Category: Sandbox

Policy and the academy

On By Martin Kramer

“Scholars on the Sidelines” is the headline of an op-ed by Harvard’s Joseph Nye in Monday’s Washington Post. There he notes that the Obama administration has appointed few political scientists to top positions, and predicts a widening of the divide between policymaking and academic theorizing. His Harvard colleague Stephen Walt has echoed the complaint, placing the blame upon scholars who follow what he calls “the cult of irrelevance.” Michael Desch, a Notre Dame political scientist, also has written in the same vein in a new piece entitled “Professor Smith Goes to Washington,” claiming that while Obama may be “depopulating the Ivy League and other leading universities with his appointments,” it’s unlikely the academics can match the influence of the think tanks or overcome the anti-intellectualism that pervades society and government.

I addressed the question myself, in an article entitled “Policy and the Academy: An Illicit Relationship?” originally delivered as a lecture in 2002. The occasion was the tenth anniversary of the passing of Elie Kedourie (1926-1992), who taught politics at the London School of Economics and whose work has had an abiding influence upon many students of the Middle East, myself included. My subject was a short essay by Kedourie, dating from 1961, entitled “Foreign Policy: A Practical Pursuit.” I explored (and contested) Kedourie’s principled belief that policy and the academy should not meet, and that the divide benefited them both.

My piece is on the web and many have read it. But now that this debate has resumed, I think it useful to provide access to Kedourie’s own text—a trenchant 1,100 words—which I think speaks rather more forcefully than my synopsis of it. Read his piece first, and only then read my discussion of it. (By the way, the poet he quotes is Eliot; the poem, Gerontion. And yes, Kedourie usually did put “social scientists” in quotation marks.)

Too late to stop Massad?

On By Martin Kramer

Isn’t it too late to stop tenure for Joseph Massad? This question has been posed to me by a reader, in light of the claim by Massad (via the Angry Arab) that he’s already been tenured.

There’s no way for someone outside the system to know for certain where the process stands. But we do know this: when the Columbia Spectator sought to confirm the rumor launched by Massad via his friend, it found it to be false. The Spectator called it “chatter,” and added this: “The outcome of the controversial Palestinian scholar’s tenure process remains to be seen and the review has not concluded.” (My emphasis.) The article goes on to explain the review process, which is also laid out in the Faculty Handbook. Once the ad hoc tenure committee has made a recommendation to the Provost, the department chair must inform the candidate of that recommendation. But a favorable recommendation still must be approved by the Provost and the President, before presentation to the Board of Trustees. The ad hoc committee only serves in an advisory capacity to the Provost.

Let’s assume for argument’s sake that Massad has been notified that the ad hoc committee has recommended in his favor, and that’s why he’s informing his friends that he’s been tenured. Is a favorable recommendation effectively the end of the process? The same Spectator article quotes Alan Brinkley, outgoing Provost: “The most important part of the tenure process is the ad-hoc committee. Usually there is a strong connection between what the ad-hoc committee decides and what subsequent steps in the process do. They usually are all the same.”

The key word here is “usually.” Indeed, the Faculty Handbook describes as “unusual cases” those instances in which the Provost, President, or Trustees overrule a favorable recommendation by an ad hoc committee. But just how unusual are they?

For the period between 1989 and 1997, we know the answer to that question, because Columbia’s then-Provost Jonathan R. Cole went before the Faculty Senate to review the statistics of all the tenure decisions made between those dates. He revealed that there had been 304 ad hoc reviews during the eight-year period, 38 of which ended in tenure denial. The Provost was responsible for 14 of the 38 denials, having overruled favorable committee recommendations. Put another way, ad hoc committees made 280 positive recommendations, and the Provost (Cole during the entire period) rejected 14 of them—a rejection rate of exactly five percent.

So rejections of favorable committee recommendations, while “unusual,” weren’t unprecedented or even rare in Cole’s time. Indeed, overruling by the Provost appears to be a routine method of tenure denial: in the period reported by Cole, 37 percent of all tenure denials after full review constituted cases of the Provost overruling an ad hoc committee.

