Anti-dhimmitude at Brandeis. "My problem is not the anti-Zionism or even that many of them are anti-American, but that they are third-rate." Such that they hide behind their degrees in order to avoid unpleasant debate on the facts, eh, Omid?
"A lesson in academic politics," from the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to JS:
When the controversy at Columbia University erupted last fall over charges of anti-Israel bias in courses on the Middle East, many American Jews saw the brouhaha as another alarming sign that pro-Arab academics had gained the upper hand in university Middle East studies departments.Mideast studies had become polemicized, and American Jews sought to ameliorate matters by pushing for the creation of Israel studies chairs and ensuring that courses on the Arab-Israeli conflict were taught by professors sympathetic to Israel.
But where many American Jews saw political bias, Brandeis University president Jehuda Reinharz saw something else: academic mediocrity.
The controversy underscored for Reinharz what had become an endemic problem in the field: Politics had superseded scholarship as a test of who was fit to teach the Middle East, with the result that political indoctrination had replaced research-driven academic inquiry.
"My problem is not the anti-Zionism or even that many of them are anti-American, but that they are third-rate," Reinharz said in a recent interview with the Jerusalem Post at his Brandeis office, referring to university Middle East studies departments. "The quality of the people [in Mideast studies] is unlike any of the qualities we expect in any other field."
Reinharz has set out to change that by creating a new center for Middle East studies at Brandeis, which he hopes will set a much-needed example of academic rigor in the field.
"We need a first-rate center for Middle East studies that is not pro or con anything," Reinharz said.
Amen! And if it were really politically neutral and academically honest, it would have room for an Institute of Dhimmitude Studies and a Center for the Study of Jihad. And more.
Oh my God. I am almost down to my knees giving thanks. I really did not think I would see the day. And the point is so simple and obvious. These people are not scholars in any way that a western mindset would recognize; neither researchers nor independent thinkers nor even very good teachers - notice how many of them manage to make themselves unpopular with their own students. Please God, let him mean it, and perhaps a movement of redemption of North American academia can start right here.
Paolo says:
"Please God, let him mean it, and perhaps a movement of redemption of North American academia can start right here."
And let us all say,
AMEN!
It might be a start. But its not only M.E. studies, just about all the ethnic, race, gender, social studies departments of so-called liberal-arts colleges seem to have an Americanized Marxist(non-orthodox,reconfigured class-war) perspective, the whole concept seems designed to create antagonistic groups who are obsessed with various forms of victim identity as a means of circumventing the laws of the market that generally prohibit the unexceptional or incompetent from rising to the top(personally I think the market has been rendered defective by a multitude of deliberate acts, intended to eliminate or put-off the consequences of bad policy-- eventually the chickens will come home to roost, the only question is how and when).
Basically it is schooling in the art of the con. And the professors,activists,media and politicians who achieve positions of privilege,power and comfort in direct connection to this con have the replication and perpetuation of this con as their number-1 priority.
What they have created is pathology= enlightenment.
MESA Nostra is only the extreme case of a general problem: that of careerists who managed to survive and thrive in academic life while others, often superior in merit, but caught in a system where merit was not exactly the main criterion (and often, too great an interest in history for its own sake, or in the artful deployment of words, a source of suspicion). Those who retire sometimes write books about the problem; others quietly voice their discontent. When William Pritchard or John Ellis write about English departments today, or Harold Bloom, or John Hollander, or a few years ago Jacques Barzun levelled his guns at the thoroughly modern university, who read or listened?
Apparently not enough of the people who count -- which is to say, the people who give money, whether they are alumni, or in foundations. Until they cut off the funds, and until university presidents stop hiding behind the absurd excuse of "faculty autonomy" (look at how quickly the supposed "tough" Summers slithers away whenever he is confronted, either by the comical West or his current carpers -- and Summers himself, though of course he must be supported to the hilt now, has a notion of "education" as vocational training, mere vocational training, "preparing for the future," engaged in something he and Vest of MIT called "production of knowledge." Cannibals -- or barbarians -- all.
It may be necessary to supplement the "college degree" with outside schools, dedicated to teaching, at a minimum, the high arts, neither trivial nor quadrivial, of reading and writing.
Not charm school, not computer school, not beautifician or secretarial school, but how to use words. This should be taught correctly in universities. It isn't.
Hugh, what's 'quadrivial' - is it like trivial only 33% more so?
My favourite Chomskyism is 'nontrivial' - I once had the misfortune to study a bit of Chomsky's deep structure twaddle, and I knew he was a bullshitter long before I read about his politics.
