INTERVIEWS

Academics and the Government

in the New American Century:
An Interview with Rashid Khalidi

Lori A. Allen, Lara Z. Deeb, and Jessica Winegar

While this article was going to press, versions of David Horowitz’s Academic
Bill of Rights were introduced in thirteen state legislatures and the U.S.
Congress. The issue of academic freedom at Columbia University made
national headlines and caught the attention of lawmakers, with most New York
papers (including the New York Times) and local lawmakers siding with the
pro-Zionist critics of a Middle East studies professor who, despite abundant
evidence to the contrary, was accused of anti-Semitism and intimidation
of students in the classroom. Meanwhile, Rashid Khalidi was summarily
dismissed from the New York City Department of Education’s K–12 teaching
development program, without any evidence of formal complaints against
him and without any consultation with him or with Columbia University. For
more information on these developments, see the special issue of the Nation on
academic freedom, “Silencing Speech on Campus,” April 4, 2005.

Two years after 9/11, just as it seemed that pressure to refrain from criticizing
U.S. foreign policy was beginning to wane, a series of events began to worry schol-
ars. A subpoena was issued to Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, to release
records related to an antiwar event on campus. Republicans introduced a bill in
the Colorado legislature that would require public universities to protect students

Radical History Review

Issue 93 (Fall 2005): 240–59
Copyright 2005 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

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 Allen, Deeb, and Winegar | Academics and the Government 241

from liberal political bias in the classroom. Several other states began to consider
similar legislation based on conservative writer David Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of
Rights.”1
But the most controversial scheme was the passage of HR 3077 in the U.S.
House of Representatives, legislation that would amend the renewal of area studies
funding by adding a government-appointed advisory board to oversee university
centers that receive funding under the Title VI Higher Education Act. The goal,
according to the legislation, was to ensure that area studies programs “reflect the
national needs related to the homeland security, international education, and inter-
national affairs.”2 For the first time in nearly fi fty years, academics found them-
selves faced with the prospect of direct government intervention into the content,
shape, and direction of scholarship and teaching. Even those who were once content
to hide out in the infamous ivory towers could do so no more. The relationship
between academy and government—and scholarship and politics more generally—
entered a transformative stage with an uncertain future. What was sure, however,
was that scholarship threatened the neoconservative vision of the so-called New
American Century. Indeed, the intensity of conservative attacks demonstrates that
academics—despite claims to the contrary—possess real power to effect change in
American politics and society.
Although the neoconservative assault was of broad significance, affect-
ing a wide range of academics and intellectuals, many scholars of the Middle East
experienced its effects most directly due to the region’s significance to the United
States’ post–Cold War foreign policy agenda. At the end of his life, Edward Said
had emerged as a favorite target of an ascendant group of Middle East strategists
because of his scholarship and his criticisms of American and Israeli actions in the
Arab world. Said’s book Orientalism offered a devastating critique of the collu-
sion between scholarship and political power—a collusion that neoconservatives
openly advocated some twenty-five years later.3 The same kind of virulent attacks
as those directed against Said have been leveled at the historian Rashid Khalidi,
whose professorship in Arab studies at Columbia University bears the late scholar’s
name. Khalidi also serves as the director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute, which
receives Title VI funding and has been accused of promoting anti-American views.
Khalidi has written a new book in a style suitable for a broad audience, Resurrect-
ing Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East
(2004), in part to challenge the neoconservatives’ assault on Middle East studies and
their vision of the future.4 It represents a significant challenge to the neoconserva-
tive viewpoint on the Middle East in public arenas. Khalidi imparts to U.S. readers
his academic expertise regarding the modern history of Western imperialism in
the Middle East, as well as its implications for America’s new occupation of Iraq.
He also offers readers evidence of the strong anti-imperial tradition in American

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 242 Radical History Review

culture. As a respected historian, program director, and scholar committed to pub-

lic intellectualism—and as a prime target of the neoconservatives—Khalidi is in
a unique position to shed light on the increasingly vexed relationship between the
academy and the government in post–Cold War, post-9/11 America.
We decided to interview Professor Khalidi in New York in February 2004
to gain some insight into the situation in which we—junior scholars of the Middle
East—suddenly found ourselves. While watching the troubling assaults on academic
freedom unfold, we have become increasingly anxious about the future of research
and teaching. Conversations with concerned colleagues in a variety of disciplines
have revealed fears that our generation will fall victim to the surveillance and
maligning of those academics who do not tow the line of whatever party is in power.
As Khalidi suggests in the interview, the proposed changes to Title VI legislation
mark just the beginning of what promises to be a long struggle in the fight for free-
dom from government control. But he also argues that a space exists for intellectual
dissent.

HR 3077, Middle East Studies, and the Neoconservative Agenda

The bill HR 3077 was passed by the House Subcommittee on Education and the
Workforce in September 2003. The bill, although a renewal of Title VI legislation
dating back to the 1965 Higher Education Act, contained some significant revi-
sions. The most important of these amendments was the creation of a new Interna-
tional Higher Education Advisory Board composed of seven members. Four of these
would be appointed by Congress, three by the secretary of education. At least two
members would represent elements of the U.S. government concerned with national
security. This board would have the power to “monitor, apprise and evaluate a sam-
ple of activities supported under [Title VI] in order to provide recommendations to
the Secretary [of Education] and the Congress for the improvement of programs
under the title and to ensure programs meet the purposes of the title.” Improve-
ment was defined as making the programs “better reflect the national needs”—
homeland security primary among them.5 The board would also be mandated to
make recommendations to recipient programs on how to encourage their students
to serve the nation, including in the area of national security. Academics expressed
concern about a requirement to allow government recruiters access to students and
student recruiting information. But it was the advisory board itself that had academ-
ics deeply concerned.
Scholars of the Middle East could have seen such a move coming. After 9/11,
a group of Middle East think tank “specialists,” whose ideas about the region fit the
ascendant neoconservative agenda, gained the attention of the Bush administration
and the media. They began a concerted series of attacks on Middle East studies in
the academy. One of the most infamous cases has been the Campus Watch Web

