Behind
the Battles Over US Middle East Studies
Zachary Lockman
January 2004
(Zachary Lockman
is professor of modern Middle East history at New York University
and a contributing editor of Middle East Report. This article
is adapted from a book on the history and politics of Orientalism
and Middle East studies, to be published by Cambridge University
Press in the fall of 2004.)
Further
Info
For
background on WINEP and its role in policymaking debates,
see Joel Beinin, "Pro-Israel
Hawks and the Second Gulf War," Middle East
Report Online, April 6, 2003.
For
more on right-leaning Middle East scholars and commentators,
see Robert Blecher, "‘Free
People Will Set the Course of History’: Intellectuals, Democracy
and American Empire," Middle East Report Online,March
2003.
Also
see Adam Sabra,
"What Is Wrong with What Went Wrong?"
Middle East Report Online, August 2003.
The
Task Force on Middle East Anthropology’s Action Alert on
HR 3077 is available online. |
An ideological
campaign to reshape the academic study of the Middle East in the
United States has begun to bear fruit on Capitol Hill. In late
2003, the House of Representatives passed legislation which would,
for the first time, mandate that university-based Middle East
studies centers "foster debate on American foreign policy
from diverse perspectives" if they receive federal funding
under Title VI of the Higher Education Act. The new legislation,
which the Senate could consider in 2004, came after conservative
allegations about abuse of Title VI funding by "extreme"
and "one-sided" critics of US foreign policy supposedly
ensconced at area studies centers across the country. In June
2003, the Select Education Subcommittee of the House Committee
on Education and the Workforce convened brief hearings on "International
Programs in Higher Education and Questions of Bias." There,
the conservative writer Stanley Kurtz repeated charges he had
leveled in the National Review: Title VI centers for the
study of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere
are infested by anti-American acolytes of the late Palestinian-American
scholar and cultural critic Edward Said.[1] The resulting bill, HR 3077, provides for the creation of a new
International Higher Education Advisory Board with the power to
"monitor, apprise and evaluate a sample of activities supported
under [Title VI] in order to provide recommendations to the Secretary
and the Congress for the improvement of programs under the title
and to ensure programs meet the purposes of the title." Four
of the board’s seven members would be appointed by Congress and
at least two of the remaining three members would represent government
agencies concerned with national security.
The fate
of this particular bill is uncertain, and the Senate’s crowded
docket may not permit its discussion before the current session
of Congress ends. But the provision in HR 3077 for an advisory
board, which could be revived in subsequent draft legislation,
raises the specter of an unprecedented degree of partisan political
intrusion into university-based area studies. Should this advisory
board come into being, Middle East studies centers seem likely
to be the prime targets of its investigations.
Kurtz’s criticisms
of area studies before Congress bore a remarkable resemblance
to a well-publicized indictment of Middle East studies, Ivory
Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America,
penned by Martin Kramer. Kramer’s slim volume, published by the
pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy just after
the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, depicts
academic Middle East studies as a cesspool of error, fuzzy thinking
and anti-Americanism. Due to stifling political correctness, the
book asserts, the output of scholars in the field is no longer
of much use to the state or to the cause of national security.
Shortly after
it appeared, Ivory Towers was favorably blurbed in the
Chronicle of Higher Education and the Washington Post,
and prominently featured in the New York Times. It was
also the inspiration for a spate of critical articles on the Middle
East Studies Association (MESA), the main North American professional
association of Middle East specialists, in such magazines as the
National Review, Commentary and the New Republic.
Echoing Kramer, commentators from the right attacked MESA because
its annual meetings allegedly feature too many scholarly panels
on topics they deem esoteric and irrelevant, and not enough panels
on al-Qaeda, Palestinian suicide bombings and "anti-American
incitement." As the motivating spirit of HR 3077 is found
in the pages of Ivory Towers, and indeed Kramer specifically
recommends (in the book and in subsequent columns) enhanced federal
oversight of Title VI programs, the arguments of the book are
worth examining in some detail.
