You thought I’d forgotten about Title VI? Not at all. I’ve posted a new column at Sandstorm anticipating tomorrow’s release of the Title VI review by the National Research Council of the National Academies. Congress ordered this study, and I went out to Irvine, California last fall to give my views to the distinguished panel. The report could have a major influence on the future course of Title VI–and, by extension, Middle Eastern studies. Read here.
Author: Martin Kramer
Speaking Title VI Truth to Power
Tomorrow, Tuesday, the Committee to Review the Title VI and Fulbright-Hays International Education Programs will release its final report at a press briefing at the National Academies in Washington. There will be a live audio webcast of the briefing at 12:30 Eastern (details here). The committee has concluded a Congressionally mandated review of government programs that fund area studies (including Middle Eastern studies) in universities. Congress instructed the National Academies to assess “the adequacy and effectiveness of these programs in addressing their statutory missions and in building the nation’s international and foreign language expertise—particularly as needed for economic, foreign affairs, and national security purposes.”
The reform of Title VI is something I’ve advocated for years, in my book Ivory Towers on Sand and on this website. But as readers will recall, I greeted the establishment of the committee with skepticism. On its first day of public hearings in February of last year, I wrote that the committee was “a brainchild of the stonewallers and whitewashers” who receive Title VI subsidies, and I provided the evidence. Their idea was to forestall a Title VI advisory board appointed by Congress, which might intrude on their cozy entitlement.
But I added this, in my name and that of my fellow Title VI critic Stanley Kurtz:
In a spirit of fairness, we’re prepared to hold our fire and see whether the [committee] has the grit to dig hard and find the truth. We’re not awed by its credentials. We respect smarts. We’re keen to see whether the committee members are savvy enough to plow aside the heaps of propaganda and disinformation about to be dumped on them by subsidized “stakeholders.” And we want to see how much ingenuity the [committee] shows in ferreting out contradictory evidence, which is part of its mandate. It’s not enough for the committee to sit back and wait for submissions. They’ve got to get out there and collect their own data.
Over the past year, Kurtz and I have kept our word. He held his fire, and I went even further, accepting an invitation from the committee to join a panel discussion last fall on “Title VI in the 21st Century.” Below is my statement to the committee. I didn’t mince words.
Tomorrow, we’ll get the final report. Let’s all read it carefully. At stake is the future of the largest of all federal foreign language programs, and the preparedness of the United States for the challenges of the future.
Update, April 3: And here is my verdict on the Title VI review. It’s favorable.
___________________
Statement by Martin Kramer
Committee to Review the Title VI and Fulbright-Hays
International Education Programs
Fourth Committee Meeting
October 5, 2006
The National Academies
Beckman Center
Irvine, CA
Committee to Review the Title VI and Fulbright-Hays
International Education Programs
Fourth Committee Meeting
October 5, 2006
The National Academies
Beckman Center
Irvine, CA
If one were to judge by past experience, your enterprise is a futile one. Before I left Washington, I refreshed my memory by delving into the major reassessments of Title VI, submitted in the past to Congress and the Department of Education. There is the report by the Comptroller General of the United States from 1978. There is the report prepared by RAND in 1981. There is the report by the Congressional Research Service from 1989. And there is the report by the National Foreign Language Center from 2000.
Together they make sobering reading. They are evidence, first, that frustration with Title VI has been evident for decades, and second, that the reforms proposed by previous panels have been largely ignored. Many of the recommendations are repeated in each assessment. If past is future, your findings will be added to this pile of forgotten paper.
The source of the frustration is well-known and well-attested. It has been partly obscured by the other testimonials you have heard in your previous meetings, so it needs to be re-emphasized. It is this: despite the achievements of Title VI—and there have been achievements—this is a program that has digressed from its original purpose.
When Congress passed the National Defense Education Act in 1958, it hoped the new program would expand the pool of language-competent Americans who would serve the national interest, broadly defined. That understanding remains at the very core of the Title VI contract between government and academe.
But despite fifty years of Title VI, such Americans are far too few in number and competence to meet the nation’s needs. The academic community claims to have done everything within its power, with limited resources, to meet the need. But there are grounds to suspect that this isn’t the entire story, or even the real story.
