Saturday, May 17, 2008
Neoconservative critics have long charged Middle Eastern studies departments with anti-American bias. Now they've enlisted Congress in their crusade.
Nov 6, 2003 | On Oct. 21, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that could require university international studies departments to show more support for American foreign policy or risk their federal funding. Its approval followed hearings this summer in which members of Congress listened to testimony about the pernicious influence of the late Edward Said in Middle Eastern studies departments, described as enclaves of debased anti-Americanism. Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank, testified, "Title VI-funded programs in Middle Eastern Studies (and other area studies) tend to purvey extreme and one-sided criticisms of American foreign policy." Evidently, the House agreed and decided to intervene.
Emboldened by its dominance of Washington, the right is trying to enlist government on its side in the campus culture wars. "Since they are the mainstream in Washington think tanks and the right-wing corridors of Congress, they figure, 'Let's translate that political capital to education,'" says Rashid Khalidi, who was recently appointed to the Edward Said Chair of Arab studies at Columbia University.
It's not surprising that they started with Middle Eastern studies. There's a particular enmity between hard-line supporters of Israel -- who, with the extraordinary ascension of neoconservatives in the Bush administration, now dominate the American right -- and academics who specialize in studying the Arab and Muslim world. That enmity burst into open conflict after Sept. 11, when conservatives saw an opportunity to accuse Middle East academics not just of biased scholarship but of representing a kind of intellectual fifth column. Soon after the World Trade Center fell, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a Washington-based group co-founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., published a report called "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It," which listed examples of insufficiently patriotic behavior of the part of the professoriate and called universities the "weak link" in the war on terror.
At the same time, Martin Kramer, editor of the right-wing Middle East Quarterly, published a book called "Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America," in which he argues that academia, in thrall to romantic third-worldism, has turned a blind eye to the region's dangerous pathologies. Last year Daniel Pipes, a colleague of Kramer's who has since been appointed by President Bush to sit on the U.S. Institute of Peace, launched Campus Watch, a Web site devoted to monitoring Middle Eastern studies departments for signs of anti-American bias. He published dossiers cataloguing the political sins of some of the most respected professors in the field, and invited students to submit reports on their instructors.
Until recently, though, this fight has been rhetorical, confined to Web sites, books, magazines and lectures. Now, with HR 3077, the International Studies in Higher Education Act, the House has taken sides. If it becomes law, it will create a board to monitor how federally funded international-studies centers impact national security. The board will evaluate whether supporters of American foreign policy are adequately represented in university programs. Conservatives, says Kramer, "need to be able to compete on a level playing field with others."
Inherent in the act is the assumption that if most established experts believe American Middle East policy is bad, the flaw lies with the experts, not the policy. "There's the threat that centers will be punished for not toeing the official line out of Washington, which is an unprecedented degree of federal intrusion into a university-based area studies program," says Zachary Lockman, a New York University history professor and director of the school's Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.
The International Studies in Higher Education Act would not grant the government the power to exclude voices from Middle Eastern studies departments, but it would give the government a role in defining which views need to be included in the academic mainstream. The seven-member board it creates would make recommendations to Congress about how the centers "might better reflect the national needs related to the homeland security," and make sure that programs "reflect diverse perspectives and represent the full range of views on world regions, foreign languages, and international affairs." Two members of the board would represent national security agencies, while others would be appointed by Congress and the administration.
The bill also mandates that centers allow government recruiters full access to students in the centers. In the past, professors have resisted cooperating with national security agencies, fearing that if the line between independent research and government intelligence was blurred, they and their students might be targeted as American agents while studying abroad.
And because the bill mandates that centers train students for government service, Kramer hopes students who plan to pursue fields useful to national defense will be given special consideration when fellowships are awarded. Right now, he says, "If you're interested in gender in eighth century Cairo, you're just as likely to receive a grant as if you're interested in the discourse of Osama bin Laden. Studying gender in eighth century Cairo is perfectly valid, but I'm not sure it's a taxpayer priority."
Of course, right now all this is speculative -- the bill remains just a bill. "This is a bill that's passed the House," says Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, the country's foremost higher education lobby. "There are several other steps in the process. Obviously a lot of people remain very concerned about the bill. People will continue to try and perfect it."
The American Council on Education decided to support the bill, which also reauthorizes funding for area studies, after language was added to prohibit the board from reviewing syllabi or interfering with curricula. After all, says Hartle, there's nothing inherently objectionable about having a panel oversee federal grant-making programs. "Stanley Kurtz is someone who is looking for a conspiracy behind every tree, but that doesn't mean a properly constructed advisory committee has to be a threat," he says.
But many Middle Eastern studies professors fear that the committee will consist of the very neoconservatives who pushed for its creation. After all, the Bush administration routinely raids right-wing, pro-Ariel Sharon think tanks to fill foreign policy positions. (In the latest example, David Wurmser, a key neoconservative scholar known for his close ties to the Israeli right, was appointed six weeks ago as a Middle East advisor to Dick Cheney's national security team headed by Lewis "Scooter" Libby.) Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Michigan, worries that the International Studies Act would give the field's most vituperative critics a perch from which to judge their doctrinal opponents.
"One of the subtexts is they don't like criticism of Ariel Sharon and want to shut it down," says Cole, who formerly directed the school's Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, which could have its funding threatened under the act. "I could imagine the board making it a criterion that the politics of a faculty are not balanced, so the university must balance things out by hiring pro-Likud scholars, or else funding could be withdrawn."
Get Salon in your mailbox!