CAUSING EYES
TO ROLL
"America’s
academics," Kramer writes, "have failed to predict or
explain the major evolutions of Middle Eastern politics and society
over the past two decades. Time and again, academics have been
taken by surprise by their subjects; time and again, their paradigms
have been swept away by events. Repeated failures have depleted
the credibility of scholarship among the influential public. In
Washington, the mere mention of academic Middle Eastern studies
often causes eyes to roll." To explain how this came about,
Kramer offers his interpretation of the development of Middle
East studies in America, portrayed as a fall from (relative) grace
largely attributable to the pernicious influence of one bad doctrine,
chiefly propagated by Edward Said through his 1979 book, Orientalism.
As Kramer
tells the story, despite promising beginnings, things were already
going poorly for Middle East studies soon after the US assumed
a superpower’s role in the region during World War II. Too many
scholars were in the grip of overly optimistic notions like modernization
theory, which posited that the entire world, including the Middle
East, could and would be remade in the self-image of 1950s America.
In the 1970s, the Lebanese civil war and then the Iranian revolution
shattered this illusion, revealing the field’s intellectual bankruptcy
and leaving it without a dominant paradigm. Even worse, scholarly
standards were appallingly low, which allowed "tenured incompetents"
to secure scarce academic positions, breeding resentment among
new graduates and graduate students. Government and foundation
funding dropped, exacerbating the sense of crisis in the field.
For Kramer,
this crisis accounts for the success of Said’s Orientalism,
and the transformation it almost single-handedly wrought in Middle
East studies. Despite that book’s grave flaws, it served perfectly
as a weapon in the hands of insurgents pushing a radical political
and theoretical agenda. Attacking established scholars and providing
an alternative theory and politics, Orientalism helped
the academic left -- and especially the Arabs and Muslims among
them -- achieve intellectual and institutional hegemony in US
Middle East studies. Kramer attributes what he sees as the abject
failure of most scholars to resist the onslaught of Said’s ideas
to a loss of self-confidence, stemming from the failure of the
models in which they had earlier put so much faith.
The damage
Orientalism wreaked on US Middle East studies is considerable,
in Kramer’s assessment: "Orientalism made it acceptable,
even expected, for scholars to spell out their own political commitments
as a preface to anything they wrote or did. More than that, it
enshrined an acceptable hierarchy of political commitments, with
Palestine at the top, followed by the Arab nation and the Islamic
world. They were the long-suffering victims of Western racism,
American imperialism and Israeli Zionism -- the three legs of
the orientalist stool." Said’s Orientalism also allegedly
licensed political and ethnic tests for admission to the field:
one has to be a leftist or, even better, an Arab or Muslim, whose
numbers in the MESA membership rolls have increased dramatically.
Despite their pretensions to intellectual superiority, however,
the disciples of Said who seized control of important faculty
chairs in the 1980s have failed to do any better than their discredited
predecessors in predicting or explaining the dynamics of Middle
Eastern politics, precisely because their predictions are driven
by their radical politics and trendy post-modernist theorizing,
not by careful observation of the real world.
For example,
Kramer argues, the Saidian left utterly failed to anticipate or
account for the rise of Islamism; all they could manage were denunciations
of purported American bias against Islam and Muslims. In the 1990s,
liberals like John Esposito of Georgetown University, who understood
that Said’s radical message and tone were off-putting for the
American mainstream, developed an upbeat, softened image of Islam
and Islamism, downplaying their violent and threatening dimensions.
Esposito and others seized on a string of would-be "Muslim
Luthers" who could be touted as the forerunners of an imminent
Islamic "reformation," all the while failing to notice
the ways in which authoritarian Arab states were successfully
promoting secularization and blocking the Islamist challenge.
Similarly, because they were convinced that the Arab regimes were
fragile and lacked legitimacy and social roots, liberal and leftist
scholars grossly underestimated those regimes’ durability. All
the scholarly attention and foundation funding devoted to the
study of "civil society" in the Arab world were thus
based on vain illusions.
