Author: Martin Kramer

“Outreach” Outrage at Georgetown

On By Martin Kramer

In the debate over U.S. government funding for Middle East centers, supporters of the subsidies claim that evidence for bias in the centers is anecdotal. But collect enough anecdotes and you have a pattern. Centers that receive subsidies—National Resource Centers funded under Title VI of the Higher Education Act—are required to engage in “outreach” to the wider community, and they receive funds for that purpose. It’s precisely here that the anecdotes are easiest to collect, because it’s here that the bias reveals itself to outsiders.

Consider Georgetown University’s Title VI Middle East center, the “core” of which is its Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS). In the May issue of the CCAS News, the center’s “outreach” director, Zeina Seikaly, offers a report on her program’s spring workshop for teachers. Some 140 Washington area K-12 teachers participated in the April 9 event, entitled “Crisis with Iraq.” (That very day, Saddam’s statue came toppling down in central Baghdad.) The “outreach” program lined up five speakers to address the teachers:

  • Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the “progressive” Institute for Policy Studies and prolific antiwar activist. Her “talking points” on the war: it “is among the most dangerous and reckless actions ever taken by a U.S. president,” it “threatens our Constitution,” and it “stands in violation of the UN Charter and international law.”
  • Edmund Ghareeb, journalist and Georgetown adjunct professor. Prior to the war, Ghareeb claimed that Saddam had been wrongly “demonized,” called for the “immediate lifting of the embargo,” and proposed a “Marshall plan” to rebuild Iraq—without removing Saddam. He also joined sanctions critic Denis Halliday in an antiwar briefing for Congress.
  • Kalee Kreider, a public relations consultant and environmental activist (formerly with Greenpeace). She travelled to Iraq in December to handle “media liason” for an antiwar mission of the National Council of Churches.
  • Anas Shallal, founder of Iraqi Americans for Peaceful Alternatives—”a non-partisan, ad hoc organization whose primary aim is to stop the war against Iraq and its people.” Once asked about Saddam’s repression, he answered that it “really took place years ago,”and that the regime’s tyranny “is, in no small part, due to our involvement in the Middle East and Iraq for many, many years.”
  • Samer Shehata, assistant professor of Arab politics at Georgetown. After a visit to Iraq in December, he wrote a page-one report for the CCAS News, determining that the “sanctions regime against Iraq constitutes a ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction’ and a crime against humanity.” The report did not mention Saddam. “This war is about empire, oil, and unfinished business,” he told 1,000 educators when Operation Iraqi Freedom began. (He also told them that “the reason [the 9/11 attacks] were directed at the United States is because our policies in the Middle East stink.”)

In academe, this panel would be described as “diverse”—Arabs and Americans, men and women, academics and activists. In the real world, this is called a stacked deck. Georgetown’s “outreach” program employed five people, three of them with no connection to the university, to hammer area schoolteachers with five varieties of the antiwar message. Imagine what an incredible machine it must take to translate your tax dollars into an event such as this. Well, you don’t have to imagine it. It’s called Title VI.

On June 19, the House Subcommittee on Select Education held a hearing on reports of bias in the Title VI-funded programs at universities. That evening, MSNBC’s program “Scarborough Country” devoted a segment to the controversy. Stanley Kurtz, who had testified earlier in the day, presented the case against Title VI abuse. And who appeared to defend the program? Perhaps the president of the Middle East Studies Association? Perhaps a director of one of the fourteen Title VI Middle East centers? Perhaps the director of Georgetown’s center? No: Title VI was defended by Hussein Ibish, communications director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Why should Ibish, who is not an academic, accept an invitation to defend a government program for university-based Middle East centers? Precisely because of the sort of event held by Georgetown on April 9. Title VI “outreach” allows biased academics to bring in off-campus activists, and pay them lecture fees to propagandize teachers and the general public. All at the taxpayers’ expense.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. Title VI support is not abused by all area studies centers, or even by all Middle East centers. The problem is that there is no effective mechanism for identifying abuse and rectifying it in real time. Unless someone lodges a complaint, the Department of Education doesn’t even know about the content of events like the “Crisis with Iraq” workshop. In any case, its staff is in no position to analyze a speakers’ list for bias. So Georgetown continues to run grossly unbalanced programs, and no one calls it to account. Indeed, Georgetown’s Title VI Middle East grant has just been renewed for another three years.

This is why Title VI needs a supervisory board, as proposed by Kurtz. The board would provide ongoing oversight to these programs, supervise the work of review panels, investigate complaints of abuse, and reprimand or defund centers that have turned themselves into propaganda outlets. Title VI is under scrutiny because the Higher Education Act is up for reauthorization, so this is the time to make your views known. E-mail the chair of the Subcommittee on Select Education, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Michigan), at this address:

tellhoek@mail.house.gov

You can write him at this address:

Committee on Education and the Workforce
U. S. House of Representatives
2181 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515

And you can fax him at this number: (202) 226-0779.