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 Allen, Deeb, and Winegar | Academics and the Government 243

site established by Daniel Pipes. Pipes, a Bush appointee to the U.S. Institute for
Peace, founded the think tank Middle East Forum, whose mission is to “define and
promote American interests” in the Middle East. The Web site invited college stu-
dents to monitor their professors and report anything anti-Israel or anti-American.6
Campus Watch created “dossiers” on eight scholars, but then removed them after
facing a storm of criticism from academics who countered that classroom discussion
of critical views about the Middle East made them neither apologists for terrorism
nor unpatriotic. However, in 2004 the Web site continued to monitor professors’
activities and report on various university departments and programs.
Middle East scholars have also come under attack in a book written by Mar-
tin Kramer, another conservative think tank member and the editor of Middle East
Quarterly, a journal published by Pipes’s Middle East Forum. Kramer’s book, Ivory
Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, published by the
hawkish pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy just after 9/11, gained
some notoriety as a result of often favorable reviews published in newspapers like
the New York Times and the Washington Post.7 The book also led to a spate of
articles in more conservative publications that were similarly critical of Middle East
studies. Ivory Towers argues that the field is a bastion of Edward Said acolytes who
engage in fuzzy, fashionable theory mongering spurred by anti-Americanism and
a radical political agenda. For these reasons and others, Kramer writes, academics
have “failed to predict or explain the major evolutions of Middle Eastern politics
and society over the past two decades.”8
Despite the fact that neither academics nor policy makers predicted much
that has come to pass in recent years, it was not only conservative columnists who
picked up Kramer’s criticisms of Middle East studies. Stanley Kurtz, the National
Review editor and Hoover Institution fellow who testified before Congress in June
2003 about the “failures” of Title VI centers, also used them. His testimony included
accusations that postcolonial theory was both anti-American and hegemonic in area
studies. This hearing proved instrumental in prompting the House to write the dis-
turbing revisions to the legislation.
Given that people like Kurtz, Kramer, and Pipes had been attacking Middle
East studies in many prominent media outlets for two years, why were Middle East
studies scholars not ready for the hearings on Capitol Hill? We began our interview
by posing that question to Rashid Khalidi.

Rashid Khalidi: People claim that they weren’t even given that chance [to discuss
it]. No, not only were the academics caught on the wrong foot as it were, but I think
also some people in the House who might have said something might have been a
little surprised by the speed with which it was rushed through. On the other hand,

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 24 4 Radical History Review

it may be that people felt that discretion was the better part of valor, and that there’s
no capital in standing up and talking about an issue on which you may be on the
wrong side of the supporters of Israel, in a situation where nobody had spoken up
against the bill. Had a proper presentation of the utter falsehood of all the allega-
tions that are being made been prepared and placed before enough members of the
House, they might have seen this for the kind of partisan piece of chicanery that it
really is.

Lori A. Allen, Lara Z. Deeb, and Jessica Winegar: Do you think that the general
academic view that people like Kramer, Pipes, and Kurtz are scholarly lightweights
played any role in academics’ lackadaisical attitude towards the legislation?

I think it should be said that underestimating the new conservativism has now proven
to be one of the stupidest things people could possibly do. People underestimate the
president, they underestimate the people around the president, and they underesti-
mate the whole radical revolutionary thrust of the core forces of this administration.
This is something that is, to my way of thinking, a terrible, terrible strategic mis-
take: underestimating these people. They are trying to reshape American foreign
policy. Some people are stuck in an analysis that says, “The United States through
globalization is trying to dominate the world anyway. What’s different about this?”
Well, these are people who can’t see the forest for the trees. They can’t see that
whatever forms of domination the United States exercised—whether in the Cold
War or post–Cold War era, whether through globalization or otherwise—have very
little to do with this new doctrine that this administration is putting forward. This
is something different. There’s a qualitative difference.

Why?

Well, the argument is that because of what happened in the United States, the
United States is entitled to limit other countries’ sovereignty. The United States
acted in ways which limited other countries’ sovereignty in the past, but it never
really publicly and formally claimed that its security required that it make everybody
else, if necessary, insecure. It never formally stated that nobody has sovereignty in
the world but the United States. It never formally stated that the United States will
not be bound by international law, will not be bound by multilateral institutions,
which the United States created. The post–World War II structure is an American
structure. Yes, it was created by many, many powers, but at its core, it is an Ameri-
can-determined structure. This administration is saying, “Ok, that era was then,
this era is now. We do not need these things.” And the president is saying, “We don’t
need a permission slip from anyone.” That basically means, “We will not be bound
by anything—morality, law, multilateral engagements, and this whole structure of
international affairs as it has been created over the past sixty years.”

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Would you say that the terms of political legitimation are changing?