Most of Kramer’s
jibes in Ivory Towers are aimed at university-based academics
interested in theory, such as the "post-orientalist fashion
designers" (as he puts it) who teach about the Middle East
and Islam at New York University. But he also derides the Social
Science Research Council for its alleged failure -- even refusal
-- to use the government funding it received to support policy-relevant
research, and MESA for its rejection of the terms of the National
Security Education Program, which originally required recipients
of its scholarship aid to undertake a period of government service.
The "new mandarins" who have assumed leadership of the
field have lost the confidence of official Washington because
of their haughty disdain for policymakers and their squandering
of public funds on empty theorizing and worthless research projects.
"In the centers of policy, defense and intelligence,"
Kramer avows, "consensus held that little could be learned
from academics -- not because they knew nothing, but because they
deliberately withheld their knowledge from government, or organized
it on the basis of arcane priorities or conflicting loyalties."
THINK TANKS
ASCENDANT
The self-inflicted
crisis of academic Middle East studies is further manifested,
Kramer argues, in the growing recourse that government and the
media have to Middle East experts based at think tanks rather
than at universities. The "intolerant climate" in academia
-- poisoned by blind obeisance to the ideas of Edward Said and
his left-wing emulators -- led many talented people to gravitate
to the think tanks, where their work "often surpassed university-based
research in clarity, style, thoroughness and cogency."
It would
seem that Kramer’s ideal model of the proper relationship between
the world of scholarship and the world of policymaking, wherein
scholars produce research that is directly relevant to the immediate
needs of the state, comes from his own past and current institutional
affiliations. After receiving his doctorate from Princeton University,
Kramer moved to Israel, where he served as a research associate
at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern
and African Studies, and then as the center’s associate director
(1987-1995) and director (1995-2001). According to his website,
he returned to the Dayan Center from the US in December 2003.
The Dayan Center, which describes itself as "an interdisciplinary
research center devoted to the study of the modern history and
contemporary affairs of the Middle East," is named after
the famous Israeli general and politician, but it incorporated
and superceded an older institution, the Shiloah Institute, named
after Reuven Shiloah, the founder of Israel’s intelligence and
security apparatus. Both the old and new names reflect the Center’s
ongoing role as not merely an scholarly institution (though there
have certainly been some serious scholars associated with it),
but also as a key site where senior Israeli military, foreign
policy and intelligence officials can interact with academics
working on policy-relevant issues.
While in
the US, Kramer has held fellowships at the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank founded in 1985 which
has sent a succession of associates -- a well-known example being
former US Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk -- straight into the
ranks of government. In the same year that Ivory Towers
appeared, Kramer assumed the post of editor of Middle East
Quarterly, published by the Philadelphia-based Middle East
Forum, a small think tank directed by Daniel Pipes, another hawkish
commentator. Pipes established the Middle East Forum to "define
and promote American interests" in the Middle East. Those
interests are defined on the Forum’s website as "strong ties
with Israel, Turkey and other democracies as they emerge,"
human rights, "a stable supply and a low price of oil,"
and "the peaceful settlement of regional and international
disputes."
Kramer is
clearly correct to point to the greatly increased importance of
think tanks in advising government and shaping public opinion
about the Middle East. The leap to prominence of WINEP in the
1980s ended the status of the Middle East as a relative backwater
for the Washington think tank industry, even for those institutions
with the lengthiest pedigrees. Particularly following the September
11 attacks and continuing through the Iraq war, the large think
tanks have significantly stepped up their Middle East-related
activity. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, founded
in 1910 to advance international cooperation, regularly hosts
Middle East scholars as research fellows and produces an electronic
newsletter called the Arab Reform Bulletin. The Council
on Foreign Relations, established in 1921 as a sort of elite dinner
club, publishes frequent Middle East-related articles in its influential
journal Foreign Affairs and in July 2002 produced a widely
read report on US public diplomacy in the Islamic world. The liberal
Brookings Institution, established in 1927 with Carnegie and Rockefeller
family funding, opened the Haim Saban Center for Middle East Policy,
under the direction of Indyk, in May 2002. The conservative American
Enterprise Institute, founded in 1943 to promote "limited
government," "free enterprise" and a "strong
foreign policy and national defense," arguably has been the
most influential of the older think tanks upon the second Bush
administration in matters related to the Middle East.