Follow-up: Reading list at Georgetown. In an entry last week, I wrote that higher education lobbyist Terry Hartle (American Council of Education) had thrown sand in the eyes of the House Subcommittee, when he said this about Edward Said’s book Orientalism: “Even a cursory review of the syllabi of the Middle East Centers clearly shows this work only occasionally appears as an assigned reading or on a resource list.”

So let’s take the only Title VI Middle East center inside the Beltway—the one closest to Dr. Hartle’s office on Dupont Circle—as an example. Georgetown offers a master’s degree in Arab studies. It’s become a popular program since 9/11: according to the CCAS News, “this year there were 175 applications for 25 slots in the program, a 250-percent increase from just two years ago.” The day before yesterday, students admitted to this program received their summer reading assignment:

We also recommend that you begin reading the following books, which you will need to have read by the first class meeting (Monday, September 8th) of the “Introduction to the Study to the Arab World” course: Edward Said, Orientalism; Albert Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples; and Guity Nashat and Judith Tucker, Women in the Middle East and North Africa: Restoring Women to History. The first is a classic in the field of critical area studies; the other two are background readings that will lend necessary familiarity with major historical patterns.

Got that, Dr. Hartle? Before these elite students even cross the Potomac to begin their studies—some on Title VI fellowships— they are expected to have read through Orientalism at the beach.

The next time the Subcommittee calls a hearing on Title VI, it can dispense with Hartle and the American Council on Education—the lobby without a clue. Summon the subsidized professors from Georgetown, and grill ’em good.

Edward Said, Malcolm Kerr, and Honors at AUB

On By Martin Kramer

On Saturday, the American University of Beirut (AUB) will hold its annual commencement, and will award honorary doctorates for the first time in over thirty years. Among the recipients: Edward Said.

Edward Said is a big celebrity in Beirut, and AUB is his favorite theater. In 1999, he addressed 1,000 students there. “The atmosphere was almost like a carnival,” reported Beirut’s Daily Star. In 2000, he delivered AUB’s commencement address. In March of this year, he spoke once more at AUB; the Daily Star likened it to “an American rock concert for the learned and the not-so.” So there’s nothing daring or controversial in AUB’s decision to honor Edward Said. Yet there’s a bit of irony in it.

During AUB’s long night of war and instability, the university lost one of its presidents: Malcolm Kerr, assassinated at gunpoint on campus on January 18, 1984. Kerr had a special bond with AUB. His parents had been American educators there, and he was born in the AUB hospital. He studied at Princeton and Johns Hopkins, became a political scientist, and built an academic career at UCLA, where he became one of America’s leading interpreters of contemporary Arab politics. Kerr was also one of the founders and early presidents of the Middle East Studies Association. He returned to Lebanon to become the president of AUB in 1982, at the university’s darkest hour. Eighteen months later, his choice cost him his life.

Why mention Malcolm Kerr on the eve of this commencement? Kerr was the only American scholar to take a chisel to Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism, the work that catapulted Said to academic fame. In a review published in an academic journal in 1980, Kerr described the book as

spoiled by overzealous prosecutorial argument in which Professor Said, in his eagerness to spin too large a web, leaps at conclusions and tries to throw everything but the kitchen sink into a preconceived frame of analysis. In charging the entire tradition of European and American Oriental studies with the sins of reductionism and caricature, he commits precisely the same error.

It’s a great read. For all of it, click here.

Congress Probes Middle Eastern Studies

On By Martin Kramer

Consider this assessment of the influence of Edward Said on Middle Eastern studies:

In a work published in 1978, [Edward Said] argued that Western meddling in the Middle East throughout much of the 20th Century produced the conflict and turbulence that continues to plague that region of the world….This theory reached its apex of popularity more than a decade ago and has been waning ever since. Even a cursory review of the syllabi of the Middle East Centers clearly shows this work only occasionally appears as an assigned reading or on a resource list. Indeed, historians and political scientists rarely find this theory useful.

Hands on hearts, fellow academics: is this assessment even remotely accurate? Has Edward Said’s influence been in a decade-long decline? Is his 1978 book Orientalism only “occasionally” assigned or listed as a resource? Is he “rarely” invoked by scholars in the field?