It’s not just the terms of political legitimation. What this administration feels itself
able to do in the world is different than what previous administrations have felt.
Some people say it’s only declaratory. But the war in Iraq showed that it’s much more
than a declaratory shift. That’s my analysis. It’s something that has to be worked out
more, I think. But incidentally, I think that a lot of people should look very care-
fully at what the Bush administration says. It bears careful scrutiny. It bears careful
textual analysis. And their actions should then be put in the context of their words,
and the words of the Max Boots and the Admiral [James] Woolseys and the Richard
Perles who swarm around them like a flock of gnats and whose ideas are the fertil-
izer for this evil, evil plant that’s growing in Washington.
I’ve had arguments with people who say that intellectuals aren’t important in
this, and that the neocons are just window dressing for the sort of muscular nation-
alist military industrial complex types like [Dick] Cheney and [Donald] Rumsfeld. I
actually don’t think that’s true. I think that as far as the president, the vice president,
and the secretary of defense are concerned, these ideas are actually important.
Perhaps people did underestimate Pipes and Kramer. If so, they made a mis-
take. Because Pipes and Kramer are not operating on the level of their scholarship.
They’re operating on a different level. They’re operating on a level of public dis-
course. They’re operating on a level of a kind of slimy attack politics, which actually
has become a very important part of the right-wing arsenal in the United States. Lee
Atwater, back in the days of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., pioneered some of
these tactics of having absolutely no respect for the truth, taking things entirely out
of context. Remember [Michael] Dukakis in the tank. You remember Willie Horton.
That was Lee Atwater. He was a political genius. What kind of moral human being
he was isn’t the issue here. He was a political genius. Those techniques, those tac-
tics, have been perfected by people like Karl Rove.
And this is where this should be situated. This has nothing to do with aca-
demia. This has nothing to do with truth, or what this guy published, or whether
this guy got tenure. What’s really important is that this is part of a broader tradition
in American politics. It used to be a gutter tradition. It has been brought by the
Republican Party in the eighties into the center. You know, [Richard] Nixon used
it, [Joseph] McCarthy used it, other people used it, but it was discredited in some
ways. It was perceived as shameful in some ways. It is now the machine of politics,
especially as used by the Republicans. But everybody does it. [Bill] Clinton’s people
did it shamelessly as well. And that’s what these people are doing. All you have to
do is read their Web sites and compare the incredible bowdlerization of everything,
or read Kurtz’s testimony. You know, the reality bears no relationship whatsoever to
the lies and falsehoods that they’re putting out. That doesn’t matter to them. This
isn’t about reality or scholarship. This is about politics. These are people going for

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 246 Radical History Review

the jugular. These are people who want to destroy things. These are people who
want to win. And that’s what we have to understand.
If academics stay back in their ivory tower, well, then they’re going to be
swept away by a political tide. They can babble on to their hearts’ content after
academia has been turned into some kind of ghastly right-wing vision. It’s not these
people [Kramer, Pipes, and the like] who are the guardians of this vision. It’s Karl
Rove, and the Christian Right, and the neoconservative right wing that really is
behind this. The Middle East and the specific concerns of these people [Kramer,
Pipes, and the like] have an important role. But this is bigger than that.

Are you suggesting that fire be fought with fire?

No, I don’t think fire can be fought with fire for two reasons. First, we’re never going
to be as good at the kind of mudslinging and the kind of deceitfulness that these
people are masters of. There’s just no way that we can get so far down in the gutter
as them successfully. Now that’s not a very moral argument that I’m making, but it’s
an important point. You’re not going to beat them at their game. The second thing is:
if any of us have any authority, and I’m not talking about political operatives in the
Democratic Party or people who are operating as political activists—they can do
whatever they want, I’m not talking about them, I’m speaking now as an academic.
If we have any authority, it has to do with not doing these kinds of things, but rather
doing what we do, which is trying to figure out what’s going on in the world, and
using that information to explain things. Ultimately it has to do with some connec-
tion to truth. So that’s the only role we can play. We can provide truthful material
to people who are in politics, but it’s a political game, and it has to be fought politi-
cally in some measure. We can’t fight it directly. But we can help the people who are
fighting it, by giving them stuff that’s truthful.
Most of what’s said about Title VI is a tissue of lies. It is claimed that the
centers do not produce people who work for the government. There is not a center
in this country that hasn’t produced scores, if not hundreds of people, who work
for the government. I come upon my own students who work for the government
everywhere I go. It’s a falsehood. It’s a monstrous, enormous, colossal, deceitful
falsehood. I mean, what can one say? You cannot fight this by saying something
false about them, or false about the neocons. The only way to fight it is by produc-
ing lists. It may not work when the Senate finally considers this. It may or may not
have impact. If we plunk on the table five pieces of data—chunks a hundred pages
each—showing that this allegation is false, that allegation is false, it may have no
impact. The political game may go somewhere else. That’s another issue. But I think
that’s the only way that we can respond to this.

• • • • •

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 Allen, Deeb, and Winegar | Academics and the Government 247

Responses to the proposed advisory board had begun by fall 2003, first in the form
of alarmed e-mails, then as petitions and phone calls to Congresspeople, and finally
as an action alert put out by the Task Force on Middle East Anthropology.9 Given
the clear links between the changes to Title VI funding, the neoconservative agenda
in the Middle East, and those critical of that agenda, it seemed apropos that scholars
of the Middle East were among the first to react with concern. Articles on all sides
of the issue were most often written with Middle East studies in mind.10 We asked
Khalidi whether he thought that Middle East scholars should be more concerned
about the legislation than others.

Rashid Khalidi: No, I don’t [think so]. Even though the attack is being motivated
by people who have a particular Middle East ax to grind, ultimately, what it’s aimed
at is expertise of any sort. The neocons cannot hoodwink the American public if
there are people out there who are capable of distinguishing between ideology and
reality. And the targets of this are not just the people in the academy. The people
in our government who are experts are also targets of the neocons. They are under
attack. People within the intelligence community, within the uniformed military
and within the State Department, are in fact even more important targets of a larger
campaign of which this is only a part. And I know that many people in the academy
shudder at the thought that in any way they and the CIA are on the same page. But,
in fact, they are, whether they like it or not, in the sense that any form of advice
from the real world, any form of grainy, detailed reporting of reality contradicts the
faith-based approach that these people are dedicated to. They are operating in a
world of illusion, created by this vision of culture, the [Samuel] Huntington vision of
cultures and civilizations, which has no relation to reality.11 And the only way they
can sell this vision—whether it’s of the Middle East specifically or the world more
generally—is to rigorously fight any form of expertise. They have blocked off all the
channels for advice getting up to the top in this administration. And there’s a prae-
torian guard that keeps—I’m not saying truth, I’m just saying fact—from getting to
the top.
We see it with weapons of mass destruction, because it’s a scandal. That’s
true in every respect—everywhere within the government. Now I’m not saying that
policy making is going to be good just because facts reach the top. That’s a com-
pletely different issue. What I am saying is that I think that what is being attempted
here is to install a political censorship over the academy such that certain unfiltered
views about reality cannot be expressed without a cost being paid. And the same
thing is being done within the government.

