of intellectual fifth column. Soon after
the World Trade Center fell, the American
Council of Trustees and Alumni, a
Washington-based group co-founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of the
vice president, and Sen. Joe
Lieberman, D-Conn., published a
report called "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing
America and What Can Be Done About It," which listed
examples of insufficiently patriotic behavior of the part of the
professoriate and called universities the "weak link" in the war on
terror.
At the same time, Martin Kramer, editor of the right-wing Middle East
Quarterly, published a
book called "Ivory Towers
on Sand: The Failure of
Middle Eastern Studies in America," in which
he argues that academia, in
thrall to romantic third-worldism, has turned
a blind eye to the region's
dangerous pathologies.
Last year
Daniel Pipes, a colleague of Kramer's who has since been appointed by
President Bush to sit on the U.S. Institute of Peace, launched
Campus Watch, a Web site devoted to monitoring Middle Eastern studies
departments for signs of anti-American bias. He
publisheddossiers cataloguing the political sins of some of the most
respected professors in the field, and invited students to submit
reports on their instructors.
Until recently, though, this fight has been rhetorical, confined to Web
sites, books, magazines and lectures. Now, with HR
3077, the
International Studies in Higher Education Act, the House
has taken sides. If it becomes law, it will create a board to monitor
how federally funded international-studies centers impact national
security. The board will evaluate whether supporters of
American
foreign policy are adequately represented in university
programs.
Conservatives, says Kramer, "need to be able to compete on a level
playing field with others."
Inherent in the act is the assumption that if most established experts
believe American Middle East policy is bad, the flaw lies with the
experts,
not the policy. "There's the threat that centers will be punished
for
not toeing the official line out of Washington, which is an
unprecedented
degree of federal intrusion into a university-based area studies
program," says Zachary Lockman, a New York University history professor
and director of the school's Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern
Studies.
The International Studies in Higher Education Act would not grant the
government the power to exclude voices from Middle Eastern studies
departments, but it nwould give the government a role in defining which
views need to be included in the academic maistream. The seven-member
board it creates would make recommendations to Congress about how
the centers "might better reflect the national needs related to the
homeland security," and make sure that programs "reflect diverse
perspectives and represent the full range of views on world regions,
foreign languages, and international affairs." Two members of the board
would represent national
security agencies, while
others would be appointed by Congress and the administration.
The bill also mandates that centers allow government recruiters full
access to students in the centers. In the past, professors have
resisted
cooperating with national security agencies, fearing that if the line
between independent research and government intelligence was blurred,
they
and their students might be targeted as American agents while studying
abroad.
And because the bill mandates that centers train students for
government service, Kramer hopes students who plan to pursue fields
useful to nationaldefense will be given special consideration when
fellowships are awarded. Right now, he
says, "If you're interested in gender in eighth century Cairo, you're
just as likely to receive a grant as if you're interested in the
discourse of Osama bin Laden. Studying gender in eighth century Cairo
is perfectly valid, but I'm not sure it's a taxpayer priority."
Of course, right now all this is speculative -- the bill remains just a
bill. "This is a bill that's passed the House," says Terry Hartle,
senior vice president of the American Council on Education, the
country's foremost higher education lobby. "There are several other
steps in the process. Obviously a lot of people remain very concerned
about the bill. People will continue to try and perfect it."
The American Council on Education decided to support the bill, which
also reauthorizes funding for area studies, after language was added to
prohibit the board from reviewing syllabi or interfering with
curricula. After all, says Hartle, there's nothing inherently
objectionable about having a panel oversee federal grant-making
programs. "Stanley Kurtz
is someone who is looking for a conspiracy behind every tree, but that
doesn't mean a properly constructed advisory committee has to be a
threat," he says.