The claim is absolute nonsense, as anyone who inhabits academe knows. Said is one of only two academics today (the other is Noam Chomsky) who draws an overflow crowd on any campus he visits and who always gets a standing ovation. (It happened again this spring at Berkeley and UCLA.) Just this past fall, on the anniversary of 9/11, American and European scholars of the Middle East, meeting in their first “world congress,” honored Said (and only Said) with their first-ever award for “outstanding contributions to Middle Eastern studies.” And needless to say, you cannot finish an undergraduate education in Middle Eastern studies without being assigned Orientalism several times over.

So who is the fellow making this absurd assertion about Said, and why is he making it?

His name is Terry Hartle, he’s a top lobbyist at the American Council on Education, and he made his claim in testimony last Thursday before the House Subcommittee on Select Education. His purpose: to absolve Middle Eastern studies of the charge that they remain under the spell of academe’s most virulent critic of American power and policy in the Middle East. Why should this interest Congress? Because there are people who are beginning to ask why American taxpayers should subsidize the activities of Edward Said’s acolytes, to the tune of several millions of dollars a year.

Poor Dr. Hartle. The Subcommittee, with very little notice, decided to conduct a hearing on Title VI, the federal program that subsidizes area studies, including Middle Eastern studies, at American universities. Since 9/11, higher education lobbyists like Hartle have been pushing for more Title VI funding, citing the threats emanating from the Middle East. The paradox is that the very Middle East “experts” who have been getting Title VI money for decades have been anything but prescient about changes in the Middle East. Even worse, a lot of them subscribe to Edward Said’s notion that the proper role of American scholars is to agitate against the alleged excesses of American neo-imperialism, both in the classroom and outside of it. The most brazen abusers have done this on the government’s nickle.

So Dr. Hartle was very busy on Thursday, covering up the sins of Middle Eastern studies. His job wasn’t made any easier by Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution, an indefatigable critic of the excesses of Title VI-subsidized centers and scholars. You can view the proceedings yourself, or read about them in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Sun, and the Subcommittee’s press release.

I do feel sorry for all the decent folk in other fields who get Title VI funding and make good use of it. Their colleagues in Middle Eastern studies, whom they’ve never held in particularly high regard anyway, have fouled the nest. A recent study of the membership of MESA shows that the age of members is rising, and that fewer of them have junior positions—all signs that departments have been avoiding the odious task of making new appointments in the field. Now schools of international affairs are faced with the prospect that the reckless antics of Middle East “experts” might undercut their own support in Washington. Thus, Hartle was quick to point out that Middle East centers are only a “small and specific part of the Title VI programs,” and that it is “a fairly small part of Title VI that has generated controversy.” The problem is that the rotten apples in Title VI specialize precisely in that part of the world that’s likely to remain at the top of the U.S. foreign policy agenda for years to come.

Title VI comes under the Higher Education Act, which is up for reauthorization, so now is the time to suggest fixes. Stanley Kurtz proposed to the Subcommittee a fair and equitable way to help Middle Eastern studies back to their senses, without gutting Title VI. (And believe me, there are some on Capitol Hill who would gut it in a flash.) The key proposal is establishment of a supervisory board for Title VI, similar to the boards that govern the Fulbright program, the National Security Education Program, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and other federally-supported educational and fellowship programs. Title VI is presently administered with a light hand by the Department of Education bureacracy, and money is disbursed through a peer-review process. All this is way too cozy and convenient for the academics, who have turned what began as a defense program into a semi-entitlement. A supervisory board would reestablish the exchange among academe, government, and society which is the intent of the law.

The academics won’t like another layer of accountability, but they’ll get used to it. In fact, one of them already has: Gilbert Merkx, a Latin Americanist and vice-provost at Duke, who is also co-chairman of the Council of Directors of Title VI National Resource Centers for Foreign Language and Area Studies. He also testified on Thursday, and offered strong support for Title VI. When asked by the chair of the Subcommittee panel for his view of a supervisory board, he said he didn’t favor the idea. But he added this:

If there is to be a review panel, I think it should be composed of the clients of the program, not of political appointees. I would recommend that there be an interagency group which would include representatives of the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA, and other agencies like Homeland Security, which are the kinds of agencies that hire people with the skills we produce. Those other agencies could work with the Department of Education to see that these programs are producing the manpower required.

Professor Merkx, you’re on. The board (or panel) would need some appointees by the White House and Congress—after all, Title VI mandates “outreach” programs, and that makes the general public a “client” as well. But I’d be perfectly happy to have a board with a majority of members appointed ex officio from the agencies named by Merkx.

I urge the Subcommittee to build on the opening offered by Merkx in his testimony, and to begin to work on draft legislation for the establishment of a Title VI board. If you feel similarly, e-mail the Subcommittee chair, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Michigan), at this address:

tellhoek@mail.house.gov

You can write him at this address:

Committee on Education and the Workforce
U. S. House of Representatives
2181 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515

And you can fax him at this number: (202) 226-0779.