Other players
include private contractors like the huge RAND Corporation, which
entered the field after World War II to produce or fund research
for the military and intelligence and other government agencies
concerned with foreign policy. Still more competitors for the
ear of power are based at what one observer calls "advocacy"
think tanks, like the Center for Strategic and International Studies
(1962), the Heritage Foundation (1973) and the Cato Institute
(1977), which combine "policy research with aggressive marketing
techniques."[2]
But there
can be little doubt that WINEP, a member of the "advocacy"
generation, has been the most successful advocate among the smaller
group of Washington outfits that concern themselves solely with
the Middle East. In its annual survey of media citations of think
tanks, the liberal media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
counted WINEP among its top twenty for three years running in
2000, 2001 and 2002. In each of these years, WINEP was the only
institution listed that focuses on a single global region outside
the US. The Middle East Institute, founded in 1946, publishes
a journal and organizes conferences but exercises relatively little
political clout. Organizations established more recently, like
the Middle East Policy Council, also do not have a powerful audience
inside the government. However, the influence of research and
the merit of that research are not necessarily one and the same
thing -- Ivory Towers on Sand being a case in point.
SELECTIVE
INDICTMENT
Some of the
criticisms of US Middle East studies which Kramer sets forth in
Ivory Towers are not entirely off-base. For example, Kramer
depicts modernization theory as flawed, though he ignores the
Cold War context which produced it and explains its popularity
in psychological terms, as the product of Americans’ missionary
zeal and naïve optimism. Some of the prognoses offered by scholars
in the early and mid-1990s about the moderation and fading away
of Islamism were indeed overly broad and facile, though it is
worth noting that in some countries (Turkey, for example) Islamist
parties did in fact evolve in a democratic and moderate direction.
Kramer is correct to note that both mainstream and political economy-oriented
Middle East scholars generally failed to anticipate the rise of
Islamist movements in the 1970s, though his book ignores the sophisticated
analyses subsequently advanced by scholars, for example in Political
Islam, edited by Joel Beinin and Joe Stork, Islam, Politics
and Social Movements, edited by Edmund Burke III and Ira Lapidus,
or Sami Zubaida’s Islam, the People and the State.
Kramer also
poses legitimate questions about whether large donations to Middle
East studies programs come with strings attached, visible or invisible,
that might affect faculty appointments, curriculum and programming.
Several US universities have in fact accepted donations from wealthy
Arabs, including members of some of the ruling families of the
oil-rich Gulf states, to fund chairs or programs in Arab or Islamic
studies. But it is not clear that these donations have exercised
any untoward influence on scholarship or teaching at those institutions,
and in any case American universities have also accepted, without
much controversy, large donations for Jewish and Israel studies
programs from people (Jews and non-Jews) strongly supportive of
Israel.
Overall,
Kramer’s approach is deeply flawed as a history of Middle East
studies as a scholarly field. Kramer blames Edward Said and Orientalism
for everything that he believes has gone wrong with Middle East
studies from the late 1970s onward, ignoring both the extensive
critiques of modernization theory and Orientalism that preceded
the publication of that book and the complex and often critical
ways in which Said’s intervention was received and developed.
As Ivory Towers tells the story, every scholar in Middle
East studies either slavishly embraced every pronouncement that
fell from Said’s lips, or else cringed in silent terror. But,
for the most part, scholars in the field did not simply swallow
Said’s take on Orientalism hook, line and sinker but engaged with
it critically, accepting what seemed useful and rejecting, recasting
or developing other aspects. Kramer’s psychologizing account of
why so many scholars and students in Middle East studies were
receptive to critiques of the field’s hitherto dominant paradigms
is shallow and tendentious.