But many
Middle Eastern studies professors fear that the committee will consist
of the very neoconservatives who pushed for its creation. After all,
the Bush administration routinely raids right-wing, pro-Ariel Sharon
think tanks to fill foreign policy positions. (In the latest example,
David Wurmser, a key neoconservative scholar known for his close ties
to the Israeli right, was appointed six weeks ago as a Middle East
advisor to Dick Cheney's national security team headed by Lewis
"Scooter" Libby.)
Juan Cole, a
professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of
Michigan, worries that the International Studies Act would give
the field's most vituperative critics a perch from which to judge
their doctrinal opponents.
"One of the
subtexts is they don't like criticism of Ariel Sharon and want to shut
it down," says Cole, who formerly
directed the school's Center for Middle Eastern and North African
Studies, which could have its funding threatened under the act. "I could
imagine the board making it a criterion that the politics of a faculty
are not balanced, so the university must balance things out by hiring
pro-Likud scholars, or else funding could be withdrawn."
The funding that's at stake supports area study centers --
interdisciplinary programs devoted to researching specific regions. It
was appropriated under Title VI of the 1958 National Defense Education
Act. Although the International Studies Act would affect centers
concentrating on all parts of the globe, almost all of the debate about
it, both inside and outside of Congress, has been about Middle Eastern
studies.
There are 17 Middle Eastern studies centers in America, many of them at
the nation's best schools, including Harvard, Columbia, New York
University and the University of Chicago. They receive Title VI grants
to fund graduate student fellowships and to do community outreach and
education -- activities like training high school teachers about Middle
Eastern issues and providing insight on the region to the media. No
Title VI money is used for professor salaries.
The centers form the core of American higher education about the rest
of the world. According to Kramer, "70 percent of Ph.D.'s in
international studies did their work at these national resource
centers, and government money has been vital to the production of
Ph.D.'s in this field."
But government money is being misspent, conservative critics say,
because, having imbibed Said's sinister post-colonial ideology, Middle
Eastern studies departments have become apologists for the Arab world
and have neglected the study of inconvenient subjects like the rise of
fundamentalist Islam and terrorism. "Take a look at the program of the
Middle Eastern Studies Association's annual conference," says Kramer.
"There are hundreds of papers there, and none of them are on terrorism.
That's because from an ideological point of view, a lot of academics
look at the study of terrorism as an overemphasis of an aspect of
reality that they would just as soon go away."
Many Middle East studies scholars, says Kramer, entered the field
because "they were enamored of the subject, but that subject has an
underside. A lot of academics who entered the field in certain
generations did so with a third-worldist perspective. They're
sympathetic to revolution and believed the Middle East was on the brink
of it. They became enthusiasts of various resistance movements,
nationalist movements, even at one point Islamist movements."
Other neocons decry the fact that the field has been overtaken by
non-Westerners. David Horowitz, a
right-wing pundit who has spent much of his career documenting and
fighting what he claims is rampant leftist bias in academia, says that
in 1979, 3 percent of Middle Eastern scholars were non-Western. "As a
result of leftist control of hiring, now 50 percent come from Middle
Eastern countries," he says. One might not think it was surprising that
a significant percentage of scholars working in a field with a specific
regional, cultural and religious emphasis would be from that region,
but Horowitz apparently regards many Middle Eastern scholars as mere
mouthpieces for their countries' terrorist ideologies. "These are
fascist countries!" says Horowitz. "They're Islamofascist countries,
and they support terror."
To restore balance to this degraded field, conservatives propose a kind
of ideological affirmative action. They want to see a revolution in the
ethos of contemporary universities, in which scholars will devote
themselves to pulling their weight in the war on terror. That means
schools must be compelled to seek out faculty devoted to furthering
American interests. If this sounds oddly like a flag-waving version of
the extreme academic left's strident calls for "engagement," that
doesn't trouble the conservatives.