Any academic study driven by politics is bound to be mediocre.
I agree entirely with Hugh. But, let's try to imagine where the money for these imaginary 'higher arts' schools would come from? Who would pay the tuition for such schools? And, if there are no wealthy donors or state grants, how would the schools even come into existence? Who would hand over the kind of money one would need to finance such a school?
Where does education money come from today, generally? The pockets of hard working people who want specific skills to find higher salaries. (Forget about spending a dime on 'something I don't need'.) Industry seeking relationships with schools that will provide them with talent, maybe a little good PR and marketing, and, perhaps, ideas from which they can profit (and now companies just set up their own universities). The state and rich donors which collectively have empoverished ideas about education. We have been living through the slow death of education in the West for decades now; the causes are complex, but one general cause is surely the lack of backbone among students, teachers, administrators and benefactors to stand up for anything in education that does not make short-sighted economic sense.
And now there are new players in the mix that make matters worse (probably older than I think): Arab/Muslim money. Billions of petro-dollars in the hands of corrupt, ideological elites who would like nothing more than to see Muslims friendly propaganda and da'wa spouting across the West, starting in 'liberal institutions' which will accept such proselytizing under the rubric of 'diversity' and 'multiculturalism'. Where does all the money come from for such organized, well financed Muslim Student Associations, for instance? And does the influence of Islamic petro-funding have anything to do with organizations like MESA and the demonization of scholars who say anything inconsistent with the 'tenents' of this organization? Of course, this is just the beginning.
Higher education presupposes affluence, among other things. It always has. Without money, no university, no institutions that value knowledge for its own sake. And few individuals and organization with bucks seem to have the requisite vision or desire to buck the trend of choking higher education into oblivion. All the while, other forces, with billions in their pockets, are more than happy to push academia along in directions that suit them.
I now cringe every time a put a gallon of gasoline in the tank; every dollar spent seems like one more idea, one more book, one more thought, in the process of being lost. And part of this is entirely our fault.
Kentim, Hugh and JTF all make valid points. My view as a Catholic, of course, is that one of the things that have poisoned universities is the prejudice against the Christian religion, coming ultimately from a kind of professional jealousy - professors, like priests, would like to be regarded as moral authorities and masters of life. There is an unconscious, or at least unstated, desire to delegitimize any source of learning and value that can rival yours - unconscious or unstated, of course, because, consciously speaking, your role as a scholar is to be open and fair to all competing views. Only you are not; you favour those that confirm your authority and refute others'. And this leads to a general atmosphere of mental dishonesty and doubletalk, as well as to an underlying sense that "my enemy's enemy is my friend". How else would you explain the extraordinary sight of the modern left (which is nothing like the working-class left I grew up with long ago) favouring both "gay rights" and a presumptuous multiculturalism that means giving free rein to all sorts of cultures, let alone Islam, where gays are not exactly highly regarded? Try and make sense of it in any other way but this: that the one thing these two things have in common is that both are enemies of the Christian religion and of the values of Western democracy. (The betrayal is the more squalid when it takes place in institutions such as Notre Dame and Gonzaga, set up exactly in order to achieve a reconciliation between the Church and the American Republic. They have not betrayed one primary loyalty, but two.)
What made tears spring to my eyes was the calm, almost wide-eyedly innocent way in which President Reinharz, surely a sophisticated and experienced man, states that the Emperor has no clothes. It is as if fears, polite half-statements, hems and haws, never had held sway over the whole world at all. Really, to read such a statement from an academic leader was like water after the desert, rest after a forced march, sanity after a nightmare.
AMEN
YOU DON'T WANT,
YOU CAN'T HAVE,
YOU MUST NOT ALLOW- EVER-
ANY ISLAMIC MF TO TEACH IN A RESPECTABLE INSTITUTION!
THEY ARE TOTALLY CLUELESS ABOUT WHAT "RESEARCH DRIVEN ACADEMIC INQUIRY" MEANS!!!
THESE GUYS ARE ONLY THERE FOR ONE PURPOSE: TO PROSELYTIZE AND TO "INVITE" STUDENTS TO THIS TOTALITARIAN IDEOLOGY CALLED ISLAM!
That would be great. It seems the only requirement for an "academic" to gain admission as a professor in "Middle East Studies" is that they hate Israel. Reminds me of a time here in a America when the only requirement to get your own radio show was to hate a certain kind of people and a certain American president.