Category: Sandbox

The Transregional Institute, ever so diverse

On By Martin Kramer

Today’s New York Sun reports that Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor at Columbia, who’s only just sat down in the chair, has tossed his name in the hopper for a chair at Princeton. This one would put him in the driver’s seat of something called the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. (Website here.) I’ll probably have more to say about this interesting twist, but for now I’ve unearthed what I wrote about the Transregional Institute in 2002, just to put it back on the record. It conveys the flavor of the place, and suggests why Khalidi might be just the right man. This is what I wrote:

When Israelis and Palestinians clash, the academic tribes rally. It’s happening once more across America. Activist organizations spring into action. Faculty members speak out. All of this is legitimate. What is illegitimate is when the very institutions of a university–academic units such as departments, centers, and institutes–turn themselves into blatant partisans of one side or the other. This is just what happened at Princeton in the spring of 2001.

Background: in 1994, Prince Moulay Hicham Benabdallah of Morocco, a Princeton alumnus, bestowed a hefty gift on the university to establish something called the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Princeton, of course, has a renowned department of Near Eastern studies, the oldest in the country. But the prince wanted something all his own and was prepared to pay for it. A Moroccan anthropologist, Abdellah Hammoudi, directs the vanity institute. It organizes conferences, many of them outside the country, and passes out a couple of fellowships each year.

This past spring, the Institute for Transregional Study announced a lecture series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When genuine academic units organize lecture series, the usual approach is to recruit speakers who will represent diverse views. After all, diversity is the mantra of the American university. In fact, what one often gets are identical views expressed by people of diverse backgrounds. Call it false diversity. The Institute for Transregional Study, in its spring lecture series, produced what must be regarded as the textbook case, the purest form, the ideal type, of false diversity.

The nine-lecture series brought together a truly broad collection of supporters, sympathizers, and apologists for the Palestinian cause. Celebrities? Edward Said and Richard Falk addressed the “end,” the “collapse” of the peace process, and who could doubt where they would lay the blame? Journalists? Inveterate Israel-basher Robert Fisk, of the London Independent, delivered his usual indictment. Sylvain Cypel, international correspondent of Le Monde, analyzed the approach of the French press, with its predictable sympathies. (Notice: no American journalists.) Academic experts? Palestinian professor Salim Tamari and Lebanese writer and militant Elias Khoury demanded the “right of return.” Sara Roy, perpetual “research associate” at Harvard University, once again explained Israel’s “political economy of dispossession.”

Israelis? Of course there were Israelis. After all: diversity rules the university. There were two. Ilan Pappe, the zealous anti-Zionist at Haifa University, a man for whom even the post-Zionists are Nakba-deniers, described what he thought would be a “fair settlement.” (Pappe thinks it must be based on Israel’s total and abject acceptance of all responsibility for the conflict and all of its consequences.) Amira Hass, the very engagé Palestinian affairs correspondent of Haaretz, now a resident of Ramallah, lectured on “The Israeli Policy of Closure: A Means of Domination and a Form of Neo-Occupation.”

And that was it. This was the entire line-up of the institute’s semester-long lecture series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

No doubt this would pass for diversity at the Mohammed V University in Rabat, former home to Professor Hammoudi. Perhaps it would pass for diversity in Moulay Hicham’s palace. It shouldn’t pass for diversity at Princeton. The question is whether Princeton will continue to ignore the abuse of its name for blatantly political purposes or will affirm the basic neutrality of its academic units–even a cash cow like the Institute for Transregional Study.

Well, it’s three years later, and although Hammoudi has stepped down, the mission is the same. The Transregional Institute is now recruiting fellows for next year, to work on this: “Society under Occupation: Contemporary Palestinian Politics, Culture and Identity.” The details of this exercise are here. According to the acting director, Miguel Centeno, the purpose of the fellowships is to “bring people onto campus to expand intellectual diversity.” Sure.

Khalidi and Hertzberg at NYU

On By Martin Kramer

Tonight, Rashid Khalidi appears with Arthur Hertzberg on a panel at New York University. The subject: “Academic Freedom in a Time of Conflict.” I’ve written about both speakers and their relationship over at Sandstorm, under the title “The Day the Rabbi Rescued Rashid.”

The subject tonight is academic freedom, but that’s not the issue. On Columbia’s campus, the faculty have every protection imaginable, and then some. And the fact that New York City has banned Khalidi from teaching its teachers is a sideshow. (That program was a non-academic activity done under contract off-campus. There’s room to debate the wisdom of the Department of Education’s action, and the way in which it acted, but it was fully within its rights to reject Khalidi, and its ban on him hasn’t impaired his academic freedom by a whit.)