As Kramer wrote in "Ivory Towers on Sand," "Middle Eastern studies must
regain their relevance, or risk becoming 'Exhibit A' in any future case
against public support for area studies. They can best achieve this by
rediscovering and articulating that which is uniquely American in the
American approach to the Middle East. The idea that the United States
plays an essentially beneficent role in the world is at the very core
of this approach."
To those who object, Kramer writes on his blog, Sandstorm, "Get off the
federal dole. Float undisturbed in your post-orientalist bubble while
more practical people use the resources to build credible
alternatives."
But Cole says the neocon vision of Middle Eastern studies as
post-orientalist bubble is a deranged fantasy. (The expression
"orientalist" refers to Edward Said's seminal work, "Orientalism,"
which argued that racist blinders led the West to see people of color
as "exotic" Others.) "These arguments that Kurtz, Kramer and others
make are only plausible if you don't actually refer to reality," he
says. As an example, he reels off the backgrounds of political
scientists at centers receiving Title VI grants. "The political
scientist at the UCLA Middle Eastern center is Leonard Binder, one of
the greats of the field, who fought on Israel's side in the 1948 war.
At the University of Seattle, the political scientists of the Middle
East are Ellis Goldberg, who does rational choice and political
economy, and Joel Migdal," a Harvard Ph.D. whose latest book is
"Through the Lens of Israel: Explorations in State and Society."
"At the University of Michigan," Cole continues, "our political
scientist is Mark Tessler, who does survey and opinion research. He has
a Ph.D. from
Hebrew University. There's Gary Sick at Columbia, who served on Jimmy
Carter's National Security Council. We could go on."
The real radicals, many professors say, are Kurtz and company -- and
they're lightweight radicals at that. Kurtz, Pipes and Kramer all have
Ph.D.'s, but have not established themselves in American academia,
finding a home in the world of partisan think tanks instead. Khalidi
believes they're trying to punish the academic mainstream for rejecting
them.
"It's amusing that people who are by and large failed academics, people
who just didn't make it through the standard approach, should argue
that it's because of radical bias," says Khalidi. "Theirs are the
sourest of sour grapes."
If they wanted to, Khalidi argues, conservatives could do what others
do who want more attention paid to a neglected field. "They could raise
money for a chair in terrorist studies," he says. "The problem is they
want respectability. They want to displace virtually everybody who
teaches the Middle East in this country from the center and say the
center is between us and them. They want the academic respectability
that comes with having federal funding. They want to move from the
extreme fringe."
In the end, the debate about what constitutes the mainstream, about the
role of ideology in evaluating scholarship, can go on ad infinitum,
with evidence on both sides. For all their hysterical nationalism,
Kramer and his cohorts obviously aren't wrong that Middle East
departments, and the humanities in general, tend to be liberal, or that
shrill radicalism abounds on college campuses. Horowitz is just one of
a group of conservatives who have made their names documenting leftist
excess at American universities, and they rarely have to look far for
egregious examples. In one infamous case last year, a U.C. Berkeley
course on "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" warned,
"Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." The
graduate student instructor was forced to remove the notice after a
national outcry.
"Clearly, Martin Kramer and his colleagues see themselves as an
embattled minority who have been unfairly excluded from academia by
what they see as
the liberals and leftists who run Middle Eastern studies in the United
States, so they want the federal government to come in and somehow make
sure people like them get hired or their views get more attention,"
says Lockman.
Yet the question, finally, isn't whether conservatives really are an
embattled minority in the university. It's whether the federal
government should supersede experts in deciding which scholarly views
deserve to be promoted, and which can be overlooked.
Ironically, given the epic scope of the debate, the actual amount of
federal funding at stake is quite small by the standards of large
universities. Most centers only receive a few hundred thousand dollars
annually from the government. But experts say the programs are often
dependent on it. Khalidi presided over five such programs when he was
director of the Center for International Studies at the University of
Chicago prior to moving to Columbia. Title VI grants, he says, are
"peanuts in university and federal terms, but in terms of these fields,
they're really important." Around 30 percent of his graduate students
learned foreign languages on area study grants, he says.