Massad’s case is unusual by any reckoning, and would be treated with additional scrutiny by the Provost. But even if the Provost were to recommend tenure, this wouldn’t absolve President Bollinger of his personal responsibility. The Faculty Handbook stipulates: “Upon completion of his or her review, the Provost will submit a recommendation to the President on whether the candidate should be awarded tenure. A nomination is forwarded to the Trustees for their approval only if the Provost and President are satisfied that the candidate deserves tenure.” Massad cannot be tenured unless President Bollinger is satisfied that he deserves it—and, presumably, tells the Trustees why.

It isn’t surprising that it’s come to this: that the faculty would recommend tenure, and that the administration alone would have to assume responsibility for any decision to reject Massad. And as the tenure review seems to have reached just that critical point, the evidence on Massad needs full public airing now more than ever. This is the moment of truth—for Columbia, for President Bollinger, and for the survival on Morningside Heights of what President Bollinger has called the “scholarly temperament.” I heard him, in person, describe his ideal in his Cardozo Lecture at the New York City Bar Association on March 23, 2005, and I’ve quoted his words often:

To set aside one’s pre-existing beliefs, to hold simultaneously in one’s mind multiple angles of seeing things, to actually allow yourself seemingly to believe another view as you consider it—these are the kind of intellectual qualities that characterize the very best faculty and students I have known and that suffuse the academic atmosphere at its best.

Joseph Massad hasn’t a single one of these qualities. If President Bollinger notifies the trustees that he’s satisfied that Massad deserves tenure—something he must know to be untrue—it will be a devastating admission of failure—his and the university’s. Now we shall learn how much courage resides in Low Memorial Library.

Footnote: Read this damning new compendium of the wisdom of Massad. President Bollinger’s contact information is here.

Massad’s alcohol analysis

On By Martin Kramer

If you were a secular, liberal Palestinian intellectual (and perhaps a Christian to boot) living in the West Bank, would you have forebodings about Hamas coming to power? You might, and with good reason. Edward Said agonized over the Hamas problem, before reaching this conclusion: “For any secular intellectual to make a devil’s pact with a religious movement is, I think, to substitute convenience for principle.”

Ah, but there’s another explanation for this secular, liberal reticence, offered by the deep, brilliant and possibly tenured Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, Joseph Massad. From the heights of Morningside, he assures us that these Palestinians oppose Hamas because… it might take away their booze. Here he goes:

West Bank-based Palestinian intellectuals, like their liberal counterparts across the Arab world, have been active in the last several years in demonizing Hamas as the force of darkness in the region. These intellectuals (among whom liberal secular Christians, sometimes referred to derisively in Ramallah circles as “the Christian Democratic Party,” are disproportionately represented) are mostly horrified that if Hamas came to power, it would ban alcohol. Assuming Hamas would enact such a regulation on the entire population were it to rule a liberated Palestine in some undetermined future, these intellectuals are the kind of intellectuals who prefer an assured collaborating dictatorship with a glass of scotch to a potentially resisting democracy without….

The journey of West Bank liberal intellectuals, it seems has finally come to this: after being instrumental in selling out the rights of Palestinians in Israel to full equal citizenship by acquiescing to Israel’s demand to be recognized as a racist Jewish state, and the rights of the diaspora and refugees to return, they have now sold out the rights of Palestinians in Gaza to food and electricity, and all of this so that the West Bank can be ruled by a collaborationist authority that allows them open access to Johnny Walker Black Label (their drink of choice, although some have switched to Chivas more recently). In this context, how could Israel be anything but a friend and ally who is making sure Hamas will never get to ban whiskey?

This isn’t tongue-in-cheek. That’s it—the sum of Massad’s political analysis of why, in Ramallah, there’s no desire to fall into the grip of Hamas and its “resisting democracy.” Massad’s approach is always the same: caricature and dehumanize anyone who won’t kill and be killed to destroy Israel—even (and especially) if they’re Palestinians and their sympathizers. Massad once even claimed that the regret over Gaza’s secession expressed by the late Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish “can be explained by the monthly checks [Darwish] receives from the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority.” If it’s not booze, it’s cash. A bit reductive, even for Columbia.

And what of Professor Massad? When the New York Times visited him at home in Manhattan to profile the armchair resister, it reported that the reading material on his coffee table was The World Atlas of Wine. “His elaborate freestanding Egyptian water pipe is stoked with apple-flavored tobacco as a weekend indulgence, accompanied by Cognac, after dinner parties.” How ennobling it is to champion Hamas—from a safe distance.