From Moment Magazine, September 1978
Obviously, research and teaching about the Arab world are entirely proper and even healthy endeavors for an American university. What makes the sudden and dramatic expansion in such activities worrisome is that they are so clearly an opportunistic response to the new Arab wealth rather than to the considered requirements of higher education; that the quality of the people available to guide research and teaching in a field that has so long been neglected is necessarily uneven; that the dollars which have begun to flow into these programs frequently come with strings attached. On the basis of the evidence, one is bound to ask whether it is bonafide educational centers that are being built and expanded or whether, instead, we are witnessing the development of a network of cells for propaganda activities. The answer, it turns out, is ambiguous and disturbing.
Last March, in the wake of the Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon, a Washington-based spokesman for the League of Arab States, Dr. Clovis Maksoud, issued a bitter condemnation of the Israeli action. Among other things, he charged that Israel had merely used the PLO Tel Aviv bus bombing as an excuse to implement a long-standing invasion plan. “The invasion doesn’t constitute a response to the Palestinian raid,” Maksoud said. “Instead, it points out a contingency plan by Israel to gain suzerainty over Lebanon.”
Maksoud’s broadside differed little in either tone or content from those unleashed by any of the other numerous U.S.-based Arab propagandists.
What distinguished Maksoud’s attack from the others was that it was issued on the stitionery of Washington’s most regarded institution of higher education, Georgetown University. Because of the respectability of its imprimatur, Maksoud’s statement was widely quoted in the press.
How did Maksoud put his hands on Georgetown stationery? No deception there. Maksoud was a member of the Georgetown staff, a visiting lecturer at Georgetown’s recently established and highly controversial Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. It was at the Conter that Maksoud and other members of the vociferously anti-Israel faculty gave their well-attended “press-briefing” for the Washington press corps. Nor, as we shall see, it is merely coincidence that the Georgetown Center, whose members have managed to make their voices heard on a number of other recent Middle East developments as well, receives most of its financial support from a group of both radical and moderate Arab states. (Its largest gift to date-$750,000-came from the government of Libya.)
Among those outraged by Georgetown’s blatantly one-sided “press-briefing” was Art Buchwald. “I don’t see why the PLO has to have a PR organization in the United States,” wrote Buchwald in one of a number of sharp letters he was to exchange with Georgetown officials, “when Georgetown is doing all their work for them.”
The so-called Buchwald-Maksoud affair is but one of a chain of controversies which has recently erupted on American campuses as the Arab presence in academe has increased. Much has already been written about the lucrative consulting contracts which have tempted American universities not less than they have enticed American business firms. Less attention has been paid to the developing connection between Arab states and the academic world which comes much closer to the heart of the academic enterprise. According to the State Department, cooperative programs, or linkages between Arab agencies and American universities, have increased ten-fold since 1973. At least 75 American colleges and universities - and quite possibly many more – have accepted gifts from various Arab states in order to establish new or to bolster existing departments in Middle Eastern or Arab studies – quite apart from those which have negotiated research or consulting contracts.
Obviously, research and teaching about the Arab world are entirely proper and even healthy endeavors for an American university. What makes the sudden and dramatic expansion in such activities worrisome is that they are so clearly an opportunistic response to the new Arab wealth rather than to the considered requirements of higher education; that the quality of the people available to guide research and teaching in a field that has so long been neglected is necessarily uneven; that the dollars which have begun to flow into these programs frequently come with strings attached. On the basis of the evidence, one is bound to ask whether it is bonafide educational centers that are being built and expanded or whether, instead, we are witnessing the development of a network of cells for propaganda activities. The answer, it turns out, is ambiguous and disturbing. One is bound to ask whether the Arab sponsors are committed to academic freedom, or whether it is something very different they have in mind. And even where the activities appear entirely respectable and seem to conform to the highest standards of decency. The answer, again, is ambiguous and disturbing.