Kramer claims
in Ivory Towers that US Middle East scholars have repeatedly
made predictions that did not come true. His accusations are sometimes
on target, though he is rather selective. He does not, for example,
take his colleague Daniel Pipes to task for inaccurately predicting
in the early 1980s that Islamist activism would decline as oil
prices fell. Nor, in his writings since the Iraq war, has he faulted
Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International
Studies -- who is a favorite of the Bush administration -- for
claiming that all Iraqis would enthusiastically welcome US occupation.
More broadly, Kramer’s fixation on accurate prediction as the
chief (or even sole) gauge of good scholarship is itself highly
questionable. Most scholars do not in fact seek to predict the
future or think they can do so; they try to interpret the past,
discern and explain contemporary trends, and, at most, tentatively
suggest what might happen in the future if present trends continue,
which they very often do not. Of course, governments want accurate
predictions in order to shape and implement effective policies,
but Kramer’s insistence that the primary goal of scholarship should
be the satisfaction of that desire tells us a great deal about
his conception of intellectual life and of the proper relationship
between scholars and the state.
Just as many
of the Israeli scholars associated with the Dayan Center have
seen themselves as producing knowledge that will serve the security
and foreign policy needs of Israel, so American scholars of the
Middle East should, Kramer suggests, shape their research agendas
to provide the kinds of knowledge the US government will find
most useful. His book demonstrates no interest whatsoever in the
uses to which such knowledge might be put or in the question of
the responsibility of intellectuals to maintain their independence,
or indeed in what scholarship and intellectual life should really
be about. His real complaint is that US Middle East studies has
failed to produce knowledge useful to the state. Yet by ignoring
larger political and institutional contexts, Kramer cannot understand
or explain why so many scholars have grown less than enthusiastic
about producing the kind of knowledge about the Middle East the
government wants -- or conversely, why it is that the government
and the media now routinely turn to analysts based in think tanks,
along with former military and intelligence personnel, for policy-relevant
knowledge.
UNTENABLE
STANCE
But there
is a larger issue at stake here. At the very heart of Kramer’s
approach is a dubious distinction between the trendy, arcane "theorizing"
of the scholarship he condemns as at best irrelevant and at worst
pernicious, on the one hand, and on the other the purportedly
hard-headed, clear-sighted, theory-free observation of, and research
on, the "real Middle East" in which he and scholars
like him see themselves as engaging. Kramer is not wrong to suggest
that there has been some fashionable theory-mongering in academia,
including Middle East studies. But in Ivory Towers he goes
well beyond this by now banal observation, and beyond a rejection
of post-structuralism, to imply that all theories, paradigms and
models are distorting and useless, because they get in the way
of the direct, unmediated, accurate access to reality that he
seems to believe he and those who think like him possess.
This is an
extraordinarily naïve and unsophisticated understanding of how
knowledge is produced, one that few scholars in the humanities
and social sciences have taken seriously for a long time. Even
among historians, once the most positivist of scholars, few would
today argue that the facts "speak for themselves" in
any simple sense. Almost all would acknowledge that deciding what
should be construed as significant facts for the specific project
of historical reconstruction in which they are engaged, choosing
which are more relevant and important to the question at hand
and which less so, and crafting a story in one particular way
rather than another all involve making judgments that are rooted
in some sense of how the world works -- in short, in some theory
or model or paradigm or vision, whether implicit or explicit,
whether consciously acknowledged or not. Kramer’s inability or
refusal to grasp this suggests a grave lack of self-awareness,
coupled with an alarming disinterest in some of the most important
scholarly debates over the past four decades or so.
It is moreover
a stance which Kramer does not maintain in practice. His assertions
throughout the book are in fact based on a certain framework of
interpretation, even as he insists that they are merely the product
of his acute powers of observation, analysis and prediction. It
is, for example, striking that at the very end of Ivory Towers
Kramer explicitly lays out a political and moral judgment rooted
in his own (theoretical) vision of the world: his insistence that
a healthy, reconstructed Middle East studies must accept that
the US "plays an essentially beneficent role in the world."
