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The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America

[Philanthropy Roundtable] John J. Miller - Nearly two years ago, Harvard and Georgetown received separate $20 million gifts from Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. These were generous gifts from one of the world's richest men. But will they help? "The problem with Middle Eastern studies on campus isn't money - the problem is ideas," warns Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank. "Just about everywhere, the state of Middle Eastern studies is a disaster," says Pipes. He and other critics say the field has become deeply flawed and radicalized. "Unfortunately, the colleges and universities are almost useless to policymakers," says Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Martin Kramer outlined the problem in Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, which he authored for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in 2001. Kramer explained: "In the 1980s and 90s, Middle Eastern studies were transformed into a field where scholarship took a backseat to advocacy, where a few biases became the highest credentials, where dissenting views became thought crimes." In an April interview with London's Daily Telegraph, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff warned about complacency toward terrorism and pointed a finger at professors: "Where you find some softness is in some elements of the media or in some elements of the intellectual class who convince themselves that this is our fault, or that there's an easier way to avoid the problem if we can just figure what price we have to pay. That is a plea to the sensibility of exhaustion, and history has shown that's a very damaging and destructive impulse."
2007-08-17 01:00:00
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