So you see the amendment to Title VI as part of a broader movement, also exem-
plified by things like the flagging of NEH proposals that contradict some political
view?

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 248 Radical History Review

Absolutely. And it’s a little step towards that kind of thing. Family values. Abortion.
Birth control. You name it. Wherever their agenda reaches—and it reaches quite
broadly—they must fight against a whole realm of science, and a whole realm of
empirically based research. We may not feel terribly committed to [empiricism]. We
may feel that we’re beyond that, but actually, if they knock that out from under us,
we’re in real trouble. I mean, we’re almost back to witchcraft.

Do you see knowledge production within academia being particularly singled

out?

Knowledge production in academia is singled out, because people in academia have

a certain amount of authority. [The neocons] have cowed the people in the govern-
ment. In a way, we’re what’s left. And they’re going after us about the Middle East
in particular because they have a particularly aggressive, particularly megaloma-
niac agenda in the Middle East. But I think it’s true across the board. And I think
this should not just alarm radical, left-wing, or liberal academics. I think that this
is something that should alarm conservative academics. It should alarm any aca-
demic.

• • • • •

Khalidi alludes to a contradiction within the accusations of neoconservative sup-

porters of the Title VI advisory board. This contradiction emerges between, on
the one hand, the allegation that academics are not engaged enough in real-world
issues, and, on the other, the attempts posed by this legislation to stifle such forms
of engagement. The essential difference between supporters and opponents of the
advisory board could be boiled down to the issue of whether scholarship exists in
order to serve a narrowly and politically defined “national need” rooted in a broader
neoconservative vision. Our conversation then turned to the possible outcome of
this vision in the academic context, as we asked Khalidi about his expectations in
the case that the amended legislation passes in the Senate.

Rashid Khalidi: It depends on its form and on control of the legislature in the
future. Which means that even if this bill is not considered by the Senate, or if the
Democrats torpedo it, it’ll probably be back. It or another version of it. I mean,
you’re going to have to drive a stake through its heart to kill this one. I’m told that
there are people on the Hill who want to prevent this from being adopted, who feel
that Title VI is a well-run program, who feel that the proposed advisory board is a
boondoggle and a witch hunt and a waste of the taxpayers’ money. Will those voices
be heard when push comes to shove? I don’t know. Will that view command a strong
enough range of support within the relevant committee? I don’t know. We’ll see. We
don’t want a politically determined committee looking into academia. God help us.
I don’t just mean about Title VI. I mean about everything.

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Mobilization against the Advisory Board and Academic Censorship

Beyond the voices of those on the Hill who spoke against the amendments to Title
VI and in defense of academic freedom, voices of opposition emerged from within
higher education and the academy. One camp within this opposition—consisting
mainly of institutional networks including the American Council on Education and
the Council for International Education—worked through the higher education
lobby to successfully introduce changes to HR 3077 while it was being debated by
the House. Primary among these changes was the addition of language stipulating
that the advisory board would not be allowed to control an institution’s “specific
instructional content, curriculum, or program of instruction.”
These changes led some in the higher education community to insist that the
continuing fuss was all much ado about nothing,12 or to argue that the battle must
be fought within the existing structure of the legislation itself. However, although
this perspective was rightly concerned about ensuring renewal of Title VI funding,
it did not represent many scholars—professors and graduate students alike—who
thought it necessary to continue working toward eliminating the proposed advisory
board altogether.
The concerns of those opposed to the board were multifarious. Among them
were worries about its mandate to collect student recruiting information and its
potential to foster elitism if area studies centers at private institutions, potentially
less dependent on Title VI funding than those at public universities, chose to refuse
funding under the new legislation. Yet the major issues were twofold: First, that
the proposed advisory board represented unprecedented government microman-
agement of scholarship and education and formed part of a broader attack on both
academic freedom and public dialogue, especially about the Middle East. This per-
spective viewed the legislation as part of a broader movement to attack those who
expressed views about the Middle East and U.S. policy that contradicted the stance
of the second Bush administration. And second, that an advisory board consisting
of political appointees was primed to result in a partisan government structure,
and a well-placed tool for a witch hunt. Essentially, these scholars held that if such
a board were established, chances would be that many of its seven members would
be appointed from those very neoconservative think tanks that spawned the idea in
the first place.
Such fears prompted numerous actions across university campuses. For exam-
ple, at Cornell University, a resolution was passed by the Graduate and Professional
Student Assembly asking the university to take a stance against the advisory board
amendment. Teach-ins and discussions were also held at the University of Chicago
and at Berkeley. Several scholarly associations passed resolutions against the pro-
posed amendments and in support of academic freedom, including the Middle East
Studies Association and the American Anthropological Association. In addition to
public commentary from the Left in the Nation and Counterpunch,13 commentary

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 250 Radical History Review

against the proposed advisory board emerged from the Right as well. A piece in the
American Conservative,14 for example, argued that this sort of government regu-
lation of academia would stifle public debate. These voices against the proposed
amendments to Title VI were joined by various civil liberties, Arab American, stu-
dent, and peace-and-justice organizations. The involvement of groups like Jews for
Peace in Palestine and Israel, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee,
and the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation highlighted the recognition that this
sort of legislation is directed at suppressing the possibilities for dissent and debate
about Middle East policy and that it threatens to silence criticism of the United
States and Israel.
Despite the efforts of these concerned scholars and organizations, a broad-
based and organized movement against the legislation did not take shape. We asked
Khalidi why a more broadly based political effort did not spring into existence in the
academic community.