He does not bother to tell readers why they should accept this
vision of the US role in the world as true, nor does he even acknowledge
that it may be something other than self-evidently true. The assertion
nonetheless undermines his avowed epistemological stance and graphically
demonstrates that it is untenable.
IN SEARCH
OF HEROES
"What
will it take to heal Middle Eastern studies," Kramer asks
in his conclusion, "if they can be healed at all?" Here
Kramer explicitly counterposes the theorizing in which too many
academics have indulged to the empirical study of "the Middle
East itself," while also advocating renewed attention to
"the very rich patrimony of scholarly orientalism."
"Orientalism had heroes," Kramer continues. "Middle
Eastern studies have none, and they never will, unless and until
scholars of the Middle East restore some continuity with the great
tradition," a continuity ruptured by the foolish social science
models of the 1950s and 1960s and then by the destruction wrought
by Said and his post-modernist devotees. In the longer run, despite
the resistance of the radical mandarins, "breakthroughs will
come from individual scholars, often laboring on the margins.
As the dominant paradigms grow ever more elaborate, inefficient
and insufficient, they will begin to shift. There will be more
confessions [of failure] by senior scholars, and more defections
by their young protégés."
To hasten
this shift, Kramer suggests that the federal government reform
the process it uses to decide which Title VI-funded national resource
centers, including centers for Middle East studies, receive funding,
by including government officials in the review process and encouraging
more attention to public outreach activities. More broadly, Congress
should hold hearings "on the contribution of Middle Eastern
studies to American public policy," with testimony not only
from academics but from government officials, directors of think
tanks and others as well. While such steps might help, Kramer
concludes, ultimately the field will have to heal itself by overcoming
its irrelevance and its intolerance of intellectual and political
diversity. Its new leaders will have to forge a different kind
of relationship with "the world beyond the campus,"
based on the aforementioned principle that "the United States
plays an essentially beneficent role in the world." Such
lines are the basis of worries within and outside academic Middle
East studies that HR 3077, the bill which resulted from the June
2003 hearing Kramer called for, is an attempt to stifle critical
voices and diminish the autonomy of American institutions of higher
education and long-established principles of academic freedom.
GOOD COP,
BAD COP
These worries
are heightened by other activities of Kramer’s employer, the Middle
East Forum, activities which can be seen as complementary to the
intellectually simplistic critique of US Middle East studies in
Ivory Towers. One might even go so far as to portray Kramer
and Forum director Daniel Pipes as, respectively, the "good
cop" and "bad cop" of the far right end of the
Middle East studies spectrum.
A year after
the September 11 attacks, the Middle East Forum launched a new
initiative directly targeting academic Middle East studies. This
is a website called Campus Watch, ostensibly established to "review
and critique Middle East studies in North America, with an aim
to improving them." Campus Watch initiated its campaign by
attacking eight professors of Middle East or Islamic studies from
institutions around the country for what Pipes deemed unacceptable
views about Islam, Islamism, Palestinian rights or US policy in
the region; the website also cited 14 universities for similar
sins. Campus Watch also invited college students and others to
monitor their professors and send in classroom statements which
they deemed anti-Israel or anti-American, helping Campus Watch
compile "dossiers" on suspect faculty and academic institutions.
The website
prompted a storm of protest: over 100 professors from around the
country sent messages denouncing Campus Watch for its crude attempt
to silence debate about the Middle East and the airing of critical
views by insinuating that the scholars under attack had been apologists
for terrorism or were somehow unpatriotic. To show solidarity
with their beleaguered fellow scholars, many of the protesters
demanded that they too be added to Campus Watch’s blacklist.[3] Campus Watch thereupon compounded the damage
it had already done by listing the names of those who had written
to protest its smear campaign under a heading which stated that
they had done so "in defense of apologists for Palestinian
violence and militant Islam."
