Middle East Studies

New York University's Zachary Lockman has a detailed look at some of the policy debate surrounding Middle East Studies. Juan Cole has also posted on his concerns with the proposed Title VI advisory board. My own stands on these issues will be well known to regular readers, but here's something I want to pluck out of the Juan Cole post:

"As Stanley Fish has said, university teaching and research is not about 'balance.' Our cancer institute isn't required to hire at least a few biologists who believe smoking is good for your health. In research, it is all right to be partisan for the evidence. It is in fact one of the things wrong with journalism and political discourse that there is so much emphasis on 'telling both sides of the story.' This is a bad approach because many stories have many more than two sides, and some stories only have one true side. Appointing a professor at each major university who would have insisted in early 2003 that Iraq was only 3-5 years away from having a nuclear bomb would not have been an academic advance, but it is the sort of thing the framers of HR 3077 had in mind when they urged 'balance.'"

It occurs to me that some of this debate goes straight to the heart of current discussions on the relationship between the academy and civil society. Part of this is salesmanship. In Middle East Studies, for example, there's a solif case to be made for the importance of gender studies despite its low reputation in right wing circles. After all, one of the major wedge issues Islamists use to advance their agenda is the role of women in society. But beyond that, the fact that the argument that Middle East Studies should be judged solely on the basis of its relationship with national security objectives has such resonance is interesting food for thought.