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Middle East Studies Under Siege
There is plenty of room within these communities for debate and change; critical voices emerge, are listened to, and often accepted in a new consensus. The process takes time; it is in perpetual flux, as it should be, and it is neither smooth nor kind, but it is internal to the academy. Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights seeks to hijack the process and force acceptance of the views of political conservatives without following the usual course. Instead of allowing the play of critical forces and living with the results (inevitable inclusions and exclusions, an uneven pattern within departments and across the academic spectrum), it would eliminate critical exchange in the name of an imposed balance and a stultifying sameness: all points of view, whatever their merit, equally represented in every classroom. Pointing to the “uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge” in the humanities and social sciences, Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights mandates not only that course syllabi provide “dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate,” but also that “academic institutions and professional societies should maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry.” These requirements gesture to the anti-foundationalism of post-structural theory, and distort it at the same time. They refuse to recognize that a certain sense of social and political “responsibility” drove many of the philosophers who articulated it; that judgments of quality and ethics are part of academic discourse; that scholars do their work precisely by making such judgments; and that the pursuit of knowledge advances through these kinds of engagements. Knowledge may be “uncertain and unsettled,” but it is also stabilized by agreed-upon procedures and conventions—that is what disciplines are about. All information, whether in science, social science or humanities, is not equally valid. Conflicts of values and ethics are part of the process of knowledge production; they inform it, trouble it, drive it. The commitments of scholars to ideas of justice, for example, are at the heart of many an important investigation in political theory, philosophy and history; they cannot be dismissed as irrelevant “opinion.” And because such commitments cannot be separated from scholarship, there are mechanisms internal to academic life that monitor abuses, distinguishing between serious, responsible work and polemic, between teaching that aims to unsettle received opinion and teaching that is indoctrination. They are not perfect by any means, but they will not work better if government oversight is substituted for community self-surveillance. In the name of neutrality, Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights would prohibit professors from expressing judgments about the material they teach, as well as about matters not directly relevant to course material; they are simply to transmit stores of undisputed information and refrain from expressing their points of view. Aside from the fact that this denies the role judgment must play in scholarly work, it cancels the important critical role that higher education should fulfill. The best teachers, in my experience, are usually those whose commitment and point of view inspire students to think differently about the world; their command of information and knowledge, certified by their degrees, publications, and departmental reviews, calls into question the pieties and certainties students have imbibed elsewhere. It is precisely the experience of education as critique that opens students’ minds and engages them in learning, sets them out on paths they never knew they could take—or at least that’s the way it used to be. Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights would shield students from this process, allowing them to reject ideas they don’t like as “indoctrination” and leaving them free to listen only to those viewpoints they agree with, thus comfortably confirming what they already believe rather than subjecting it to illuminating doubt. David Horowitz’s call for balance aims to bring intellectual life under conservative control. This means not so much imposing an outright orthodoxy—Horowitz’s partisans claim that is what they are combating on the left—as it does insisting that there is some objective measure by which the pursuit and teaching of knowledge can be separated from the values and ethical commitments that motivate it. In place of competing ideologies, we are offered a formalist pluralism. And the ongoing conflicts of ideas and values that some of us think have historically been and ought to continue to be the responsibility of university teachers are ruled out of order in the name of fairness and balance. The very same voices which two decades ago denounced the left for unleashing an amoral relativism, now appeal quite cynically to that same relativism to advance their own ends. As the conservative revolution sweeps the United States, it seeks to secure its hegemony by disarming critique: silencing critical or even mildly skeptical legislators and journalists by impugning their patriotism, their loyalty, and their objectivity. The university is the last redoubt of critical thinking, the last place whose mission is to offer some resistance to the ideas and policies that are now being touted as the unilateral “American way.” And the academic bill of rights is the strategy for breaching its walls. Needless to say, the critical perspective that Middle East studies scholars bring to questions of war and peace, historical accounts of conflict, and current policies and practices would be seriously constrained, if not entirely outlawed, by the requirements of balance and neutrality that Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights wants to impose.
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