Rashid Khalidi: Part of the problem is that they [the neocons] are political, and we’re
not political. The people who are pushing this are not like us, in the sense that they
don’t represent this extremely disparate collection of private and public institutions,
spread all over the United States, who have very little in common in many respects
and who are all going off in different directions. Whereas they are a tightly knit,
professional group affiliated with the party in power. They go into the Republican
House leadership, and they are speaking the same language. They are on the same
page. They believe in the same things. That’s simply not true of the higher education
community, where you have Republicans and Democrats, and neocons and liberals,
and radicals and revolutionaries. It includes everybody. And the institutions are all
cautious and conservative. And everybody is worried about alienating this senator,
or that committee, or this department of government, because the universities are
deeply dependent on the government. So why they didn’t do what they didn’t do,
when we come to write the history of it? These will be some of the explanations.
Should people be doing more? Yes. Who should be doing more? All the area studies
associations should be doing more. All the professional associations, of all sorts, the
American Historical Association (AHA), the American Political Science Association
(APSA), the American Anthropological Association (AAA). All of the higher educa-
tion bodies, all the provosts, in all of their configurations—the ones in the Midwest,
the Ivies. They should all be taking this deadly seriously. Will they? It depends. You
know, this university won’t do it because the president feels this way, that university
may not because they have a Republican governor who will be angry. . . . You know,
there are all kinds of circumstances. But should more be done? Yes. Should it be done
more quickly? Yes. Should it not be just a single effort? Yes. Because this is going to
be with us. It’s not going to die. No one is driving a stake through the heart of this
vampire. It’s coming back. If it doesn’t get passed in this session, it will come back.

• • • • •

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The issues Khalidi raises here regarding the obstacles faced by the higher education
community and the importance of that community’s engagement with politics are
tied to broader questions about the relationships among the academy, public intel-
lectuals, and the government. What role can or should the public intellectual play in
our society, and what is the relationship of that figure to the academy and to politics?
Is the public intellectual the gadfly, as Edward Said said, “whose place it is publicly
to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to
produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or
corporations”? Is it the person who, in the words of Michel Foucault, questions “over
and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people’s mental habits,
the way they do and think things, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to reex-
amine rules and institutions”?15 Or is it someone who simply researches and presents
basic facts about issues of political import to a public audience? Some argue that the
quality of public intellectualism has declined in recent decades, in part as a func-
tion of increasing specialization of academic disciplines. Others contend that such a
lack of intellectual clout is just another aspect of the infamous anti-intellectualism
of the United States itself.

Public Intellectuals and the Academy

In the final portion of our conversation with Khalidi, he discusses his own efforts to
contribute to public knowledge and political debate through his book Resurrecting
Empire. We also discuss the question of whether or not the initiatives described
above have succeeded in narrowing the purview, or deflecting the impact, of public
intellectuals present and future.

Rashid Khalidi: One of the things I try and do in this new book, Resurrecting
Empire, is to say that there is a strong anti-imperial tradition in American culture.
In fact, it is the old republican tradition. It’s been trampled on again and again. I
mean, when the United States did what it did in the Spanish American war, not to
speak of the way in which the United States was created at the expense of Native
American peoples. You had expansion of various sorts, imperial and otherwise. But
there is another tradition—which is represented by [Samuel] Adams and all the
founding fathers—of not going abroad in search of monsters, that the empire will
destroy the republic, that the United States should avoid entangling alliances. And
that can go into a perverse isolationism. That can be reified and turned into some
kind of silly, moss-covered memorial to the great founding fathers. But it can also be
the source of a radical tradition which would argue against empire. Empire is not in
the American psyche.
And as I argue in the book, there’s a strong anti-imperial sense among Amer-
icans. This administration is having trouble dealing with that. Everybody should
read very carefully the Bernard Lewis piece in the Wall Street Journal, where he

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 252 Radical History Review

ended up saying that the United States should support empire.16 Well, I think we
should have an argument about this. And I think that’s an argument anyone could
win with ordinary Americans, even Americans whose minds have been poisoned by
CNN and have degenerated under the impact of Fox. Most Americans don’t want
to have an empire. You have to sell it to them in another way: “democracy,” “a dan-
ger to the American people.” Those are the things that Americans will go for. “If
we’re doing good things abroad then why should we oppose them? Because they’re
bad people. They shouldn’t be there.” Those are easy ideas for the deceitful empire
builders in Washington to sell.
But the American people aren’t stupid. They’re beginning to figure out that
there never was even the slightest, remotest shadow of a possibility of a threat in
Iraq. The Iraqi regime threatened only its own people. Every neighbor of Iraq wasn’t
threatened by Iraq. If they weren’t threatened by Iraq, why are we threatened? I
mean, we’re like an elephant up on a table howling and screaming because this half-
dead mouse is on the ground. I mean it’s a spectacle that the rest of the world can-
not understand. And Americans are actually beginning to come out of this shell, this
daze, that was created by 9/11 and then reinforced by the panic mongering of this
administration—which it used to justify this adventure in Iraq. And public opinion
has now, according to the last poll, actually turned against the war. The point is,
there is space here in which a straightforward, simple, nonjargonistic, nonstupid,
nonextreme critique can win over a large number of people.

Why isn’t that space being claimed by more people with diverse views?

