Lookout Kids !! It's Bush's Ideology Police !!
James Chamblee
Targeting Middle East studies, zealots' 'homeland security' creates
campus insecurity
The Ideology Police
by Alisa Solomon
February 25 - March 2, 2004
In a gesture that consolidates the 1990s culture wars, the post-9-11 chill
on dissent, and the relentlessness of hawkishly pro-Israel lobbying, the
U.S. House voted unanimously last fall to establish an advisory board to
monitor how effectively campus international studies centers serve "national
needs related to homeland security" and to assess whether they provide
sufficient airtime to champions of American foreign policy. Currently the
Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions is considering a
parallel provision for its upcoming higher education reauthorization bill.
The bill will likely go to the floor in March.
Though it's just a few paragraphs in an arcane piece of routine legislation
reauthorizing a relatively small amount of money to what's called "area
studies," the advisory board provision represents an ominous offensive
against academic freedom and oppositional views. For decades now, since the
end of the McCarthy period that saw countless academics expelled from the
classroom for their views and international research controlled by a Cold
War agenda, the critical assault on left-leaning professors has been
launched from books, articles, websites, and media broadcasts-unpleasant
enough for the people targeted, but still the stuff of discourse. Even the
creepy post-9-11 list of 40 profs accused by the American Council of
Trustees and Alumni of giving comfort to America's adversaries turned out to
have no teeth.
But the very possibility of legislation sounds old alarms anew. Even if the
measure does not make it past the Senate-ranking Democrats on the panel
don't expect it to get much traction-the very idea of ideological feds
inspecting campus lecture halls takes the culture wars to a perilous new
level.
The seven-member advisory board-which would include two appointees "from
federal agencies that have national security responsibility"-would oversee
the country's 118 international studies centers. This year, they shared
about $95 million under Title VI of the Higher Education Act. Centers may
use the funds only for graduate student fellowships, language instruction,
and lectures and other public programs. They do not hire faculty or offer
courses-traditional departments such as art history or political science do
that. The centers then involve local faculty from across the disciplines who
have expertise in such areas as Latin America, Russia, Africa, and East
Asia. Only 17 of the nation's international studies centers focus on the
Middle East-covering the Arab countries, Turkey, Israel, and Iran-but no one
doubts that they are the intended targets of the legislation.
"The priority of those behind this is defending Israel from any criticism,"
says Zachary Lockman, director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center at New York
University. "They understand that universities are one of the few places
where debate and argument take place that cannot be heard in the media or
anywhere else."
Indeed, the most vociferous critics of the centers have been three
right-wing Zionist think-tankers : Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution
and a columnist for the National Review Online; Martin Kramer, whose screed
Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America was
published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; and Daniel Pipes
of the Middle East Forum, whose website Campus Watch posted "dossiers" on
professors whom Pipes deemed to hold unacceptable views on Islam,
Palestinian rights, and U.S. or Israeli policy. Students were urged to send
in reports on teachers who made any dubious remarks.
Kurtz was the star witness in House testimony on the bill last June, when he
painted a frightful caricature of area studies programs. He accused them of
having "extreme and monolithic" perspectives and "stifling free debate" as
they buckle under an insidious "ruling intellectual paradigm" set forth in
Orientalism by the late Edward Said, "the most honored and in-fluential
theorist in academic area studies today." Kurtz recommended the
government-appointed supervisory body to assure that "over and above
questions of peer review, due consideration was given to the national
interest."
Members of Congress did not check to see that, in fact, international
studies programs are filled with scholars with a range of contentious views,
or that the influence of Orientalism is largely confined to the humanities
and even there has been subject to ongoing critique since its publication in
1978. Nor did they systematically investigate any of Kurtz's other
apoplectic charges, among them that professors discourage students from
taking jobs with the government. Nor did it matter that international
studies centers are already monitored by the Department of Education, to
whom they must submit detailed annual reports and from whom they must
reapply for funds every three years.
"This is part of a wider campaign to intimidate," asserts Rashid Khalidi,
the Edward Said Chair of Arab Studies at Columbia and head of its Middle
East Institute. "It won't work with my generation, but it will discourage
younger scholars from going into the field. One of the objectives is to put
the universities in an impossible position-either to accept partisan
intrusion into academic affairs or just not take the money." According to
Amy Newhall, executive director of the Middle East Studies Association, the
effect will be counterproductive: fewer and fewer students studying Arabic,
Pashtu, Turkish, Urdu.