Because federal funding is so crucial to these centers' survival,
Khalidi says, the threat that HR 3077 poses to Middle Eastern studies
in America is
"deadly serious." The bill, he says, would do one of two things. Either
it would "impose the teaching of one twisted version of Middle East
reality, what I call terrorology, impose it at the taxpayers' expense
as one central element in the way the subject is taught. Or, by
subjecting self-respecting universities to conditions they will
not under any circumstances accept, it would curtail the teaching of
the Middle East."
Cole says scholars will have a hard time convincing their bosses to
give up funding. "It may be that some centers would forgo it if the
interference looks like it's too heavy-handed," he says. "But it's
really hard to go to a dean and ask to throw away $200,000 a year if
the criteria that has to be met could be met in some way that isn't
completely odious to the university. There would be pressure to meet
it."
Michigan Republican Pete Hoekstra, chairman
of the House Subcommittee on Select Education and author of the bill,
insists that's not what lawmakers intend. The advisory committee, he
says, will be there "to help schools to learn from each other, to
gather information and help schools learn what other schools are doing
so they can really improve their own
international programs."
Hoekstra agrees with
some of Kurtz's criticism of Middle Eastern studies, but says that has
nothing to do with his legislation. "I do think that there may be some
validity in some of his comments," he says. "I don't believe these
studies should be used to promote an ideological point of view. I'm
about getting students educated in international affairs, not having
students get into a classroom and have them be indoctrinated into a
political philosophy. But did we put anything into the bill that puts
in some kind of screening process? For those who believe it's there,
ask them to point out where it is."
Other congressmen, though, have been less cagey about the bill's likely
effect. Welcoming its passage, Rep. Harold
Berman, D-Calif.,
said, "I am
encouraged that the creation of this Advisory Board will help redress a
problem which is a great concern of mine, namely, the lack of balance,
and indeed the anti-American bias that pervades Title VI-funded Middle
East studies programs in particular ... surely it is troubling when
evidence suggests that many of the Middle East regional studies
grantees are committed to a narrow point of view at odds with our
national interest, a point of view that questions the validity of
advancing American ideals of democracy and the rule of law
around the world, and in the
Middle East in particular."
The
International Studies in Higher Education Act is a singular victory
for Martin Kramer, who
proposed similar legislation in "Ivory Towers on Sand." An American-born
Israeli citizen with a Ph.D. in Near Eastern studies from Princeton, he served
as the director of
the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel
Aviv University.
Returning
to the States, he joined the
same network of conservative think tanks that nurtured defense
intellectuals like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. The journal
he edits, Middle East Quarterly, is published
by the Middle East Forum, whose director is Daniel Pipes, the man
behind Campus Watch. His book was published by the Washington
Institute
for Near East Policy, a staunchly pro-Israel think tank whose board of
advisors includes Perle and former CIA Director James
Woolsey.
Wolfowitz resigned from the board when he joined the
administration.
Kramer's entire book can be read as an argument for legislation like
the International Studies Act. Most of "Ivory Towers on
Sand" is a
discussion of what Kramer sees as the ideological corruption within
Middle Eastern studies, but he also details the minutia of government
funding, outlining Title VI's history in order to examine how it can be
reformed.
As Kramer reports, Title VI was, from its inception in 1958,
"administered as a no-strings-attached benefit." Back then,
though, the
leaders of the field were people "of a patriotic disposition, who could
be counted upon to help out," Kramer writes. This, he makes
clear, is
no longer the case. Thus the time has come to attach strings.
"It is important for Congress to take a deeper interest in Title VI,
and Middle Eastern studies are as good a place as any to begin asking
questions," he wrote in "Ivory Towers on Sand." "A relevant
congressional subcommittee might hold a hearing on the contribution of
Middle Eastern studies to American public policy."
