Author: Martin Kramer

Will Princeton Intercept the Palestine Football?

On By Martin Kramer

On March 31, Rashid Khalidi, Columbia’s Edward Said Professor, will deliver what the New York Sun has called a “job talk” at Princeton. Earlier this month, the paper reported that “Khalidi has thrown his hat into the ring for the Niehaus chair in contemporary Muslim studies at Princeton and to take charge of that university’s Transregional Institute, according to the sources, who are at the New Jersey school.”

At Columbia, Khalidi directs the Middle East Institute, and its scope is fairly obvious from its name. But what is the Transregional Institute? It’s short for the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia—the most pretentious and overblown name in the field. It’s also quite meaningless. The Transregional Institute has rather narrower interests, and it devotes an inordinate amount of time to one country: Palestine.

I first wrote about the Transregional Institute’s Palestine obsession back in 2002, when it sponsored a lopsided lecture series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This past winter, the Institute caused yet another stir, in announcing that its theme for the next academic year would be “Society under Occupation: Contemporary Palestinian Politics, Culture and Identity.” The announcement had a propagandistic tone, and complaints began to reach Nassau Hall. On February 4, the Transregional Institute and the university issued a joint statement, claiming that “our focus will be on the society and culture, not on the politics. We will be approaching our study from a variety of perspectives, aided by speakers who will represent a variety of viewpoints.”

Maybe, maybe not. It remains to be seen. But beyond this indication of intent, the statement also made an assertion of fact. It sought to justify the choice of the Palestinians as a theme of study, by making this claim:

There are close relationships between the United States and Israel and there is considerable study in this country of Israeli society and culture, but little is known about contemporary Palestinian culture, society, political thinking, and identity.

This immediately rang false to me. I have a pretty good sense of what’s being done, and in what quantities, and it has long seemed to me that the study of the Palestinians is a virtual industry in American academe. To provide some empirical evidence for this anecdotal impression, I consulted the members’ directory of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).

Members of MESA are asked to indicate their “areas of interest” by country when they join the organization, and with a click you can bring up all the members who’ve declared an interest in a particular country. These are the results for some of the more important countries:

  • Egypt: 504
  • Iran: 429
  • Turkey: 338
  • Palestine: 297
  • Israel: 181
  • Iraq: 122
  • Morocco: 105
  • Saudi Arabia: 57

Now look at these numbers, and tell me that the Palestinians are neglected. To judge from MESA’s membership rolls, the opposite is true: there are more American academics per Palestinian than there are for any other nationality in the region. Even if you could somehow rustle up another one hundred academics specializing in Israel—people who’ve forgone the pleasures of MESA membership—the score would only be even. The Palestinians are right up there behind Egypt, Iran, and Turkey, the cultural and strategic heavyweights of the Middle East, each of which has a population of close to 70 million. And the fact that so many more people work on the Palestinians than on Iraq and Saudi Arabia combined leaves one wondering (again) just what taxpayers are getting for their subsidies to the field.

All this is evidence of a simple truth. For at least twenty years, the Palestinians have been the chosen people of Middle Eastern studies. Start with institutions. You’ve got the Institute for Palestine Studies (with offices in Beirut, London, and Washington), and the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC). There’s the Journal of Palestine Studies, a highly partisan periodical nevertheless published by the University of California Press. There’s even an Encyclopedia of the Palestinians, 700 pages in two columns, already in a revised edition. And there’s a never-ending parade of books, articles, conferences, and film festivals.

Academe offers powerful incentives and reinforcements for academic recruits into Palestinian studies. If you want to make a name for yourself and get published by a top university press, one of the surest routes is to produce work on the Palestinians. (Even the current president of the Association of Israel Studies is best known not for his work on Israel, but for a book on the Palestinians.) And if you’re a Palestinian working on the Palestinians, you’ll have plenty of allies in building your academic future. The situation at Columbia, where almost every department feels it must have someone in the Edward Said mold, is only the most extreme case.

I’m not blaming Palestinian academics and their sympathizers for this state of affairs—to the contrary. They’ve operated with admirable unity of purpose in their collective self-interest. It’s not just that they’re talented, it’s that they promote one another generously and shamelessly. For a bit of the flavor, read the obituary of Ibrahim Abu-Lughod by Edward Said, or the obituary of Edward Said by Joseph Massad. This is how the Palestinians built an academic empire: by lending one another a hand. Hats off to them.