The real Title VI story is this. Many in area studies are persuaded that the United States possesses excessive power, or abuses its power. Knowledge in the service of such power is knowledge complicit in its excesses and failures. The inclination of these academics has been to separate Title VI from its original intent, and transform it into part of the academy’s own reproductive system. They will not surrender the resources that Title VI transfers; but they have worked to turn the program from a contract into an entitlement, and to shift its emphasis away from hard languages and toward soft area studies, which enjoy far more academic prestige.
My time is too short to detail the resulting distortion. It is ably summarized in the National Foreign Language Center’s 2000 assessment. According to that report “over the years, the original focus on language has been replaced with a much broader mandate for area and international studies.” As a result, the report concludes, Title VI isn’t doing all it could have done to fill the language deficit. That report recommended the “refocus [of] Title VI/Fulbright-Hays on language.”
This is the same lament conveyed in the comments submitted to you by the Federal Interagency Language Roundtable—to my mind, the most important submission made to you. It gives Title VI a “fairly good” grade in promoting general area studies and curriculum development. But in preparing graduates with a full range of language competence, the grade is “considerably poorer.” The Roundtable calls for “systematic objective assessment” of the program, and ends by proposing that Title VI centers “commit to delivering more instruction in language skills at higher levels.”
So the question is this: why hasn’t government already recalibrated the program?
The answer lies in an imbalance of political will and human resources. Title VI, on a federal scale, is a very small program—too small to command the sustained attention of Congress. And a small and overstretched bureaucracy administers it. They have not been equal to a determined coalition of provosts, deans, center directors, and professional lobbyists. These have succeeded in massaging, tweaking, and spinning Title VI so that it meets precisely their purposes.
This “Title VI community” now greets even the most modest proposal for reform with a massive wall of denial and resistance. And they assure that every careful reassessment of Title VI is discarded in the same pile.
For a recent example of such a reaction, I urge you to read an article by Dr. Amy Newhall, executive director of the Middle East Studies Association (in this collection). It bears this provocative title: “The Unraveling of the Devil’s Bargain: The History and Politics of Language Acquisition.” The devil, it soon becomes clear, is none other that the U.S. government. In striking a bargain with Washington, writes Newhall, academe made the mistake of justifying Title VI in terms of languages for national security. Her conclusion: “Traditionally, language programs have offered a degree of protection for the area-studies component of federally supported programs… Now the devil’s bargain is unraveling.”
I commend Dr. Newhall for writing so frankly, first, about the stealth use of Title VI as a language cover for area studies, and second, for dropping the usual pabulum about the “congruence of national interests and the broader interests of scholarship.” (That is the boilerplate language she used in her submission to you.) No, she says, we cut a deal with the devil. This, from the executive director of this country’s leading association of Middle Eastern studies, is a sudden glimpse into the kind of prejudice that has kept Title VI from reaching its full potential.
The truth, of course, is that the bargain has not unravelled at all: for example, there are more Title VI centers for the Middle East today than at any time in history. Dr. Newhall’s piece is an example of the melodramatic overstatement that greets every mention of Title VI reform. The question of whether we are to get even a minor recalibration of Title VI is very much an open one. And it very much depends on you.
I would not be so presumptuous as to anticipate your conclusions. I would venture a guess that you will reiterate some of the recommendations made in the past, hopefully regarding the primacy of languages, and that you will make other original recommendations.
When it comes to original recommendations, I propose to you that you consider whether Title VI needs a mechanism to assist in the implementation of your recommendations. Once you have added to the pile of reassessments, what will assure that the one and a half million dollars spent on your exercise will have made a difference?
The obstacle to implementation remains the imbalance of will and resources I mentioned earlier—an imbalance that tilts the program away from its intent. Some weight has to be added to the other side of the scale.
The best way to keep the program aligned with evolving national need in a rapidly changing environment is to create an independent mechanism that will do exactly what you are doing now, year-in-and-year-out. Title VI needs “systematic, objective assessment,” and it should not require a tragedy on the scale of 9/11 and five years of sharp polemics to get it. It should be institutionalized for Title VI, as it is for other programs. This may be the only way to restore Congressional confidence in the program, at a time when newer, focused language programs have stolen the flag from Title VI. A rough-and-ready version of this idea appears in the House version of the long-stalled reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. It is possible to imagine additional or alternative approaches.
The most important recommendation you can make—indeed, the one on which all your other recommendations depend—is the establishment of an independent, credentialed body to assist the future development of Title VI.
