Author: Martin Kramer

“It’s noon. Do you know where your UCLA professor is?”

On By Martin Kramer

Exactly a week ago, university students around the country walked out on strike at midday, to protest a possible war against Saddam. When students strike, it denies no one a service. The point is self-denial: they’re prepared to sacrifice class time, for which they’ve paid good money, in order to demonstrate a point.

When faculty strike, that’s something else altogether. It really is denial of a service, to students who’ve paid good money for it. On a few campuses, some professors announced they were cancelling classes in solidarity with the student walkout. Universities have different policies on this sort of conduct, and one presumes they’ll uphold them.

The most ironic instance of class cancellation involved the UCLA historian Gabriel Piterberg. For a couple of years now, Piterberg has been striking the pose of an angry avant-garde radical. He harangues campus demonstrations, signs petitions, and teaches a course in post- and anti-Zionism. He even fabricated his own listing at Campus Watch, as though he were being persecuted for his ideas—a bald play for sympathy.

Now what is a poseur to do when an anti-war student strike looms? The Daily Bruin, UCLA’s student newspaper, popped the question to Piterberg the day before the walkout. And the question was pertinent: Piterberg teaches a midday seminar from 11 to 1 on Wednesdays. Piterberg gave this answer: “There is no way I can actively endorse it [the walkout], or not teach if there are students who choose to stay in class. That would be abuse of my position.” Ah, you say, professional ethics trump political commitment—as they should.

But that’s not the end of the story. Thursday’s Daily Bruin carried the news that Piterberg had “cancelled class and attended the rally.”

Piterberg, who teaches a 17-student history seminar at 11 a.m. on Wednesdays, said the vast majority of his class left to be a part of the demonstration.

“Only two students stayed,” Piterberg said.

After almost the entire class left, Piterberg decided to reconvene at 1 p.m. so students who wished to be a part of the walkout would not be punished.

“Politics are part of our lives, missing one class for an hour or two is not going to determine education. An important issue like war is going to affect education,” Piterberg said.

Need I say more? Piterberg said it himself—just a day earlier. He ended up abusing his position. And his student demonstrators got the best of both worlds: they got to pretend they had denied themselves a class session, when in fact Piterberg made it all up to them. A poseur gives a lesson in the art.

Columbia’s Troubles Bubble Up Through the Bubbly

On By Martin Kramer

Last night, Columbia College (the university’s undergraduate college) threw its big bash of the year: a black-tie gala at the Plaza Hotel, held in honor of five alumni recipients of the John Jay Award for professional achievement. One of them, the renowned classical composer John Corigliano, added what a report this morning calls a “moment of drama,” when he “briefly silenced the crowd with his muted but nonetheless unexpected criticism of Columbia’s Middle Eastern Studies program.” Corigliano reflected on his own undergraduate days:

I didn’t know it at the time, but I felt encouraged to go on and be a composer because I wasn’t discouraged by the kind of fundamentalist “there is only one way” kind of composing. I say this because throughout this country there has been an enormous, enormous amount of publicity about the various departments of Middle Eastern Studies, and about the fact that the anti-Israeli policy in these [departments] is enormous. And one can say that of the department of Middle Eastern languages and cultures at Columbia, that that’s true here.

According to the report, “Corigliano’s comments drew raised eyebrows but also sustained applause.” Bravo, maestro.

When this sort of complaint crops up in a midtown dinner (which, by the way, raised $700,000 for scholarships), you know that Bir Zeit-on-Hudson has a real problem. I predict it will get worse before it gets better. According to another press report, the Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC), the heart of darkness and home to such extremist luminaries as Hamid Dabashi and Joseph Massad, is already in the midst of a dramatic expansion. And the History Department, where Rashid Khalidi is about to become the Edward Said Professor, is also seeking to add an assistant professor. In the self-referential friend-brings-a-friend world of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia, it is Khalidi who will have the biggest say in that hire. In fact, the push for the junior slot was put off until Khalidi signed on. “If we were going to have a distinguished senior professor of modern Middle Eastern history, then [Khalidi] should play a central role in choosing who the junior person is in the field,” announced one member of the department. Does that sound like a formula for producing intellectual diversity, or like a mechanism for guaranteeing intellectual conformity?

Middle Eastern studies at Columbia, across all the departments, have functioned like a private club for more than a decade. Until the administration breaks it up, nothing will change. In the meantime, let’s acknowledge John Corigliano. The man who composed the Oscar-winning score for The Red Violin and the Pulitzer-winning Symphony No. 2 has done his alma mater a big favor. He said out loud what untold numbers of friends of the university are saying in private. This time the criticism was in a minor key. The next time, the university may not be so lucky.

UPDATE: Hamid Dabashi, the chair of MEALAC, has written an intemperate letter to the Columbia Daily Spectator, firing in all directions. Criticism of his department is denounced as “fabricated lies,” “pernicious lies,” “malicious misrepresentations,” “misguided accusations,” “insults to the dignity of my colleagues,” etcetera. It’s delightful to see this militant squirm under the heat of the spotlight.

