Tag: Yale

Cole and Yale

On By Martin Kramer

On Tuesday, Juan Cole posted this appeal on his website, Informed Comment:

If among my loyal readers there are any attorneys with expertise in libel law, in the US or UK, who might be willing to consult on a possible series of lawsuits for reckless defamation of character resulting in professional harm–done on a contingency basis–I’d much appreciate hearing from you.

Cole doesn’t say who he’s got in mind as targets of a suit, but a few likely candidates come to mind. One is David Horowitz, who’s included a Cole entry in his new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. According to a press report, “Cole called the chapter on him ‘dishonest’ and said that it is ‘if not libelous, then verging on it.’ He declined to say if he’s planning any legal action.” (A propos, Cole’s written before that Horowitz “has extremely wealthy backers.”) But in the very same press article, Cole seems to undercut any possible claim that Horowitz has done him harm: “I think [Horowitz] has no impact whatsoever. He’s not relevant to our academic governance or the way we make decisions in the academy.” So Cole himself has dismissed Horowitz as harmless.

Just how does anyone do “professional harm” to a tenured full professor? It’s a question posed in the (moderated) comments section of Cole’s weblog appeal. Writes one reader: “If you were fired from your job as a professor over these published defamatory statements that would be one thing. Short of that I can’t see it.” Writes another: “If one is a middle aged college professor whose primary source of income remains intact, it starts to get to be difficult to prove how much income has been lost.” In fact, it’s obvious that Cole has a job for life at the University of Michigan. Tenured American academics are the most protected and secure class in the history of all humankind. No one could say anything about Cole–and there is nothing that Cole could say–that could cost him his Ann Arbor sinecure.

So what “professional harm” could possibly have been done to him? It’s here that Cole’s commentators have missed the point. In American academe, the coming of middle age is the moment of truth. Every professor fantasizes about getting the summons from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. They may have reached the summit of achievement in their own institutions, but they covet the prestige of the top three. Cole seems to be no exception, as we read in an article published last week in the Yale Herald. There it’s confirmed that Cole is a candidate for a new contemporary Middle East slot at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies.

The article also quotes a few of Cole’s critics, including Alex Joffe of Campus Watch, and Michael Oren, who’s a visiting professor at Yale. The reporter got this reaction from Oren to a typical Colecism:

On Feb. 17, 2003, Cole wrote in an online post, “Apparently [Bush] has fallen for a line from the neo-cons in his administration that they can deliver the Jewish vote to him in 2004 if only he kisses Sharon’s ass.” Oren said of this comment, “Clearly, that’s anti-Semitism; that’s not a criticism of Israeli policy. If you’re accusing Jews of manipulating the American government to fight wars for Israel without any evidence, then that’s not legitimate criticism; that’s in the area of racial hatred.”

A named Michigan student is also quoted, to the effect that when she met Cole to discuss her interest in studying Arabic in Egypt, she deliberately avoided mentioning her Judaism or Zionist beliefs. “I didn’t want him to see me in his eyes as a Jewish student, but as a serious student of Middle East studies who wanted to talk to him about Arabic.”

All this doesn’t bode well for Cole at Yale, which may be why he’s feeling professionally harmed these days, and wondering whom to sue over it. After all, isn’t he obviously deserving of a Yale professorship? Isn’t he the most famous professor of Middle Eastern studies in America today? President of the Middle East Studies Association? Regular columnist at Salon.com? Doesn’t he “command Arabic”? (And he’s studied eight or nine languages!) And look at that weblog! Those insinuations of antisemitism are blocking his path to destiny! (And by making an appeal for legal advice on his website, Cole also is setting up his “loyal readers” should Yale turn him down. It will be because he was libelously tarred with antisemitism by the Likudniks and neocons.)

Of course, that would suggest that appointments at Yale are subject to manipulation by Likudniks and neocons, an absurd notion. So in the event that Yale does pass Cole over, it’s likely to be because his scholarship, and commitment to scholarship, fall short of Yale standards. How might Yale reach that conclusion?

Celebrity and scholarship aren’t necessarily correlated. An argument could be made–it’s one I’d accept–that Cole hasn’t produced a single scholarly work of significance to Middle Eastern studies as a whole. He’s produced a few specialized monographs and conference volumes, a couple of compendia of his own articles, and translations of Kahlil Gibran (which sell better than anything else he’s written). Some of his major areas of interest (Bahai studies, 19th-century Iran, Shiism) also overlap those of Yale historian Abbas Amanat (who happens to be on the search committee), so it’s not exactly clear how much added value Cole would bring to Yale.

Moreover, in the years since 9/11, while people like Fawaz Gerges and Mary Habeck have belted out important books on Al-Qaeda, Cole has spent his time obsessively blogging, summarizing news reports and spewing out political invective. In his middle age, at a time when serious historians produce their great works of synthesis, Cole has turned into a journalist. Academics would be right to wonder how anyone can blog with this intensity and still produce any sustained scholarship. I certainly wonder, and I say that as an academic blogger of long standing. The price of blogging is paid in scholarship.

But the major objection to Cole surely must be that he doesn’t know the contemporary Middle East. Cole did all his scholarly work on the 19th century (his monographs on the Urabi revolt, Shiite Lucknow, and Bahai modernization). He has not made a speciality of the contemporary Middle East, and it shows. Time and again, I’ve expressed wonderment at his errors. (On the right sidebar here at Sandbox, scroll down to “Juantanamo!” for links to my major Cole-itis attacks.) Tony Badran has done the same for Cole’s purported knowledge of Lebanon, and IraqPundit has covered Cole’s Iraq gaffes. When it comes to Israel, which is also situated in the contemporary Middle East, not only is Cole embarrassingly ignorant but, worse, he doesn’t seem to be aware of it.