I don’t know. You know, I’m a Middle East historian. All I can say is that there is lots
of ammunition, lots of material in the public record of this administration and in the
history of the modern Middle East that can be mined in ways which, I think, could
be devastating in ordinary public debates over foreign policy. America is so far away
that the world really doesn’t impinge on Americans most of the time. That’s not a
willful ignorance; it’s not a bad thing. It’s not something we can fault people for. But
that’s the way American culture is. I think we should be trying to educate people.
The international should be brought more to the center of people’s consciousness.
And you realize that young people understand that, by the overwhelming interest in
courses on international subjects and foreign languages. In universities, you realize
that young people are infinitely smarter than their elders. They sense that this is
important. And, you know, there’s a vast role for education in all of this. And it needs
to be something that universities focus on.

At a recent lecture at New York University, you exhorted Middle East scholars to
make their work more accessible. And your book is an effort to do just that. What
is your experience with trying your hand at this kind of work?

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 Allen, Deeb, and Winegar | Academics and the Government 253

Mostly we write for each other, and we write for a relatively narrow audience which
understands the terms of reference, uses the same arcane language. And we’re talk-
ing about complex things, and you couldn’t sell five thousand copies of anything we
write. And that’s mostly what I do, that’s what academics do, what we train our grad-
uate students to do. What I suggest is that we should go a little further than that. We
have an obligation to go a little further than that. By “we” I mean people who deal
with the modern Middle East, or the Middle East generally, but also people who
deal with the rest of the world. And it’s particularly important now when the rest of
the world is more important. The United States deserves to know about the rest of
the world. What that involves for academics is learning how to do things that don’t
come naturally. We always attach qualifiers, we don’t want to assert something that
can’t be proven, we tend to speak in long, complex sentences, we tend not to be able
to sum up what we’re saying in short, pithy, sound bites, and that’s what is required
for dealing with the media, for instance.

Your book is one aspect of your public intellectualism. Why do you think pub-
lic intellectuals in this country have so little cachet, especially in comparison to
Europe?

I’m not sure that they have no clout here. We just have to define public intellec-
tualism a little more broadly. Unfortunately people thrown up by think tanks and
the media have to be counted in some cases as public intellectuals. On the Right,
largely. I don’t think Ann Coulter is an intellectual, and there are many others like
that—raving and ranting types. But, you know, there’s a political debate going on.
And for the first time in a long time, since the sixties, it’s being joined from the other
side. You go to the average airport bookstore, where all you used to find was Louis
L’Amour—and Sarah Peretzky if you were lucky—diet books, and how to make a
billion dollars. And [now] you find Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Al Franken, as
well as books from the other side, Bernard Lewis, and a great deal of other material.
I have to say, Bernard Lewis is a public intellectual. I don’t agree with a lot of what
he says. But there are actually people on both sides. A lot more now, I think, inter-
estingly enough, perhaps now more than in recent decades. I think it’s an entirely
good thing.

You are part of a tradition, in line with Edward [Said], Eqbal Ahmed, and a num-
ber of others, some of whom have passed away recently. Do you feel that there are
enough people coming after you?

I think one of the objectives of this offensive is to intimidate. They ask: “If we can do
this to Edward Said, then what’s going to happen to you, you poor, miserable, unten-
ured faculty member? What’s going to happen to you, you poor, miserable graduate
student?” I think that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to mug you all,

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 254 Radical History Review

before you get to where they can’t really touch you. To where you have tenure. They
couldn’t touch Edward. It enraged them that they couldn’t touch him. They can’t
touch Chomsky. It enrages them. It drives them up the wall. That there are people
who are, in some measure, unassailable. Whereas the Right has virtual control over
a certain chunk of the media. There they can say anything they want—again and
again and again. And it is not just repeated in the right-wing media but in the main-
stream media. But there is in academia a corner where their writ does not run. It
drives them absolutely batty. There are conservative and neoconservative students,
and there are some faculty who resonate to those ideas. But, by and large, they
don’t get a lot of traction in the academy. In fact, they’ve become paranoid and talk
about how persecuted they are. But it’s a marketplace of ideas. It’s not like there’s
any absence of those ideas out there. And the university is part of the world. In the
media, the ideas mainly come from them, not from anything called the Left. Not
from anything radical, or from even liberal sources, by and large. Regardless of what
is said about the so-called liberal media. So, I’m not sure if there are enough people
coming along. There probably are.
But the key thing to me is that we not just generate a culture that speaks only
to itself. What happens in universities can be remarkably cut off from the world.
And so much of what happens in the universities goes no farther. I’m happy when
academics have an impact on public debate. Some of them I’m less happy about than
others. But all too frequently we’re just talking to ourselves. So what I worry about is
people who can cross over. And talk in a sophisticated way to broader publics.
I don’t think that’s something that a young scholar should do for two reasons.
It’s not something that they should do because they first have to protect themselves
from the kind of things that may happen if you ever say anything that people don’t
like—which is to say, you’ve got to get tenure. We’re now, once again, for the first
time in a while seeing why tenure exists. It tends to create a position where people
don’t teach a lot, don’t administer a lot, and don’t write a lot, and there’s no way of
dealing with them. That’s a minority, fortunately, but it exists and tenure protects
it. Tenure is primarily there to protect people who say things that are unpopular,
things that are important to have said. So the first thing that a young scholar prob-
ably can’t do is to risk their neck saying things that will imperil them in terms of the
tenure process.
It’s [also] probably something that a young scholar can’t do because to talk
in general terms that are accessible to a broad audience, you have to have a pretty
wide base of expertise. You have to have done a lot of empirical or other kinds of
work which establishes that you know what you’re talking about such that you can
talk in general terms. This is why some of the best work of academics, like [Fernand]
Braudel or [Albert] Hourani, is “late” work, to use the term as it was used by Edward
Said, that is accessible.

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 Allen, Deeb, and Winegar | Academics and the Government 255

Are there other reasons why scholars do not do publicly accessible work? Perhaps
because it is not validated in the institution?