Apologize to Bernard Lewis
Bernard Lewis gave a speech at the gala of the American Enterprise Institute on March 7. (He received the Irving Kristol Award on the same occasion.) In it, he borrowed almost verbatim from an article he’d published over five years ago in the Wall Street Journal, where he’d written the following:
“Crusade” still touches a raw nerve in the Middle East, where the Crusades are seen and presented as early medieval precursors of European imperialism—aggressive, expansionist and predatory. I have no wish to defend or excuse the often atrocious behavior of the crusaders, both in their countries of origin and in the countries they invaded, but the imperialist parallel is highly misleading. The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad—a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war.
The day after the AEI speech, Neil King, Jr., in a blog at the Wall Street Journal, wrote an item entitled “Bernard Lewis Applauds the Crusades.” Lewis had done no such thing, and King ended up running a correction: Lewis, wrote King, “made the point that the Crusades, as atrocious as they were, were nonetheless an understandable response to the Islamic onslaught of the preceding centuries, and that it was ridiculous [for Pope John Paul II] to apologize for them.” That should have been the end of the story.
But it wasn’t. Jacob Weisberg, who attended the gala, did a piece on it for Slate (which he edits), and it also appeared in the Financial Times (where he’s a columnist). There he wrote the following:
What did surprise me was Lewis’ denunciation of Pope John Paul II’s 2000 apology for the Crusades as political correctness run amok. This drew applause. Lewis’ view is that the Muslims started it by invading Europe in the eighth century. The Crusades were merely a failed imitation of Muslim jihad in an endless see-saw of conquest and re-conquest.
Were you to start counting the ironies here, where would you stop? Here was a Jewish scholar criticizing the pope for apologizing to Muslims for a holy war against Muslims, which was also a massacre of the Jews. Here were the theorists of the invasion of Iraq, many of them also Jewish, applauding the notion that the Crusades were not so terrible and embracing a time horizon that makes it impossible to judge them wrong.
The piece was accompanied by a less-than-flattering photo of Lewis. And in a gossipy audio “interview ” with Slate, Weisberg added this further spin: “What a bizarre turn of events, that the Jewish neoconservatives are now applauding a British Jewish intellectual, sort of minimizing the awfulness of the medieval Crusades.”
I suppose Weisberg hasn’t read any of Lewis’ works. If he had, he’d know exactly how Lewis has interpreted the Crusades. And given the nonsense that Weisberg has spread, it’s definitely the moment to reread Lewis on the subject.
Lewis certainly does understand the Crusades as part of a counter-attack or counter-offensive: a Christian attempt to retake those lands that had been lost to Christendom in the waves of Islamic conquest that began in the seventh (not eighth) century. This isn’t a new theme in his writings, but he articulated it best in his Tanner Lectures on “Europe and Islam” (here), delivered in Oxford in 1990:
In recent years it has become the practice, in both western Europe and the Middle East, to see and present the Crusades as an early exercise in Western imperialism—as a wanton and predatory aggression by the European powers of the time against the Muslim or, as some would now say, against the Arab lands.
They were not seen in that light at the time, either by Christians or by Muslims. For contemporary Christians, the Crusades were religious wars, the purpose of which was to recover the lost lands of Christendom and particularly the holy land where Christ had lived, taught, and died. In this connection, it may be recalled that when the Crusaders arrived in the Levant not much more than four centuries had passed since the Arab Muslim conquerors had wrested these lands from Christendom—less than half the time from the Crusades to the present day—and that a substantial proportion of the population of these lands, perhaps even a majority, was still Christian.
Lewis isn’t really interested in whether the Crusaders were more or less “awful” or “terrible” or “wrong” than other conquerors, ancient, medieval or modern. Any hack propagandist, movie maker, or Slate journalist can do that, for people who enjoy moralizing across millennia. Lewis instead seeks to instruct us, from the sources, as to how the Crusades were viewed by their contemporaries. Christians at the time saw them as a reconquest of their own lands, not as an imperialist intrusion into Islam’s privileged domain. (And Lewis goes on to note that Muslims didn’t see the Crusaders as much more than a nuisance, until they began to raid closer to their truly privileged domain, Mecca and Medina.)