So I would be surprised, and even shocked, if Yale appointed Juan Cole. The fact that he’s under serious consideration (and that Princeton has considered Rashid Khalidi) is just more evidence of the enormous generation gap in Middle Eastern studies. For over thirty years, the best people have avoided the field, and mediocre people have flourished in it. Now that there’s intense student demand for courses on the modern Middle East, provosts and deans are in a quandary. It’s at times like this that our “great universities” earn the name. They do so by upholding scholarly standards and protecting their students from “professional harm.”

Yale Daily News Flunks Verbal

On By Martin Kramer

As a Princetonian, my expectations from Yale have never been very high. But I always assumed that the best of its students—or at least those students who edit the Yale Daily News—could read a text in English. This morning, even that assumption was shaken.

I refer to an editorial in today’s edition, under the headline: “Bill’s ‘Advisory Board’ is Cause for Concern.” The reference is to the International Studies in Higher Education Act, or H.R. 3077. (Full text here.) The bill would continue long-standing federal subsidies for area studies in universities. It also would establish a board to advise the Department of Education and Congress on how to improve supported programs. When the bill was in committee in the House of Representatives, academics expressed concern that the proposed board could go beyond general priorities, to delve into the curricula of individual programs. So the bill was modified to include this provision:

Nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize the board to mandate, direct, or control an institution of higher education’s specific instructional content, curriculum, or program of instruction.

By any objective reading, that passage is unequivocal—indeed, it was probably dictated by the higher education lobby—and it trumps every other provision of the bill. It manifestly bars the board from mandating, directing, or controlling university curricula. That’s one reason the bill received unanimous bipartisan support in the House, whence it has been sent to the Senate.

Yet you won’t know that this safeguard even exists, if you rely on today’s Yale Daily News. It says this about the purpose of the board:

The act would create a federal advisory committee to oversee the curricula of foreign language and area studies programs that receive government funding. The Yale Center for International and Area Studies, which receives more than $5 million of federal funding annually, would be subject to any such curricular review….Even if the Bush administration is well-behaved, such input into curricula opens the door to dangerous behavior in the future.

“Oversee curricula”? “Curricular review”? “Input into curricula”? Do the editors of the Yale Daily News suffer from a collective reading disability? This spin on the bill is so at odds with its language that it leaves you wondering about the basic comprehension skills of the Yale editors. This doubt is reinforced by an earlier piece contributed by one of the newspaper’s regular columnists, containing this astonishing passage:

According to the language of the bill, professors whose ideological principles may not support U.S. practices abroad can have their appointments terminated, any part of a course’s curriculum containing criticisms of U.S. foreign policy can be censored, and any course deemed entirely anti-American can be barred from ever being taught.

When I first read this passage—written by a Yale senior—my jaw dropped. There is nothing whatsoever in the language of the bill to support a single one of these assertions. In the real world, this sort of thing—making it up—will get you failed out of journalism school, or fired by your newspaper.

But the explanation of poor comprehension is probably too simple, so let me offer a more sinister one. In the very first news story about the bill in the Yale Daily News, it was reported that some Yale professors opposed it. The university’s vice president for federal relations, Richard Jacobs, told the newspaper that Yale had already started to lobby key senators, including Sen. Christopher Dodd (D.-Conn.), against parts of the bill. Dodd sits on the Senate committee that has received the bill from the House (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, or HELP).

In other words, even before the Yale Daily News ran its first story, the Yale administration had opened a backstairs campaign against the bill. So the newspaper is dutifully following the lead of the administration and faculty. It reminds me of how Pravda picked up signals from the Politburo and amplified them—including the crude falsehoods.

So Yale is running a deliberately misleading campaign, relying on distortions, incitement, and the pliant editors of the campus newspaper, in order to leverage Sen. Dodd into opposing the bill. Why? Look at the composition of the HELP committee on which Sen. Dodd sits. Nearly all of the Republicans and most of the Democrats come from states whose institutions get little or no federal money for Middle Eastern studies, and not much more for area studies. Sen. Dodd is one of the few committee members who has constituents who receive the subsidy. And so Yale has assumed the responsibility of running a campaign directed at Sen. Dodd, on behalf of the entire area studies crowd.

What can you do to counter the lobbying efforts of big academe? If you are a resident of Connecticut, it’s easy: click here for a form and write to Sen. Dodd. Tell him that you fully support H.R. 3077 and the advisory board it would establish. Tell him that you are appalled by the deliberate distortion of the bill at the hands of its critics, especially at Yale. Tell him that the bill’s smooth passage is the least Congress can do to assure that this subsidy serves some national purpose at a moment of national need. For more arguments for the bill, read this address I gave two weeks ago, and follow the links from its right-hand panel.

If you’re not a resident of Connecticut, you can have just as much effect by writing the same things to Sen. Judd Gregg (R.-N.H.), chair of the HELP committee. Click here for a form or write directly to greggstaff@labor.senate.gov. Also check this list of HELP committee members, to see if one of your senators is on it, and write to that senator, with a copy to Sen. Gregg.

Yale Library Joins Intifada? While I am indulging my bias against Yale, I wonder why Palestinian propaganda posters are featured at the website of the library’s Near East Collection. Is it because the posters are such outstanding and rare holdings? (The stuff looks pretty commonplace to me.) Or is it because of the politics of the collection’s curator and chief faculty adviser, both of whom signed the extremist Yale divestment petition against Israel? Just wondering.