So knowing all this, I’m genuinely offended when Princeton University, my alma mater, insults my intelligence with the line that “little is known about contemporary Palestinian culture, society, political thinking, and identity,” as if the Palestinians were a remote hill tribe. It’s simply false, and I’m left wondering whether the statement’s authors are just ignorant of reality, or somehow intend to throw the public off the scent.

So let me make it that much harder for Nassau Hall to profess ignorance or practice denial. The Transregional Institute is an outpost of Palestinian advocacy, the Princeton retail outlet of the solidarity industry. Its function is to sew the Princeton label on the Palestinian cause. If the university decides to make the Institute more visible by recruiting a high-profile Palestinian polemicist to run it, let it not be surprised when lightning repeatedly strikes the rod.

I’d hate to see Princeton reduced to the state of Columbia, especially since a righteous few over in Near Eastern Studies have managed to buck the wider trend. And I’m still sentimental about the place. But my pastime is chasing academic tornados, and if one crosses the Hudson and races down the Turnpike—well, I’ll be right behind it.

Columbia Nation-alized

On By Martin Kramer

The Nation weighs in with an editorial and a long piece on the Columbia controversy. The editorial is truly revolting. It shows precisely the same contempt for the students that the offending professors showed. They’re called “foot soldiers” of “right-wing crusaders like Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer, Charles Jacobs and David Horowitz,” and they’re dismissed as “undergraduate zealots.” The whole story is forced into The Nation‘s standard template: “right-wing Jewish pressure” is exercising mind control.

Anyone who’s gotten close to the Columbia story knows that this is a lie. These are Columbia students, and they’re among the best. They’ve determined their own course. A lot of them are on the liberal-left side of the spectrum, and they seek advice from all sorts of people, on campus and off. In the film Columbia Unbecoming, they sound restrained, moderate, and perfectly credible. The offensive words they attribute to their professors also sound perfectly believable, because they echo those professors’ on-the-record extremism. The profs are the proven zealots. The Nation has exploited the media silence the students imposed on themselves until the university’s ad hoc committee announces its findings. I hope the students reconsider, and zap The Nation right back.

I don’t have the patience to cover all the elisions, omissions, and distortions that mar Scott Sherman’s article. Suffice it to say that the “roots” of the Columbia crisis aren’t in a concerted campaign by Jewish organizations to “take back” campuses. The “roots” lie in the relentless quarter-century campaign by the Saidians to purge departments of all dissenters. If you don’t even allude to that, you don’t get it, period. Instead, Sherman takes readers on long detours, the sole purpose of which is to slip in names like Richard Perle and Bill Kristol. You see, The Nation believes there is a master plan.

Sherman mentions me every few pages, first introducing me as someone who “has taken it upon himself to police and patrol the discipline of Middle East studies.” Where are my police powers? I’m a guy with a website, paid for out of pocket. It’s The Nation, on every newsstand, that takes it upon itself to police debate, by tarring people recklessly with the brush of McCarthyism. I’m “an intellectual architect” of H.R.3077. I like the way that sounds, but I’ve no idea what it means, and I suspect Sherman hasn’t either. I’m an “indefatigable polemicist and critic,” who is “vituperative in his attacks.” Maybe the editors can explain to me why the magazine hasn’t used the term polemicist to describe Joseph Massad (he’s “deliberately provocative and utterly uncompromising,” which sounds principled and deep), or Rashid Khalidi (the editorial calls him “redoubtable,” which suggests defense rather than offense). These two are as indefatigable, polemical, and vituperative as I am on any given day, except they don’t have weblogs. You have to suffer through their classes or watch them on Al-Jazeera or slog through their books to feel their truncheons.

Bottom line: this issue of The Nation should be tossed in the trash. But on second thought, I don’t mind being called indefatigable. I’ll underline that word, and send the article to my folks.

