Tag: Rashid Khalidi

Radical Rashid

On By Martin Kramer

A journal called the Radical History Review, published by the Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc. (!), has just published an interview with Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor at Columbia University. I can’t possibly tackle this remarkable document in a single go—the dishonest elisions, the bombastic flourishes, the pompous posturing. It’s 200-proof Khalidi; you don’t drink it, you sip it.

Consider this strident claim: “There’s a ludicrous allegation that the universities are liberal. That allegation is ludicrous because huge chunks of the university which nobody ever talks about are extremely conservative by their very nature.” (Notice the trademark hyperbole: ludicrous, huge, extremely.)

Khalidi mentions business and med schools, but doesn’t stop there—no, he can’t stop there. For Khalidi is determined to prove that there’s a plot to snuff out the last embers of liberal dissent on campus. It’s here that Khalidi—carried away by his rhetoric and the prodding of his radical interviewers—goes right over the top.

“Where is there a law school that’s liberal?” Khalidi asks.

Well, there might be a couple of law schools that are slightly liberal. Slightly. But there’s a range of opinion in most of them, and most of them are quite conservative, and many of them are extremely conservative. The University of Chicago, for example. Nobody ever talks about that.

Does Khalidi have even a clue as to who populates the faculty of America’s law schools? A new study, the final version of which is about to appear in the Georgetown Law Journal, has researched the campaign contributions ($200 or more) of professors at America’s top 21 law schools over eleven years. 81 percent of contributing profs gave wholly or predominantly to Democrats; only 15 percent gave wholly or mostly to Republicans. “Academics tend to be more to the left side of the continuum,” commented the dean of Northwestern’s law school on the study. “It’s a little worse in law school.”

And what about the University of Chicago’s law school, which Khalidi cites as his prime example of an “extremely conservative” school? A study of the party political affiliation of law faculty has established that Chicago’s law profs include 55 Democrats and 8 Republicans—a ratio of about 7 to 1. (That’s only “conservative” by the standards of Columbia, where the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 12 to 1.)

Alright, you say, so Khalidi probably doesn’t know much about law schools. But how about schools of international relations and international affairs? He should definitely know the score there, right? After all, at the University of Chicago he directed the Center for International Studies. At Columbia, he directs the Middle East Institute, part of the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). So here he goes: “Most schools of international affairs are conservative (i.e., security studies). They’re not extremely conservative, necessarily, but they’re certainly not left-liberal or liberal.” Certainly not.

Now as it happens, the current issue of Foreign Policy has an article summarizing the findings of a fall 2004 survey of international relations faculty. The survey asked them this question: “How would you describe your political philosophy?” This is how the researchers summed up the answer to this and other questions:

Sixty-nine percent of international relations professors, describe themselves as liberal; a scant 13 percent see themselves as conservative. They overwhelmingly opposed the U.S. war in Iraq, almost unanimously believe that the United States is less respected in the world because of it, and they think that this loss of respect poses a significant problem for U.S. foreign policy. Seventy-seven percent of them support free trade, and only 10 percent believe the United States should beef up its military budget.

So Khalidi’s claim that “most schools of international affairs are conservative,” and that “they’re certainly not left-liberal or liberal,” is also fact-free (perhaps “ludicrous” would be the right word).

All this leaves one wondering just what’s going on in Khalidi’s head. The answer, of course, is that Khalidi is a radical. If you’re a campus radical, you dismiss anyone who isn’t totally with you as a “conservative” or an “extreme conservative.” You may be surrounded by people who view themselves as liberals, who opposed the Iraq war, who believe in “soft power.” But because they won’t denounce America as a resurrected empire or rally to the likes of Joseph Massad, you cast them all as “conservatives” who are part of the problem.

That’s why I’ve never understood the willingness of liberals to see Khalidi as a “friendly.” Behind their backs, to his soulmates at the Radical History Review, he trashes them contemptuously. He’s most dismissive of the liberal university administrators (you know, the ones who’ve provided him with job after job). He thinks they too are conservative drones, who haven’t done enough to defend academic freedom:

The institutions are all cautious and conservative. And everybody is worried about alienating this senator, or that committee, or this department of government, because the universities are deeply dependent on the government… This university won’t do it because the president feels this way, that university may not because they have a Republican governor who will be angry.

Given that some of these timid liberals have gone out of their way to help radical Rashid shimmy up the academic pole, he probably regards them as useful idiots. He’d be right.

Addendum: Visit this entry at Sandbox for an additional comment by Martin Kramer on the Khalidi interview.

Unreal Rashid

On By Martin Kramer

Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor at Columbia, gave an interview to the Radical History Journal, and it’s a gem. The interviewers wanted his take on Title VI reform, but they got a lot more: a rambling compendium of excessive statements on a wide range of issues. In a new Sandstorm column, I look at one of the most bizarre assertions in the interview: Khalidi’s insistence that universities and their faculty are conservative.

But alongside the wild claims are some astonishing confessions. In the rush of questions and answers, Khalidi inadvertently concedes many of the very points made by academe’s critics. Here he is on scholarly objectivity: “Now, I’m with Edward Said. There’s no such thing as opinionless, objective scholarship.” Here he is on the tenure process: “It is in some sense a corrupt system, but I can’t think of what the alternative would be.” And here he is on faculty indoctrination: “It has to be admitted that this issue of abuse of authority, which the Right is using as a stick to beat us up with, is not entirely illusory. I mean, there is an issue there…. There’s probably a way in which the academy is forcing a kind of mindless conformity on students.” It’s not every day that a chaired professor admits that scholarship is biased, the tenure system is corrupt, and students are forced to conform. These statements are smoking guns, and they suggest that we’ve just scratched the surface at Columbia.

The interview also includes an enraged tirade against proponents of Title VI reform. “They are political, and we’re not political,” he tells his fellow radical historians a statement that shouts its absurdity to the heavens. “We’re never going to be as good at the kind of mudslinging and the kind of deceitfulness that these people are masters of. There’s just no way that we can get so far down in the gutter as them successfully…. These are people going for the jugular. These are people who want to destroy things…. They’re operating on a level of a kind of slimy attack politics, which actually has become a very important part of the right-wing arsenal in the United States…. It’s Karl Rove, and the Christian Right, and the neoconservative right wing that really is behind this. The Middle East and the specific concerns of these people have an important role. But this is bigger than that…. Reality bears no relationship whatsoever to the lies and falsehoods that they’re putting out.”

Well, I don’t sit atop the Olympus of truth and apolitical virtue that is the Edward Said Chair. And I’m sure the gutters at Columbia are so clean that its students can eat out of them. But read my column, and decide for yourself whether reality bears any relationship whatsoever to Khalidi’s depiction of it.

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.