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| Volume XIV, Summer 2007, Number 2 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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Academic Freedom after September 11, edited by Beshara Doumani. Zone Books, 2006. 250 pages. $21.95.
Eve M. Troutt Powell,
History department, University of Pennyslvania
“Palestine,” “Judea and Samaria,” “Palestinians,” “War of 1948,” War of “Independence,” “October War,” “Ramadan War,” “Yom Kippur War”: a professor’s choice to publicly utter any of these words can set off figurative bombs in lecture halls and seminar rooms across American university campuses. A name can signal the taking of sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict; and now university lectures, like the conflicts themselves, are fodder for articles, commentaries and perhaps Congressional intervention.
In the essays of this persuasive collection, Academic Freedom after September 11, the situation looks threatening and grim. The authors cite an increasing number of cases where Middle East studies faculty, most in departments of history or political science, have faced intense scrutiny, not only for their written work but also for how they lecture. Even the languages indigenous to the conflicts in the Middle East are now subject to examination by Congress. If HR 3077 is passed, members may decide to limit federal funding for university centers for teaching languages like Arabic if, after consideration by an oversight board, these centers appear to train students to view U.S. foreign policy too critically. The authors of these essays argue that academic freedom has never been challenged so systematically or with such political power.
Edited by Beshara Doumani, these six essays are the product of a conference held at the University of California at Berkeley in 2004. They are well written, well chosen and gracefully woven together in this volume. In part one, “Contending Visions,” essays by Robert Post, Judith Butler and Philippa Strum explore (and debate) the legal, historical and philosophical background of the construction of academic freedom. In part two, “Praxis,” essays by Kathleen Frydl, Amy Newhall and Joel Beinin examine the effects of challenges to academic freedom in the field of Middle Eastern studies. What links all of these sections is the recognition that such political confrontations occur at a dramatic confluence of historical events — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the events of September 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq — added to the profound changes to the ways in which universities seek and get funding, whether from federal agencies or private philanthropies.
In his introductory essay, Doumani writes that what makes the post-9/11 environment so distinctive is that it coincides with the emergence of the United States as sole superpower, on the one hand, and the political triumph of evangelically based political conservatism, on the other. These forces, when combined with the greater influence of private and corporate donorship on American universities, have contributed to a political climate in which “there is no field more radioactive than that of Middle East studies, and nothing more frowned upon than expressions of support for Palestinian studies” (p. 31). It is not only the history of the Palestinians that suffers. As presented in this essay, President Bush’s promotion of the War on Terror has relied on “a virulently anti-intellectual stand that insists that the enemy cannot be understood through the conventional interpretative concepts and units of analysis that the academy generates.” This has created a situation, at least in the eyes of the government, in which “the expertise of area specialists in particular and most scholars in the humanities and social sciences in general are made irrelevant” (p. 17). Academic specialists in Middle Eastern studies are blamed for not having predicted the events of 9/11, yet there continues to be a shortage of qualified and informed experts. As Doumani writes, “Such a shortage, of course, is one reason why the crisis occurred in the first place” (p. 23).
In the first essay, Robert Post looks at the first articulation of academic freedom: the “1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” published by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). This declaration expressed a reevaluation of the employment relationship between universities and professors, based on concerns that universities might fire professors at will for unpopular views. As Post notes, this declaration of academic freedom did not assert First Amendment rights for individuals, and that is its great strength. The 1915 Declaration ties “the protection of academic freedom to the production of a social good that the public actually requires.” But Post adds that such support would evaporate if “academic freedom were re-conceptualized as an individual right authorizing faculty to research and publish as they personally see fit” (p. 72). What further protects this construction of academic freedom is the assurance that “faculty within the university are free to engage in the professionally competent forms of inquiry and teaching that are necessary for the realization of the social purposes of the university” (p. 64).
Post, like all of the authors in this collection, protests the International Studies in Higher Education Act of 2003 (ISHEA) and its proposal that the secretary of education have discretion over allocations of Title VI funding for foreign-language and area-studies centers. ISHEA would also create an advisory board that would evaluate programming funded by Title VI. One of its supporters, Congressman Howard Berman (D-CA), contended that ISHEA would “help redress a problem which is a great concern of mine, namely the lack of balance, and indeed the anti-American bias that pervades Title VI-funded Middle East Studies programs in particular” (p. 89). For Post, the danger here is that “ISHEA uses an overtly political standard to override norms of professional competence and relevance” and thereby infringes on academic freedom (pp. 90-91).
This is a significant essay, full of insights into the history of academic freedom. But what seems missing is an understanding of the unfortunate effects of the marginalization of area studies (in general) and Middle Eastern studies (in particular) that simply would not occur if these fields were considered central to any American university. Area studies are by their very name marginalized. How many in Congress have taken such courses? How many other professors in universities have taken courses on the Middle East? I have heard specialists in American studies muse out loud that specialists in East Asian or Middle Eastern studies never really get to deal with the vast resources of documentation with which specialists in American history must be conversant! (I invited this colleague to join me in the National Archives of Egypt, but he demurred.)
If one cannot assume that university colleagues even acknowledge the important contributions made in Middle Eastern studies, then Post’s assertion of the power of professional norms seems vulnerable. His line of thinking raises questions for Judith Butler, who responds directly to Post in her essay, faulting him for not historicizing his arguments about academic norms. While agreeing that academic freedom should not be viewed as an individual freedom, she asserts that the conditions in which professional norms are formed have changed a great deal since 1915. Butler points out that the restrictions on grant funding proposed in ISHEA have already been self-imposed by influential major foundations like Ford and Rockefeller. This has already had, she asserts, a "strong influence on what will and will not be considered legitimate academic work" (p. 109).