In June, the
Congressional Subcommittee on Select Education did just
that, convening hearings on "International Programs in Higher Education
and Questions of Bias." At the end of his opening statement, Rep. Phil
Gingrey, R-Ga., said, "I am interested in opening the discussion and
debate to learn more about the merits of and concern for federal
support given to some of the international education programs that have
been questioned in regard to their teachings, which have been
associated with efforts to potentially undermine American foreign
policy."
Kurtz, testifying before the subcommittee, nodded to Kramer, calling
his book "the most comprehensive and authoritative account of the
extremist bias against American foreign policy that pervades
contemporary Middle East studies." Much of the blame for this bias, he
said, is a result of the malign influence of Edward
Said and post-colonial theory, which he called the "ruling
intellectual paradigm in academic area studies."
He proceeded to list some of Said's more inflammatory statements,
including his 1999 call for Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Wesley
Clark to be tried for war crimes along with Slobodan Milosevic. Said,
Kurtz continued, "has even treated the very idea of American democracy
as a farce. He has belittled the reverence in which Americans hold the
Constitution, which Said dismisses with the comment that it was written
by 'wealthy, white, slaveholding Anglophilic men.'"
There might have been an eerie déjà vu in seeing a
congressional committee examine the work of a renowned scholar for
treasonous intent, but Kurtz told the panel he was not proposing to
blacklist Said. "My concern is that Title VI-funded centers too seldom
balance readings from Edward Said and his like-minded colleagues with
readings from authors who support American foreign policy," he said.
This was more generous than Kurtz's comrades have been toward their
enemies' work. Last year,
Pipes told Salon, "I want Noam Chomsky to be taught at universities
about as much as I want Hitler's writing or Stalin's writing. These are
wild and extremist ideas that I believe have no place in a university."
At the end of his testimony, Kurtz made several policy recommendations,
including the creation of a board to manage Title VI. Asked about the
role of the board in an e-mail interview, Kurtz wrote, "The board
should look to encourage intellectual diversity, and it should also
encourage programs that successfully bring students into positions of
responsibility in the areas of international affairs, international
business, foreign language expertise, and national security."
According to Kurtz, the legislation is in the spirit of the best
liberal tradition. "I hope that HR 3077 will encourage vigorous debate
within the academy on the state of the world generally, and on American
foreign policy in particular," he writes. "I'd like to see the sort of
debate that now goes on between the academy and its outside critics
take place within the academy itself. That doesn't mean excluding
critics of American foreign policy from the academy. It means bringing
supporters back in."
For
professors of Middle Eastern studies, though, it's outrageous, and
dangerous, that the government is meddling with academic freedom.
And it's especially galling that those who are
calling for government intervention are the very neocons whose
fear-mongering claims about Iraq have been shown to be false. "The thing
that burns me, these are the
guys who told us that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons program and
would have a nuke within three years," says Cole. "And they're coming
back and telling us that our scholarship is shoddy and we need to be
overseen by them?"
To Khalidi, the neoconservative attack on Middle Eastern studies
recalls the assault launched earlier this year on American intelligence
agencies that failed to confirm right-wing assumptions about Iraq. Once
again, conservatives are questioning the competency of those who don't
agree with them about the Middle East, insisting their views would
triumph if only they weren't suppressed by a mandarin establishment in
need of immediate reform. And just as Pentagon hawks set up their own
intelligence office when the CIA didn't tell them what they wanted to
hear about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, now the neocons are
trying to do the same thing in academia.
"Neoconservatives want to substitute zealotry and true belief for real
expertise," Khalidi says. "They're not just after us in the Middle East
field. They're not just after academics. You see this inside the
military, inside the intelligence community. You see this in the way
the State Department has been treated. Anybody who
knows anything about anything is suspect. Unless you
have the right views you are not allowed to speak, and if you do,
you do so at your peril."
* Michelle Goldberg is a
staff writer for Salon
based in New York
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