Oh, of course. And it’s not validated within the institution for two reasons: (1)
because it would jeopardize tenure, but also (2) because there’s a narrow vision
of what a scholar and academic is. That you cannot be an activist. You cannot be a
political person. And there’s a huge wrangle over this in the academy. To what extent
should political opinions be expressed in the classroom by the teacher who is in a
position of authority? To what extent is the student’s learning experience going to be
affected by the fact that that student is aware that outside the classroom the profes-
sor, with all of her/his authority, has pronounced him/herself on this, that, or the
other. I don’t know where I come down on these things. But it has to be admitted
that this issue of abuse of authority, which the Right is using as a stick to beat us up
with, is not entirely illusory. I mean, there is an issue there. We’ve seen it in gender,
and no one disputes it now. Relationships based on unequal power relations are no
longer seen as appropriate.
Is it appropriate for a professor to use her/his authority to push opinions?
Now, I’m with Edward Said. There’s no such thing as opinionless, objective scholar-
ship. Every piece of scholarship comes from somewhere. But I don’t think that that
means that anybody can say anything in the classroom with the authority of the
teacher. You know, is it correct for me to hand out “Buchanan for President” tracts
in the classroom as a professor? Obviously not. Should I be handing out revolution-
ary socialist tracts in the classroom? Obviously not. I mean, as a professor, is it
legitimate?
My point is that there’s probably a way in which the academy is forcing a kind
of mindless conformity on students. But I think there are some legitimate questions
to be asked here.
I can tell you that if you are engaged in any kind of politics as a student,
you have to be exceedingly sure that the rest of your work is on extremely solid
grounds. Because there are people in the academy who will penalize you for having
any views, any opinions, any political life outside the academy. And that has to do
with an old vision of the objective scholar. Mainly it has to do with the disapproval
of the specific opinions expressed in many cases. But that’s the way it is.

Do you think that can or should change?

Maybe it should. Can it? I don’t know. Look, let’s be frank. There’s a ludicrous alle-
gation that the universities are liberal. That allegation is ludicrous because huge
chunks of the university which nobody ever talks about are extremely conserva-
tive by their very nature. Most law schools are conservative. Most business schools
are conservative. Most medical schools, and the huge parts of universities that are

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 256 Radical History Review

involved with science, are neither liberal nor conservative. If anything, they might
have a slight bent towards the status quo. And most schools of international affairs
are conservative (i.e., security studies). They’re not extremely conservative, neces-
sarily, but they’re certainly not left-liberal or liberal. I mean, where is there a busi-
ness school that’s liberal in the whole of the United States? Where is there a law
school that’s liberal? Well, there might be a couple law schools that are slightly
liberal. Slightly. But there’s a range of opinion in most of them, and most of them are
quite conservative, and many of them are extremely conservative. The University of
Chicago, for example. Nobody ever talks about that.
And even if you go further, where is there a nonconservative department of
economics? Well, there are maybe one or two, but most of them are quite conserva-
tive. Even in some of the other social sciences, it’s really hard to say that we are talk-
ing about departments, or fields, which as a whole are liberal. The only place where
this ridiculous accusation has some traction is in the humanities. And only some
parts of the humanities. So, yes, there is a liberal bias in parts of the humanities and
some of the social sciences. Maybe history. Maybe anthropology. Maybe compara-
tive literature. And what part of the academy is that? Well, it’s a small part, albeit
an important part. I wish it were more important. But actually, if you look at what
most students study, they study accounting, they study business, they study engi-
neering, they study law, they study science, they go into medicine. They may take a
few humanities courses. Their minds, heaven forbid, may be poisoned by a liberal
idea or two. But in the overall structure, universities are relatively conservative, with
important liberal elements (to use that ridiculous terminology).

Do you have any evidence that these intimidation techniques are working, either
among young colleagues or among students?

No. I doubt that they’re working. I would be very surprised if they’re working. You
know, junior faculty have always kept their heads down. Rare is the junior faculty,
the nontenured member of the university, who will contradict their seniors on any-
thing of importance to them. Leave aside the politics and the real world. And there
are understandable reasons for that, even if it’s not always admirable. And, one way
or another, that’s not going to be changed by this. It has deep roots, the most impor-
tant of which are internal to the universities. You have to have a process. If it’s not
the faculty who determines tenure, then you have an even worse body. And as long
as you have that you have all kinds of problems of patronage and seniority. It is in
some sense a corrupt system, but I can’t think of what the alternative would be.

But there is another level at which this can work and may be working, which is at
our level.

Graduate students.

• • • • •

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 Allen, Deeb, and Winegar | Academics and the Government 257

Indeed, a number of young scholars have been explicitly advised not to study cer-
tain topics, especially Palestine. One respondent to an informal survey said that
an advisor told him in 1996 to steer away from working on Palestinian issues as it
would “affect [his] prospects for getting a job further down the road.” On begin-
ning graduate school in 1999, an anthropology student’s advisor told her she had
“counseled people against studying Palestinians until after the Oslo Accords, which
she felt legitimized the identity of Palestinians on an international stage.” Another
respondent described her experience:
In 1994, I was talking with my advisor about potential fieldwork sites in the
Middle East. There was a range of issues that I was interested in researching,
and I thought that Palestine would be a fruitful place to explore them. She
said it would be really hard for me to get tenure with a project in Palestine,
because the academy, administrations, and trustees would always doubt one’s
allegiances. She said I should wait until I had tenure to start work in Palestine,
which is what she had been planning to do since she started in academia.

Stories such as these are not uncommon. We asked Khalidi to comment.

People are being told, “Don’t even touch Palestine. Go to Malaysia or anywhere
else. The farther away you can get from Palestine-Israel, the better off you’ll be.”

