The battle for Middle East Studies

Post below lifted from American Thinker. See the original for links

Eminent intellectual dissidents have arisen and are taking on the leftist establishment which has dominated the study of Middle East affairs in the United States. Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami have given up hope of ever restoring balance and sanity to the hyper-politicized Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), and have now founded an alternative organization, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA).

Academic associations sponsor academic conferences and publish journals, but they also set the tone and help establish the intellectual agenda of an entire field. Based on my own experience as a member of three different academic associations, leadership roles tend to fall into the hands of people willing to do the grunt work. Which in practice means those burnishing their resumes and those with a political agenda. With the massive amount of Saudi money flowing into the American academy, it is hardly surprising that career opportunities have been so available to those who blame the West for all the problems of the Muslim world, shy away from real problems, and are obsessed with the usual left wing academic fads.

Nibras Kazimi of Talisman Gate provides an enlightening view of the situation, and some telling anecdotes revealing some of the rot within Middle East Studies. If you wonder what's the problem, try this:

...MESA shies away from discussing contemporary Middle Eastern issues for fear than any controversy may scare away the funders.

Can we all agree that Iraq is an important issue, and that such important issues should be front and center among the priorities to be discussed by Middle Eastern scholars? Yes? Good. Then why is it that during MESA's upcoming annual conference only five (yes, FIVE) panels are dedicated to Iraq out of a total of 206! Whereas there are at least a dozen panels dedicated to gender and sexuality studies!

Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be a single panel that seriously sets out to discuss jihadism during the whole four day stretch of the conference.

Columbia U becomes even more politically correct

Administrators at Columbia University threw a bone to the four famished students on a hunger strike yesterday, giving in to some of their lofty demands. Columbia agreed to raise $50 million to beef up ethnic studies and expand programs for multicultural students, strike organizers said, but refused to budge on the protesters' biggest demand - killing the school's proposed expansion into Harlem.

"We are very happy to hear that the university is willing to meet our demands," said student organizer Jamie Chen. "We took drastic measures, and we're glad that the university has come to a point of negotiation." Columbia's concession will expand the school's multicultural student center and expand the required freshman ethnic-studies class from a several hundred-student lecture to small seminar groups. Administrators have also agreed to add diversity training to orientation programs for new faculty and hire five new ethnic-studies professors.

The concessions, coupled with threats from campus doctors, were enough for two of the students to pull out of the hunger strike - now in its 10th day. Seniors Emilie Rosenblatt and Bryan Mercer left the strike late Wednesday night after doctors said they were in serious medical danger and would be put on involuntary leave if they continued. They were replaced by two newcomers, and the four students said they would continue to strike until the Harlem expansion plan was quashed.

"It's such an effective reality check to see that our actions have real impact," said Richard Brown, 19, who joined the strike yesterday. "But the administration has made no concessions to the community for the expansion. We want to ensure they do it in an ethical manner that respects my neighbors." Student representatives and administrators met late yesterday afternoon to address the issue. Columbia's proposed expansion plan would grow the campus by 17 acres.

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The university of life

It's time we put the 'human' back into humanities, says Anthony Kronman

At the end of the second world war a programme called directed studies (DS) was established at Yale University. Its purpose was to give students an organised introduction to the civilisation for whose sake the war had been fought. Sixty years later, the contours of the programme have changed, but its basic goal remains the same: to acquaint students with the west's greatest works of literary and philosophical imagination, equipping them with a storehouse of images and ideas on which they can draw as they struggle to find or make meaning in their lives.

DS students take three-year courses in which they read Homer, Plato, Aeschylus, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Tolstoy and others. At any given moment, all the students are reading the same books and discussing them with their teachers in seminar-size classes. The sense of common adventure is strong and the experience of discovery often intense.

Such programmes are a rarity in the US today. They were once far more common. The ambition they express used to be a fundamental premise of American higher education: that college is a time not merely to learn a specialty and prepare for a career, but also to acquire the moral and intellectual equipment one needs to grapple with the question of what living is for.

This ambition has been discredited by the modern research ideal, which rewards specialisation above all else. Many university teachers today regard the question of life's meaning as one that no serious scholar ought to take up in the classroom. And it has been undermined by the careerist anxieties of students. Those anxieties have flourished in the absence of resistance from teachers too preoccupied with their research to see students as anything more than prospective members of their own specialties, rather than as human beings struggling for fulfilment and love, under the long shadow of death.

The dominance of the research ideal has obscured an older responsibility of the humanities - to train students in what used to be called "the art of living", an enterprise larger than any career. Having abandoned this responsibility, but finding themselves unable to compete, as producers of research, with their colleagues in the sciences, humanities teachers have sought to restore a sense of their mission and role by embracing a variety of progressive causes. This has created a culture of political correctness whose stifling uniformity encourages students to see themselves more as representatives than individuals; it blocks serious engagement with the very personal question of life's meaning.

As a result, American students graduate from college well-prepared for their careers, but under-educated in the meaning of life. In a world where the freedom to explore life's meaning is greater than ever, students are less well-equipped for this challenge than those in past generations - and if they want help in meeting it, they must look beyond their universities to the churches, which now have a dangerous monopoly in questions of spiritual importance.

The tradition of reading great books as a way of introducing students to perennial debates about the meaning of existence is one that American universities borrowed from their British counterparts. That tradition is under pressure in Britain for the same reasons it is in the US: an emphasis on research among teachers and on careers among students; the strangling effects of political correctness; and the spread of religious fundamentalism in response to the demand for a serious engagement with matters of spiritual concern.

Programmes such as DS are a way of fighting back against these pressures. The British philosopher Michael Oakeshott spoke of a "great conversation" among the writers whose works constitute the backbone of western civilisation. This civilisation is the shared inheritance of students on both sides of the Atlantic. To deprive them of it is to leave them without landmarks to navigate the difficult and thrilling business of life. There is time enough to prepare for a career, and for scholarly research. Part of a college education ought to be devoted to something else - to the question of what living is for.

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