Author: Martin Kramer

Title VI: Let the games begin!

On By Martin Kramer

Remember Title VI? That’s the federal subsidy program for area studies in universities. It’s this money that funds 17 National Resource Centers on the Middle East at U.S. universities. (One example: the Middle East Institute at Columbia, directed by Rashid Khalidi.) An average National Resource Center, with fellowships in the package, will receive about half a million dollars a year in taxpayer subsidies. The U.S. Department of Education administers the program. Today, a Congressionally-mandated review of Title VI gets underway at the National Research Council, part of the Washington-based National Academies (pictured).

Here’s the context. A couple of years back, when the scars of 9/11 were still fresh, Stanley Kurtz and I joined a campaign to reform Title VI. The program, as initially conceived in the 1950s, was supposed to produce grads fluent in foreign languages, who would go on to serve the country’s growing need for area expertise. But over the decades, service-averse academics turned it into a slush fund for subsidizing their pet grad students, who were being groomed for academe. Trendy theory replaced language proficiency as selection criteria. And some centers plowed the money into bogus “outreach”–university-based programs that siphoned taxpayer money to off-campus radicals, who used it to propagandize K-12 teachers.

We proposed a modest solution: a Title VI advisory board, appointed by Congress, to make recommendations to Capitol Hill and the Ed Department on aligning Title VI with national priorities. In 2003, the board concept appeared in the House bill for the higher ed reauthorization. In reaction, the program’s tenured dependents let out a great howl, which spread right through academe like the Danish cartoon mania. The campaign featured wild charges that the board would turn into an inquisition, and that Kurtz and I would be its Torquemadas. In fact, the proposed board lacked any authority; it would have been advisory only, and its members would have been appointed by bipartisan consent. The idea of a board wasn’t even new: the Title VI program had one in years past. But hell hath no fury like a professor held accountable, and the howls reached some Senators. Title VI reform may eventually make it through Congress, but it’s currently stuck in the bog of the delayed reauthorization.

That’s another story. But it was the prospect of a board that gave birth to the idea of a review. Now who do you think would have dreaded the board most? Well, Columbia University, for starters. Two years ago, a Columbia dean, Lisa Anderson, proposed that the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies assess Title VI, as an alternative to a Congressionally-appointed board. (You remember Dean Anderson, don’t you? She was Joseph Massad’s thesis advisor and supporter, and she raised the secret money for the Edward Said Chair.) Anderson had a line into the NRC: she had just served on an NRC panel to investigate aspects of terrorism. She floated the NRC idea to journalist Todd Gitlin, and Columbia’s in-house lobbyist also amplified it: “We feel that an advisory board with goals set by an independent body such as the National Academy of Sciences would make most sense.” This proposal went up to Senate Democrats, who dropped it into the FY 04 appropriation for the Ed Department. Congress ended up earmarking $1.5 million for a contract with the NRC, for a review of Title VI.

That review begins this morning, with the first meeting of the review committee and a “public forum.”

From our point of view, the NRC review was born in sin, a brainchild of the stonewallers and whitewashers on Morningside Heights. It’s the sweet dream of the Title VI “community,” some of whose members have rushed to Washington to make their statements this morning. (They include Amy Newhall, executive director of the Juan Cole-led Middle East Studies Association, and David Wiley, African studies mandarin and advocate of an academic boycott of the National Security Education Program, an alternative to Title VI.)

But in a spirit of fairness, we’re prepared to hold our fire and see whether the NRC 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 NRC 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.

As a service to the committee, we’ll help it ask the tough questions, by posing some of them ourselves. We’ll also be looking carefully at all of the submissions to the committee, exposing distortions of fact and picking holes in faulty logic. We don’t need ten minutes at the old-fashioned “open mic.” We’re right here on the Internet, and we’ll take as much time as we need.

Tenured and dangerous

On By Martin Kramer

David Horowitz has published a book with the title The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. These sorts of lists used to get academics in a lather, but they’ve become so commonplace that the novelty has worn off. (Some profs are even wearing their inclusion as a badge of honor. As one of them put it,  “I suspect most [of us] are either pleased or insouciant .”) Horowitz might make it more interesting by putting the 101 names on his website, so that the rest of us can rank them. Democracy now.

I haven’t seen the book, which presumably fills out the case against each professor. But I’ve gone through the list to see who’s made it from Middle Eastern studies. Despite the field’s small size, it’s amply represented. Below are the professors of Middle Eastern studies in Horowitz’s 101 “most dangerous,” with my own vote in italics. (Please note: I’ve skipped profs who may write a lot about the Middle East, but who aren’t members of the guild. That includes the likes of  M. Shahid Alam, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Norman Finkelstein, etc.)