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There are many reasons such attacks are working. First, student activism
around Israel-Palestine has become intensely polarized on campuses, and it's
easy for those who don't follow the bureaucratic intricacies of college life
to project their anxiety about the general atmosphere onto the narrow slice
of events put on by Title VI-funded centers. What's more, one legacy of the
conservative pounding of the campuses through the '90s is the widespread,
though suspect, notion that universities are controlled by "tenured
radicals." Add that to what Lockman calls an "extraordinarily naive and
unsophisticated understanding of how knowledge is produced" and a
particularly disrespectful and bizarre image of students as "brainwashable
robots," and it's not so hard to buy into the central argument of Kramer's
Ivory Towers on Sand: that Middle East scholars are scandalously incompetent
for failing to predict 9-11 and that students are being irreparably harmed
by teachers' anti-American obsessions.
More generally, the Bush administration has made national policy out of not
only blaming the messengers, but replacing them when they provide analysis
that is ideologically inconvenient. Scientists aren't providing the
conclusions about climate change or reproductive health that your
constituents like? Undercut and distort their findings. In this atmosphere,
Kramer's insistence that Middle East scholars ought to be parroting and
promoting government policy sounds perfectly reasonable to Tom DeLay's
House.
Most of all, though, the assault on area studies succeeds because it is
based on exaggerations, distortions, and downright falsehoods-a tactic
perfected in the culture wars. Here's how it works: Take a few queer and
feminist artists, brand them as obscene, and argue that the entire National
Endowment for the Arts is contaminated and must be purged. This maneuver
puts defenders of the field in the position of arguing that, well, the vast
majority of NEA-funded work is not obscene-thus conceding the bogus charge
at the core of the attack. That's what happened in the hastily called House
hearings where Kurtz sounded the rallying cry against Title VI centers. The
primary advocate for the centers was Terry Hartle, senior vice president of
the major higher education lobby, the American Council on Education, which
ended up supporting the House bill since it was increasing funding for
international studies and a few lines were added promising that the advisory
board would not interfere with curricula. His testimony essentially echoed
Kurtz's assertion that Title VI-funded programs should serve government
needs-he just argued that they are already doing so effectively. What didn't
get said was that there's a public good in campus debate around this very
question.
No one was on hand at the hearings to refute the way Kurtz twisted what he
presented as fact. To cite just one example, Kurtz railed against the
Kevorkian Center for "extremism and lack of balance" in responses to 9-11
from affiliated scholars that the center posted to its website. He
excoriated Ella Shohat, an Israeli-born professor of art and public policy
at NYU, because she "criticizes America's 'crimes' of 'oil driven hegemony'
and America's 'murderous sanctions against Iraq.' " But here's the full
passage from Shohat: "By the same token, the facts of the imperial policies
of the U.S., of oil-driven hegemony in the Gulf, of the murderous sanctions
on Iraq, of blind U.S. support for Israeli policies do not turn terrorists
into the legitimate avengers of the crimes committed toward populations in
the third world in general. Terrorist crimes do not avenge other crimes;
they simply add more crimes. A fundamentalist Manichean discourse projects a
righteous East pitted against a corrupt and infidel West. Bin Laden's
discourse is the demonizing discourse of a zealot, one that turns all Jews,
Christians, and Muslims who do not share his interpretations into infidels
worthy of death."
There's one more way the attacks on Title VI centers take a page from the
playbook of the culture wars: Like those who demanded that English
departments dump Toni Morrison from the syllabus and admit only the
time-tested "classics," Title VI watchdogs also want to return the campus to
an era before the Vietnam War, open admissions, and other seismic events
brought critical attention to the tacit conservative politics of the
standard curriculum. After all, area studies-programs focused on foreign
countries and cultures-began in the U.S. first in the early 20th century as
part of church efforts to improve their evangelizing, and then became
co-opted for the Cold War. Indeed, Title VI funding began under the National
Defense Education Act of 1958. Most famously, as the China scholar Moss
Roberts has written, East Asia studies long functioned in tandem with state
intelligence services. "Even a small degree of independent-mindedness could
destroy a career in Asian Studies," he writes, citing the example of John
Service, a scholar drummed out of the academic mainstream for offering "a
breath of rationality about the Chinese revolution."
Cleverly, proponents of Title VI oversight paint themselves as the ones
excluded from campus discourse today. Looking at a faculty listing of any of
the schools with Middle East centers, though, one does not need much time to
find Zionists, anti-Zionists, non-Zionists, post-Zionists among them-as well
as experts in such fields as medieval Arabic poetry. But there's a deeper,
discomfiting question in these postmodern times about how to take on the
charge of imbalance, because it requires confronting that slippery, roundly
deconstructed concept of truth-or at least, as scholars might prefer, of
sound evidence. Would anyone demand that a gay studies program "balance" its
offerings by hosting lectures on how homosexuals can be "cured" of their
condition? Would Jewish studies be expected to lend its podium to a
Holocaust denier? "It's certainly true that the prevailing opinion of people
who actually study the modern Middle East is more critical of American and
Israeli policies than the policy makers would like," says Stanford
University's Joel Beinin, a recent president of the Middle East Studies
Association. "You'd think that might lead people to say, 'Maybe those
scholars are right.' "