No, the issue is this: what is Columbia’s obligation toward its students, when all of its faculty on the Middle East including Khalidi converge at one extreme point? If the Middle East faculty believe that one of the states in the region should be eliminated, and they are uniform in this belief, will this not inevitably affect their teaching, in ways that are subtle or blatant? And if it does, hasn’t the university an obligation to provide another view, presented by fully-credentialed persons with the very same protections of academic freedom enjoyed by all faculty? Do the rights of the present faculty extend to monopolizing the recruitment of future faculty? Or does the university, as a community, have the right to override the present faculty in order to promote diversity?

These are the real questions that arise from the Columbia case, and they go far beyond what an out-of-touch rabbi thinks of an increasingly out-of-bounds professor.

Update: Here is a morning-after report on the panel. A bit sketchy.

Pipes’s Partner

On By Martin Kramer

The following item appeared alongside a profile of Daniel Pipes in Harvard Magazine, January-February 2005. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

No study of Daniel Pipes would be complete without a few words about the trenchant Martin Kramer, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and former editor of Pipes’s Middle East Quarterly, who earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Princeton, where he studied with Dodge professor (now emeritus) Bernard Lewis. For both Kramer and Pipes, Lewis is the greatest twentieth-century representative of the group of Jewish scholars who played a key role in the development of “an objective, nonpolemical, and positive evaluation of Islamic civilization,” to use Lewis’s own words, someone far above what Pipes calls the “postmodern practice of stuffing the complexities of political science and history into bottles labeled race, gender, and class” characterizing the current field.

In his 2001 book, Ivory Towers on Sand, Kramer launches a withering attack on the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), asserting that there were acknowledged problems with competency and standards from its very inception, in 1966—indeed, as far back as 1955, when Sir Hamilton Gibb was brought in to head the new Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. Gibb, who “had wanted to bring Oriental studies and the social sciences together,” later lamented:

…it was not long before I realized how inchoate, indeed how naïve, all my previous ideas had been, in face of the actual problems involved in developing a programme of area studies that could stand up to the high standards demanded by the Harvard Faculty—and equally so to the best academic standards in this country.

“To speak plainly,” said Gibb, “there just are not yet enough fully-qualified specialists in any of the required fields to go round.” “When Gibb departed in 1964,” writes Kramer, “Harvard’s center nearly folded, and for years it relied upon visiting faculty. Harvard tolerated its Middle East center (it brought in money), but never respected it.”

It was the Arab-Israeli conflict in June 1967 that ignited what Kramer describes as the deepening politicization, the substitution of indoctrination for scholarship, and the Arab-Israel obsession that debilitated MESA. William Brinner, a Berkeley historian, saw it, and warned in his 1970 presidential address: “We do not seek an end to controversy, but we must realize that the price we will pay for political involvement is the destruction of this young Association and the disappearance of a precious meeting place of ideas.” And in 1974, the University of Chicago’s Leonard Binder, in his presidential address to MESA, cautioned: “Some day peace may break out, and then people will cease to be willing to pay us to tell them what they want to hear. What will we then do if we have no scholarly standing?”

But the coup de grâce for Middle Eastern studies, Kramer asserts, was delivered by Edward Said, the late Palestinian-American critic and University Professor and professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, in his 1978 book Orientalism. Said, writes Kramer,

situated the Palestinians in a much wider context. They were but the latest victims of a deep-seated prejudice against the Arabs, Islam, and the East more generally—a prejudice so systematic and coherent that it deserved to be described as “Orientalism,”the intellectual and moral equivalent of anti-Semitism. Until Said, orientalism was generally understood to refer to academic Oriental studies in the older, European tradition….Said resurrected and resemanticized the term, defining it as a supremacist ideology of difference, articulated in the West to justify its dominion over the East.

“The decadence that pervades Middle Eastern studies today,” wrote Kramer, “the complete subservience to trendy politics, and the unlikelihood that the field might ever again produce a hero of high culture—all this is owed to Edward Said.”

It didn’t take long for “Orientalist” to become a nasty word in Middle Eastern studies circles, as, for example, when Said himself, writing in Counterpunch in June 2003, referred to “Neanderthal publicists and Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes.” To which Pipes responded a day or two later, “How impressive to be called an Orientalist by the person who transformed this honorable old term into an insult.”