This was
of course an egregious falsehood, because those who had written
Campus Watch in protest did not for a minute accept Campus Watch’s
original allegation that the first eight scholars it had attacked
were apologists for terrorism. They had written to denounce Campus
Watch for launching what they saw as a vicious attack, by means
of distortion and innuendo, on respectable scholars and to uphold
academic freedom, the right of free speech and the importance
to a democratic society of open discussion of issues of public
concern.
The protests
and considerable media interest (and criticism) apparently led
Campus Watch to remove the web pages attacking the eight scholars
as well as pages containing dossiers on individual professors.
Throughout the flap, defenders of Campus Watch ridiculed critics
who used the word "McCarthyism" to describe the website’s
self-appointed mission to expose "the mixing of politics
with scholarship." But, speaking at right-wing activist David
Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend in November 2003, Pipes hinted
that Campus Watch has its own trouble keeping them separate: "I
flatter myself perhaps in thinking that the rather subdued academic
response to the war in Iraq in March and April may have been,
in part, due to our work."
SLIPPERY
SLOPE?
Martin Kramer,
Pipes’ partner in the campaign to reorient the politics of US
Middle East and area studies in a rightward direction, mocks Middle
East scholars suspicious of the advisory board which Senate passage
and presidential signature of HR 3077 would create, if the bill
is not amended. If they do not like outside scrutiny of their
activities, he remarks, they can "get off the federal dole"
and eschew Title VI monies entirely. The advisory board will not
intimidate professors who disapprove of US Middle East policy,
adds Kramer, because the "full range of views" the board
is designed to protect "necessarily includes every view and
excludes none." Of course, one needs to accept the major
premise of Ivory Towers -- university students are not
currently exposed to a "full range of views" -- to consider
such a board necessary. Moreover, in light of other hostility
expressed toward academic Middle East studies since the September
11 attacks, the concerns of Middle East scholars are not so surprising.
Some right-wing
critics have gone beyond Kramer’s proposals for "reform"
of the Title VI program and called for federal funding of Middle
East studies to be reduced or cut off. Others have urged that
the secretary of education use his control over Title VI funding
to mandate "balance" and "diversity" in teaching
about the Middle East, and particularly about the Arab-Israeli
conflict. In the present context, "balance" and "diversity"
seem to be code words for pressuring colleges and universities
to muzzle critics of US and Israeli policies and promote viewpoints
more congenial to those of the Bush administration and the Sharon
government. This was made explicit in proposals put forward by
a number of members of Congress. In April 2003, for example, Sen.
Rick Santorum (R-PA) announced plans to introduce legislation
that would cut off federal funding to American colleges and universities
that were deemed to be permitting faculty, students and student
organizations to openly criticize Israel, since Santorum seems
to regard all such criticism as inherently anti-Semitic. Meanwhile,
Santorum’s colleague Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) proposed the creation
of a federal commission to investigate alleged anti-Semitism on
campus -- again defined rather broadly to include virtually all
criticism of Israeli policies.
"Diversity"
as defined by Kramer and his fellow conservative Stanley Kurtz,
the main champion of HR 3077, ideally means inclusion of "supporters
of US policy" on the faculties that are supposedly now turning
American students against their own country. But Kramer and Kurtz
realize the government cannot force the alleged legions of leftist
professors to abandon their control of departmental hiring as
they once abandoned the barricades. So, as Kurtz put it at a WINEP
forum on HR 3077, the bill offers "gentle" incentives
for academics to mend their wayward ways. The proposed advisory
board, he hopes, will recommend funding increases for Title VI
centers whose graduates go on to government service and whose
outreach programs present "many viewpoints of foreign policy."
Given that the "diversity" of Title VI centers’ output
is in the eye of the beholder, and given the clear predilection
of the board’s proponents for anti-intellectual ways of thinking,
the composition and activities of the advisory board would likely
become the bone of endless contention. Should HR 3077 or something
like it pass into law, the ideological battles within and about
Middle East studies in the United States will have entered a new
phase – but they will be far from over.