As for the absurdity of the papal apology for the Crusades, the view arises quite logically from Lewis’ interpretation of the first millennium of Islamic-Christian relations:
For almost a thousand years, from the first Moorish landing in Spain to the second Turkish siege of Vienna, Europe was under constant threat from Islam. In the early centuries it was a double threat—not only of invasion and conquest, but also of conversion and assimilation. All but the easternmost provinces of the Islamic realm had been taken from Christian rulers, and the vast majority of the first Muslims west of Iran and Arabia were converts from Christianity. North Africa, Egypt, Syria, even Persian-ruled Iraq, had been Christian countries, in which Christianity was older and more deeply rooted than in most of Europe. Their loss was sorely felt and heightened the fear that a similar fate was in store for Europe.
The Crusades, Lewis notes, were “no more than an episode…. In the seesaw of attack and counterattack between Christendom and Islam, this venture began with an inconclusive Christian victory and ended with a conclusive Christian defeat.”
Given this context of repeated Muslim expansion, and the futile attempt of the Crusades to reverse it, Pope John Paul II’s apology does indeed appear ridiculous. (By the way, Lewis knew the pope, with whom he’s pictured on right.) If such apologies are in order, the Muslims owe them to Christendom for every Islamic conquest, beginning with the conquest of Christian Jerusalem in 637 and culminating in the conquest of the great Christian capital of Constantinople in 1453. And why shouldn’t Christians also apologize for the religious wars that ended the 700-year Muslim occupation of Spain and the 500-year Muslim occupation of the Balkans? Of course, such apologies would be absurd, but then so is the papal apology for the Crusades.
Lewis says so as the world’s preeminent historian of Islam, not as a “Jewish intellectual” or a “Jewish scholar,” somehow duty-bound to represent a “Jewish” perspective. It’s Weisberg who turns Lewis’ great virtue as a historian—that he views the sweep of history without parochialism—into a moral fault. Lewis, he seems to be arguing, should properly take a Jewish view. This is the sort of thing that people expect in Cairo and Tehran, but it’s a bizarre turn of events to see it echoed in America. If one is going to begin to pillory Jewish scholars for reaching conclusions that contradict some journalistic notion of the Jewish interest, it really would be impossible to count the ironies. Take, for example, Joel Beinin and Norman Finkelstein…
The bottom line here is that apologies for the Crusades are ridiculous, but Jacob Weisberg owes Bernard Lewis an apology. It’s owed not over his criticism of Lewis’ role in the gestation of the Iraq war (which Weisberg exaggerates, I think). All’s fair in politics. But beyond the vapid assumption that the Crusades were “awful,” Weisberg knows zip about their history. Lewis had mastered this subject long before Weisberg was born, and if Weisberg is incapable of acknowledging it, then he’s even more ignorant than he’s made himself appear to be.
And he owes Lewis a second apology for pigeonholing him as a “Jewish scholar” and “Jewish intellectual” in this particular context. I wonder how Weisberg would feel if his critics labeled him a “Jewish journalist” in every discussion of his professional work, and judged him by whether or not he had reached a “Jewish” conclusion. (Any perceived deviation would be marked as “ironic.”) I imagine he wouldn’t like it one bit. Is Weisberg clever enough to see that irony?
And for the record: Lewis is not a “British Jewish intellectual.” He became a naturalized American twenty-five years ago.
Update, March 21: The American Enterprise Institute has published Lewis’ full remarks. Here’s what he said about the Crusades—exactly in line with what he’s always said:
We have seen in our own day the extraordinary spectacle of a pope apologizing to the Muslims for the Crusades. I would not wish to defend the behavior of the Crusaders, which was in many respects atrocious. But let us have a little sense of proportion. We are now expected to believe that the Crusades were an unwarranted act of aggression against a peaceful Muslim world. Hardly. The first papal call for a crusade occurred in 846 C.E., when an Arab expedition from Sicily sailed up the Tiber and sacked St. Peter’s in Rome. A synod in France issued an appeal to Christian sovereigns to rally against “the enemies of Christ,” and the Pope, Leo IV, offered a heavenly reward to those who died fighting the Muslims. A century and a half and many battles later, in 1096, the Crusaders actually arrived in the Middle East. The Crusades were a late, limited, and unsuccessful imitation of the jihad—an attempt to recover by holy war what had been lost by holy war. It failed, and it was not followed up.
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