I don’t think it affects students. I think students are still adventurous and brave
enough to do exactly the opposite of what they’re told. If they’re told to stay away,
they say, “Why should I stay away? I want to see more about it.” I detect a remark-
able level of inquisitiveness and open-mindedness among students. I think that’s
one of the things that drives the other side crazy. They have cultivated a hothouse
atmosphere where people will only get one view. Suddenly people are exposed to
another view, and they lose people: people who actually get a chance to see alterna-
tive points of view. They say, “Yeah, maybe there is more to this than I was always
taught in an isolated atmosphere.” And that really scares the living daylights out of
them. They have to maintain a closed system. Because much of what they’re saying
is false. There is a complexity to the confl ict which, even if you are a committed
Zionist and supporter of Israel, you can entertain. But they are the enemies of com-
plexity. Because so much of the support they’ve developed is structured on the idea
that there is only one way to see things. That there is no complexity. It’s flat. It’s a
picture that does not stand up to any kind of scrutiny.
If students were staying away [from controversial issues], I wouldn’t have so
many people trying to work on topics related to Palestine-Israel. And it’s not just me.
Everybody who teaches these issues is besieged by students. The numbers of people
interested—those who are committed one way, those who are committed another
way, those who want to know, those with no views—are increasing.

• • • • •

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 258 Radical History Review

There is no doubt that, within academia and the broader public, the Middle East,
Islam, and area studies in general have gained increased attention—whether nega-
tive, positive, hysterical, paranoid, simply curious, muscularly intimidating, or oth-
erwise. But it may be that this particular period of intense focus on these issues,
sparked in part by HR 3077 and similar initiatives, has had quite the opposite effect
than what may have been intended. Students have continued to be political and con-
tinue to be drawn to complicated, controversial issues. But they are wary. We close
with an excerpt from an e-mail correspondence between two junior scholars who
were part of a discussion we initiated on a Middle East anthropology listserv.
I do not feel cowed by the neoconservative critique, which is why I have
publicly signed my name onto initiatives both within and outside of academia
that aim to expose United States or Israeli or Arab government actions, and
to analyze the effects that they have on social life and prospects for peace and
prosperity. That said, I do feel like I’m treading on eggshells in the classroom
and on the job market. I’ve been attacked a couple of times in the classroom for
assigning certain readings (which are well-respected within the academy), or
for using words like “occupation,” which are agreed upon by the international
community.

Her colleague responded:

Eggshells, glass, or burning coals, this ground needs to be tread. I won’t be
intimidated into silence, ignorance, or obfuscations. I refuse to wake up thirty
years from now and ask myself, why didn’t I say anything to people about what
I knew of the brutalities of Israeli occupation and the criminal incompetence
of the Palestinian Authority? Or why didn’t I do more to learn about, and
tell students about, what my government was doing in Iraq, or how Arab
governments treat human rights activists? I have the abilities, facilities, and
luxury to seek the facts and expose forms of oppression. That, therefore, is my
responsibility. Advisors, granting institutions, editors and thought police may
be trying to hide our shoes, but we have to continue to walk that bumpy path
seeking out truth, no matter how hot the embers.

Notes
1. David Horowitz, “Academic Bill of Rights,” Students for Academic Freedom,
www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/abor.html (accessed April 14, 2005).
2. From Sec. 633 of HR 3077, Library of Congress, thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c108:2:./
temp/~c108ETHkk4:e21036 (accessed April 14, 2005; this site is no longer active).
3. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
4. Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in
the Middle East (Boston: Beacon, 2004).

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 Allen, Deeb, and Winegar | Academics and the Government 259

5. From Sec. 633 of HR 3077, Library of Congress, thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c108:2:./

temp/~c108ETHkk4:e21036 (accessed April 14, 2005; this site is no longer active).
6. For analyses of how Campus Watch specifically targets professors seen to be anti-Israel
and anti-America, see Scott Smallwood, “Campus Watch in the Media: Web Site Lists
Professors Accused of Anti-Israel Bias and Asks Students to Report on Them,” Chronicle of
Higher Education, September 19, 2002, www.chronicle.com/daily/2002/09/2002091902n
.htm.
7. Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America
(Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001).
8. Ibid., as quoted in Zacharay Lockman, “Behind the Battles over U.S. Middle East Studies,”
Middle East Report, January 2004, www.merip.org/mero/interventions/lockman_interv
.html. This article also contains a detailed critique of Ivory Towers on Sand, with a general
overview of the battles described here.
9. This information can be found at University of California, Berkeley, Graduate Assembly,
ga.berkeley.edu/academics/hr3077.html (accessed April 14, 2005).
10. For a collected sampling, see Social Science Research Council, www.ssrc.org/programs/
mena/MES_Opinions/index.page (accessed April 14, 2005).
11. Here Khalidi refers to the so-called clash of civilizations thesis put forth by Samuel P.
Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York:
Touchstone, 1997).
12. See, for example, an article by Diane Jones, director of the Office of Government Affairs
at Princeton University, “House Bill Should Not Be Cause for Alarm,” Yale Daily News,
December 10, 2003, www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=24398.
13. See Vijay Prashad, “Confronting the Evangelical Imperialists, Mr. Kurtz: The Horror, the
Horror,” Counterpunch, November 13, 2003, www.counterpunch.org/prashad11132003.
html. See also Kristine McNeil, “The War on Academic Freedom,” Nation, November 11,
2002, www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021125&c=1&s=mcneil.
14. Anders Strindberg, “The New Commissars,” American Conservative, February 2, 2004,
www.amconmag.com/2004_02_02/article.html.
15. Said and Foucault are quoted in Richard Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 30, 31.
16. Bernard Lewis, “Democracy and the Enemies of Freedom,” Wall Street Journal,
December 28, 2003, available at Opinion Journal, www.opinionjournal.com/extra/
?id=110004478 (accessed April 14, 2005).

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