As in the essays of Post and Butler, Philippa Strum also investigates how the idea of academic freedom developed in the United States, but she pays closer attention to the judicial rationale for the constitutional protection of academic freedom. While looking at what distinguishes scholars’ speech from the speech of other Americans, she wonders, in particular, about the rights to academic freedom of students. As she argues, the law had remained remarkably unclear about them as well as about the distinctions that could be made between faculties at private or public institutions, or scholars who work outside universities. Unlike Post and Butler, Strum considers academic freedom to be an individual right, but the lack of clarity in the law has rendered the academy vulnerable. As she writes, "The scholarly community’s failure to articulate the right to academic freedom as individual, with the institutional right understood as a necessary derivative of the individual right, has left the Supreme Court and the law of academic freedom, as currently defined, in the position of not being certain whether academic freedom belongs to the faculty or to the university” (p. 158).
Kathleen Frydl’s essay opens part two of Academic Freedom since 9/11 with an exploration of how understandings of academic freedom have changed on American campuses, especially when confronted with the privatization of universities. Who, she asks, will “exercise sovereignty” over the research university, and according to what logic? As she writes, “This — and not speech outside the classroom — is the front line of academic freedom” (p. 179). This essay, like many of the others, raises concerns over the impotence of academics’ assertion of their intellectual freedom, especially in an environment like Columbia University, where student complaints or funders’ stipulations seem to be changing the very mission of the university. Those who attack scholars of Middle East studies at Columbia seem to care little about this, or, as Frydl says, “The contempt for the academy of a Kurtz or a Pipes is plain for all to see” (p. 197).
This essay ends on a troubling note, however, and here I will quote it at some length:
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Those who seek to fundamentally alter important decisions of national life must understand that they have benefited from the system they now seek to change, and therefore their changes must speak to future generations and not simply the perceived needs of the present. If changes such as the proposed HR 3077 keep coming, and they will, academics who expect to defend values important to them simply and exclusively under the banner of freedom from state control will not have to wait long before their voices are rendered irrelevant. This rhetoric has no strengths against carrots, and it is also hypocritical. The knight who flies those colors also rides a mount and uses armor indirectly or directly provided by the state, and he must be prepared to disrobe and dismount if he wishes to join the battle (p. 199).
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The last sentence is powerful and evocative, but I found it unclear: Before whom is this gauntlet being thrown? Is Frydl saying that those of us who have benefited from federal or state funding in our research, language training and teaching need to remove ourselves from such dependencies before we join the battle and decry proposed challenges to what can and cannot be said or discussed in the classroom?
The title of Amy Newhall’s essay, “The Unraveling of the Devil’s Bargain: The History and Politics of Language Acquisition,” goes far in explaining what Frydl’s challenge to area-studies academics means. In this essay, the clearest of all the collection, Newhall describes the conundrum: “The situation is further complicated when those critical individuals or their institutions receive federal grants, particularly where there is great government demand for linguistic expertise” (p. 204). Who is biting the hand that feeds him?
It was fear of the Soviet launching of Sputnik in 1957 that galvanized Congressional creation and support for language training in the less-commonly-taught languages (LCTLs) — which ecompass all of the languages taught in Middle East-related language centers. Thus, “with the perception of linguistic competence as a national-security issue came the mission of achieving it as a federal responsibility” (p. 206). Very important institutions were born of this situation, institutions that touch upon the professional lives of almost all involved in Middle East studies in American universities, like Title VI and the Fulbright-Hays Program. This close connection between federal funding, issues of national security and area studies in U.S. universities has, as Newhall notes, always tarnished the credibility of American researchers in the eyes of Middle Eastern governments. In Egypt today, for example, “it is now almost impossible to obtain research permits to pursue twentieth-century history, religious movements, and women’s minority and civil society issues” (p. 217). Academia danced with the devil, then, and showed its own involvement in this lack of trust, “since it was content in earlier times to use these same arguments of national security to justify continued funding.” As Newhall continues, “Now the devil’s bargain is unraveling, to the detriment of both the government’s interest in excellent and productive language programs and academia’s interest in funding for free and wide-ranging research and innovation” (p. 227). This should be assigned reading for every member of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.
The final essay in this compilation is Joel Beinin’s “The New McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East.” Here Beinin identifies certain public intellectuals, think tanks and neoconservative groups that protest indignantly against certain Middle East centers as the “American Likud” — an American version of the more hawkish major Israeli political party. According to Beinin, the most visible and vocal of these American Likudists are Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, who have, after years of trying, managed to gain the ears and hearts of powerful members of the Bush administration.
This, in certain ways, makes the present intellectual environment worse for academics than during the days of McCarthyism. During the Cold War, as Beinin discusses, “The U.S. government had no choice but to rely on research universities as the primary source of expertise on the Soviet Union and the regions of Asia, Africa and Latin America that were contested during the Cold War” (p. 242). Most academics, according to Beinin, acquiesced in the institutional structure of the Cold War, but protests and opposition against government foreign policy grew substantially during the Vietnam War, during the Reagan Administration in reaction to its policies in Latin America, and during the culture wars. Think tanks arose “funded by right-wing and corporate sources designed to constitute alternative sources of knowledge unconstrained by the standards of peer review, tolerance for dissent, and academic freedom” (p. 242). Academic specialists, no longer the government’s sole source of information about the Middle East, find themselves the targets of Kramer and Pipes, of the administration, and of the pro-Likud factions in the United States.
This essay brings us full circle, back to the issue of normative professional standards within academia that Robert Post saw as a protective force. Beinin sees the fight as more political than academic, but he ends the book hopefully. No investigation of a Middle East program or professor has proven the substantial bias claimed by critics, and the current debacle in Iraq is certainly demonstrating the futility of the neoconservatives’ predictions made about easy “success” and “democracy.” History may well prove many of the historians right.
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