“I find it particularly distasteful,” storms Dabashi, “that as we are honoring our alumni they can muster such rude audacity to discredit the very institution that is honoring them.” Really. The John Jay Award has two roles. In some cases, its purpose is to honor donors and friends. In others—like Corigliano’s—it is to allow the College to bask in the fame of a highly accomplished alumnus. Corigliano was perfectly within his rights to exclude a rogue department from his endorsement of today’s Columbia.

Dabashi—get this—also says he has written an “official letter” to the dean of the College, demanding an answer to this question: “Did he or anyone else from Columbia College publicly defend the good name and the dignity of my colleagues who have served generations of Columbia students honorably with the fruits of their teaching and scholarship?” That would have given the evening a splendid touch. It’s not enough that Columbia is pumping up MEALAC with new slots and resources. Dabashi expects deans to jump up in their tuxedos to defend MEALAC’s blatant excesses, against perfectly legitimate criticism.

Three times in his letter, Dabashi writes that the episode was an affront to the “dignity” of the department. “Dignity” isn’t an intrinsic characteristic of a university department: it has to be earned, and it can be lost. MEALAC’s “good name” is in serious question, and if its members want it back, they can take a first step: dump Dabashi.

Iraq: Another “Expert” Blind Spot

On By Martin Kramer

Where are America’s Iraq experts? According to one view, the media are hiding them from you. That’s the claim of Juan Cole, University of Michigan historian. He’s one of the establishment boosters of Middle Eastern studies, and a staunch defender of the Middle East Studies Association against all comers. (He also edits its quarterly journal.) In a recent piece, he complains that the media are ignoring America’s historians of Iraq—people who know about the country in its historical context. “It is an index of America’s longstanding anti-intellectualism,” he remonstrates, “that long hours of cable television news are filled with the views on Iraq of small town radio talk show hosts and retired colonels, but virtually no one who actually knows Arabic or has written substantially on the country appears on the small screen.”

He goes on to list the historians and their fields of expertise, and the reader’s eye races ahead to learn the names of those who’ve done contemporary work. Suddenly, we crash into this paragraph:

No American historian has essayed a major work on Baathist Iraq, for which the sources would have to be propaganda-ridden Iraqi newspapers, expatriate memoirs with an axe to grind, Western news wire reports, and what documents the U.S. government has been willing to declassify. Given the limitations of these sources, it is no wonder that most scholars have devoted their energies to the Ottoman and British periods, for which more documentation exists, the biases of which are more easily dealt with because passions have cooled with the passage of centuries.

I wonder whether Professor Cole is even aware that he has contradicted himself. He complains that the media have excluded Iraq “experts” from the public forum, even as he reports that those same “experts” have excluded Baathist Iraq from their own area of expertise. In fact, the real scandal is not the “anti-intellectualism” of the American media. There is no reason on earth for them to ask an expert on 19th-century trade in Mosul about the intentions of Saddam Hussein. The scandal is the admitted fact that American academe has not produced a single work on Baathist Iraq.

Millions of taxpayer dollars have been poured into this field—including, after the Kuwait war, a special appropriation for research fellowships called the Near and Middle East Research and Training Program, justified on the grounds of “national security.” You would have thought that at least one bright young man or woman would have gravitated toward the study of Baathist Iraq, which for over a decade has been America’s top national security concern in the Middle East. But no one did, and the answer is implicit in Cole’s own words.

I’d like to work on Baathist Iraq, says the student. Don’t waste your time, says the professor. The sources are too unreliable, the subject is too burdened with passions. If you insist on working on Iraq, tackle some remote period. (Unless, of course, you want to join the legions of Middle East “experts” who are “working” on the Palestinians: any period, any subject is just fine. Palestinian newspapers, memoirs, and oral testimonies are evidence, and the historian of the Palestinians has special dispensation to indulge his or her biases and passions.)

It’s the guild masters who have created a situation where Baathist Iraq has been excluded from the research agenda. Outside America, where the guild is run differently, invaluable work has been done on this very subject. There is Amatzia Baram’s book on the Baath’s manipulation of Iraqi identity. There is Ofra Bengio’s book on Saddam’s political discourse. They made excellent use, among other sources, of those “propaganda-ridden Iraqi newspapers.”

Nor is it true, as Cole says, that there is “more documentation” for the Ottoman and British periods. After the last Gulf war, the United States government brought eighteen tons of Iraqi official documents to Washington, a treasure trove seized by Kurds from Iraqi government offices. Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya and Human Rights Watch have made use of these documents. Not so historians and political scientists, who presumably are too busy studying “masculinities in Egypt” and “perceptions of the deaf in Islamic societies” (real research topics funded with “national security” appropriations).

In the lengthening indictment of Middle Eastern studies, Cole’s confession—”no American historian has essayed a major work on Baathist Iraq”—is one of the weightiest counts. That absence, like the absence of studies of Bin Laden, is the result of a skewed academic culture that systematically discourages policy-relevant research. Why Washington continues to pump money into this enterprise is more of a mystery than the doings of Saddam Hussein.

POSTCRIPT: Now the Boston Globe has published a piece confirming the point of this entry from other sources. Dick Norton (Boston University): “We don’t have a single academic expert in America who understands how Iraqi politics work in 2003, not a clue.” Judith Yaphe, National Defense University: “There’s nobody in this country who really knows the internal dynamics, the fabric of how Iraq works.” So where did all that federal money go?