  • Baylor University: Mark Ellis. Concur.
  • Columbia University: Lisa Anderson, Gil Anidjar, Hamid Dabashi, Joseph Massad. I’d take out Anderson, perhaps also Anidjar, and would replace them with Rashid Khalidi and Mahmood Mamdani.
  • Duke University: Miriam Cooke. Concur. And by the way, she writes her name in lower case, thus: miriam cooke. Go figure.
  • Georgetown University: John Esposito, Yvonne Haddad. Concur.
  • Stanford University: Joel Beinin. Concur.
  • University of California, Berkeley: Hamid Algar, Hatem Bazian. Concur, and I would add Beshara Doumani.
  • University of California, Irvine: Mark LeVine. LeVine is more amusing than he is dangerous. I’d drop him. But as long as we’re in California, I would add Asad AbuKhalil at Cal State Stanislaus, Sondra Hale at UCLA, and Stephen Zunes at the University of San Francisco. From outside of the guild, I’d add Saree Makdisi at UCLA.
  • University of Kentucky: Ihsan Bagby. I’d never heard of him before I saw his name here. Drop.
  • University of Michigan: Juan Cole. Concur.
  • University of Southern California: Laurie Brand. Nah. Only dangerous to herself.

I’d have no trouble filling up another list of “dishonorable mentions,” but it wouldn’t differ much from the names on this petition, so I won’t bother.

Are these professors dangerous? The jacket of Horowitz’s book says he “exposes 101 academics–representative of thousands of radicals who teach our young people–who also happen to be alleged ex-terrorists, racists, murderers, sexual deviants, anti-Semites, and al-Qaeda supporters.” With a few possible exceptions, I don’t think that those listed above fit neatly into any of these categories. They’re fellow travellers and apologists who’ve already been exposed. At this point they’re as dangerous as potholes, easy to avoid if you’re paying attention or someone has warned you in advance.

The more serious problem is that Middle Eastern studies are mediocre. I haven’t seen a citation analysis, but my guess is that no one in Middle Eastern studies would come even close to the top 101 in the humanities and social sciences. No wonder provosts and deans look upon Mideast departments as places more pregnant with embarrassment than achievement.

Martyrs get tenure at Columbia?

On By Martin Kramer

Yesterday the press reported that Columbia University has promoted Joseph Massad to associate professor. Massad, a Palestinian extremist and protégé of the late Edward Said, was the prime culprit in last year’s student abuse scandal. His most famous contribution to the store of human knowledge is his ingenious discovery that Zionism isn’t just racism, it’s antisemitism. Read his latest excretion, a review of Steven Spielberg’s Munich, and ask yourself how in the world Columbia entrusted him to teach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If Edward Said hadn’t been pulling all the strings on Morningside Heights, Massad probably would have ended up teaching in a community college. Now he’s one step away from tenure at a leading university.

If he’s ultimately tenured, who will bear the responsibility? In December, David Biale, Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History at University of California Davis, published an article on campus controversies in J., a Jewish newspaper based in San Francisco. I don’t have the patience to rebut every claim or factual error in this text; Professor Biale really should stick to Jewish history. But there’s one claim that relates to Massad’s tenure, and that demands elucidation. Professor Biale writes:

When Palestinian professor Joseph Massad at Columbia University addressed an Israeli student in a fashion that certainly deserved censure, those eager to find an anti-Semitic conspiracy ended up turning him into a martyr and guaranteeing him tenure. Colleagues at Columbia have told me that their prior doubts about this instructor were drowned out by the din of external propaganda.

This is a very serious charge—not against the makers of “external propaganda,” but against Columbia University. If Professor Biale believes that mere “martyrdom” is sufficient to get someone tenure at Columbia—that Columbia, like Hamas, puts shahids on a permanent pedestal—he should step forward immediately to deplore Columbia for betraying the basic principles of academic integrity. I propose he begin by announcing publicly that he won’t lend his name to any appointment or promotion procedure at Columbia. He should urge others to do the same.

However, yesterday’s report indicated that Massad’s tenure isn’t guaranteed, which means that it may not be too late to block him. If Professor Biale and his “colleagues at Columbia” relieve me of the responsibility of making the case against Massad, I’ll be glad to defer to them. I merely await their explicit assurance. I’m particularly eager to learn who these “colleagues” are, and what sort of “doubts” they’re willing to express.

Should they not have the courage to step forward, preferring to stay securely locked behind their office doors, they should keep silent about “external propaganda.” It will be the only thing standing between Massad and tenure. I’m quite willing to conduct it, and I’ll expect Professor Biale’s tacit support.

Update: David Bernstein (The Volokh Conspiracy and a law prof at George Mason) thinks I don’t give enough credit to community colleges: “I can’t imagine any self-respecting community college would give [Massad] a job.” He’s probably right.

Bernstein has gone back to Massad’s review of Munich, which compares Spielberg’s latest to the film Exodus:

Here is how Massad describes [Exodus‘s] plot: “Exodus tells the story of the Zionist hijacking of a ship from Cyprus to Palestine by a Zionist Haganah commander.” This is analogous to saying that Schindler’s List was a movie about Jews taking a working vacation in Poland.

We’re all familiar with Holocaust denial; no respectable university would hire a Holocaust denier for its faculty. So why would any elite university like Columbia retain, much less promote, someone who similarly intentionally falsifies Jewish history (indeed, in this case, the history of Holocaust survivors) for political ends?

I think this is a perfect opportunity for Professor Biale to show a bit of grit. I urge him to come forward with an authoritative critique of Massad’s distortions of Jewish history. Isn’t this precisely why he was tenured (and chaired)? To counter falsehood with truth? As Professor Biale teaches the Holocaust, he has a unique responsibility, and far more authority than any blogger. (Read his many credentials.) Come forward!