Confessions of a Scheming Vice Provost

On By Martin Kramer

A little over a year ago, USA Today ran an editorial against H.R. 3077, the Title VI reform bill for the program that lavishes federal subsidies on area studies in universities. (Readers of this space know that I’ve been an ardent supporter of Title VI reform, and particularly of an advisory board that would match the program’s priorities with national needs.) The premise of the editorial: Why, Title VI is humming along just fine! Take a look at the University of Michigan, for example. They’re helping the U.S. government to understand terrorism, and they’ve boosted their Arabic enrollments tenfold! Michigan and the others have their shoulders to the wheel, producing Arabic translators for government service! Can’t Congress just leave well enough alone, and trust the profs for a change?

The absurdities embedded in this editorial so incensed me that I had a response on this site before the newspaper landed on most doorsteps. Okay, take the University of Michigan for example, I wrote. Michigan’s Mideast faculty had refused to partner with the government in its flagship program for intensive Arabic study on campuses. The political rationale, as explained by one professor: “We didn’t want our students to be known as spies in training.”

So while Michigan was happy to suck Title VI dollars out of Washington for doctoral students who worship at their professors’ feet, they wouldn’t hear of training anyone for government service. As I put it: “Some prof or public relations official at Michigan duped the editors at USA Today into presenting the professors at Ann Arbor as team-players in the war on terror, when in fact they’ve refused to play ball.”

Now we learn who that Michigan prof was, because he’s written about the campaign he helped to run against H.R. 3077. He’s sociologist Michael D. Kennedy, an expert on Eastern Europe, and at the time he was vice provost for international affairs. Kennedy now claims to have inspired that USA Today editorial, as his contribution to the campaign run by dozens of deans and vice provosts across America.

Not surprisingly, it turns out that not everything in the editorial was factually true. “The numbers of Arabic language students increased,” Kennedy now writes, “but not tenfold.” That was a “mistake,” although it’s not clear who made it, and I saw no evidence at the time that Kennedy rushed to correct it. But this was only one small untruth in the parade of lies that marked academe’s campaign against H.R. 3077. It was almost more than I could do to keep up with the fabrications that poured forth from otherwise respectable academic leaders. The campaign taught me that when it comes to keeping their entitlements free of accountability, vice provosts are just as loose with the truth as tobacco lobbyists.

Kennedy’s account runs something like this. In 2003, Title VI came under “attack” from a band of politically-motivated marauders on the margins of Middle Eastern studies, who only wanted to “inflame political passions.” They got a lot more traction than they deserved, because their message plugged into popular discontent about bias in the universities. They’ve been beaten back, at least for now, due to “many people [who] worked very hard to put the cruder Title VI critiques in their proper place,” and thanks to that old stalwart, Sen. Ted Kennedy (no relation, I presume).

Still, warns Professor Kennedy, the “ideologues” could be back, so the best defense is to show that area studies are willing partners of government, that they aren’t averse to trading ideas with officials, that they really are relevant to issues of national security. “The debate about security,” Kennedy writes, “should move more toward the center of our academic missions.”

Professor Kennedy goes still further, arguing that there’s nothing wrong with academics who rub shoulders with national security agencies. “There are certainly some academic colleagues who would not approve of seminars involving the military, CIA, or even State Department officials,” Kennedy allows, “but then we also have colleagues who don’t approve when Shell executives come to town, or when students organize Palestinian Solidarity conferences, or when gay issues are taught in the class room.” In other words: so what?

Imagine! And from Ann Arbor! That’s a sign of real progress, and I and my fellow “ideologues” are pleased to seize some of the credit for it. It used to be that such contacts had to be concealed in shame. Now they’re paraded as evidence that federal subsidies are justified. That wouldn’t have happened were it not for the Title VI controversy.

So I’ll set aside Professor Kennedy’s pompous depiction of area studies as a seat of “analytical rigor and intellectual integrity,” as opposed to the “politicized ideology” represented by Title VI reform advocates like Stanley Kurtz and myself. That’s provost-speak. Politicized ideology runs rampant throughout area studies (think Columbia, or Juan Cole, University of… yes, Michigan). But if attacking us makes it easier for liberals on campus to justify government partnerships to the campus radicals—well, so be it. That’s academic politics. Kurtz and I can take it, as we take our bow.

P.S. Title VI reform, round two, looms just up the pike. I’ll say more shortly.