Thus, for example, a tacit stipulation of most contractual arrangements with Arab states is that Jewish staff will not be employed in projects funded with Arab dollars. In July 1975, the Midwest Universities Consortium for International Activities – which consists of Indiana University, Michigan State, the Universities of Illinois, Wisconsin and Minessota – terminated its program of academic assistance at the University of Riyadh after the Saudis refused a visa to a Jewish professor. The professor, Ralph Smuckler, is dean of the international program at Michigan State, and a member of the Consortium board of directors.
The first issue of “Petro Impact,” a newsletter put out by the American Jewish Committee to help keep track of the frowing Arab penetration into American affairs, surveys the situation as follows:
“In the quest for new sources of financial support, many American colleges and universities have sought grants or research contracts from Arab sources. While these funds may be used for perfectly legitimate purposes – including study of the contemporary Arab world… they may also be used to skew university curricula, underwrite biased anti-Israel programs and support on-campus propaganda activities not consonant with the universities’ fundamental quest for truth and knowledge.”
Israeli Consul Daniel Mokabi, who keeps regular tabs on the matter more bluntly. Speaking of the Arab world’s sudden, and somewhat suspicious fondness for certain prestigious American academies of learning, Mokabi says: “It’s really quite simple. They are rying to buy these schools out.”
Is there a real possibility that the integrity of higher education in the United States is being seriously compromised? Consider the café of Georgetown. Of all the myriad institutions which have forged new links with Arab league governments, it is Georgetown which understandably causes the most concern. Not only does the prestigious Jesuit university’s rapid embrace of even the most hot-headed Arab donors seem to set a distressing moral precedent; it is also in a position to exert considerable influence upon the shaping of American foreign policy towards the Middle East, a position it has already begun to exploit.
Apparently, no one at Georgetown is particularly troubled by its Center for Contemporary Arab Studies’ acceptance of the $750,000 from Col. Muammar el-Quadaffi’s pro-terrorist regime. (The money, given in May, 1977, goes to endow the Center’s Umar Al-Mukhtar Chair of Arab Culture.) Nor has there been significant opposition expressed to the appointment of the Libyan ambassador to the United Nations, Mansur R. Kikhia, as one of the eleven advisors to the Center. (The other include Issa Al Kawari, Qatar’s Minister of Information; Qais Al Zawawi, Oman’s Minister of State of Foreign Affairs, a Mobil Oil vice president, Chase Manhattan’s director of international relations for the Middle East – and J. William Fulbright, now a registered foreign agent.
Nor, one imagines, is there much embarrassment regarding the presence on the Center’s faculty of several outspoken PLO enthusiasts. That, presumably, is why the Center’s second annual report proudly notes participation of three of its faculty members in a Bagdad University Symposium on Zionism held in 1976 – and of another at a Washington conference on “Zionism and Racism.” (The Bagdad participants included Center Director Michael Hudson.)
Georgetown is hardly a backwater institution. It produces annually more U.S. Foreign Service and State Department officers than anu other school in the country. It is located virtually within whispering distance of Congress and the Washington press corps. It has a long-standing tradition of interaction with the highest officials of the American government. In short, it is an especially tempting plum, of obvious interest to Libya and the United Arab Emirates.
Center Director Hudson predictably insists that “we don’t mix politics and education.” But perusal of the Center’s report suggests the opposite. Otherwise, why does the report proudly note that “faculty members were frequently consulted on Middle Eastern developments; and members were quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Tines,” etc. etc.
I testimony before Congressional committees and in background briefings for businessmen and officers, “Center members played a part in current Middle Eastern developments in Washington.”
Georgetown’s President, Reverend Timothy Healy, S.J. – who arrived on the Georgetown campus two years ago, when the Center’s existence was already a fait accompli – is reported to be increasingly uncomfortable with the lobbying activities of his Arab studies staff. But in public Father Healy continues to insist that the school’s integrity ha bot been compromised. “Don’t ignore the self-corrective capacity of a university, regardless of the source of the gift,” Healy said in a recent interview with Gene Maeroff of The New York Times. “In the fall there will be five American Jews and an Israeli (enrolled) in Arab studies, and a professor would have a hell of a time propagandizing to them.”
Five American Jews, one Israeli – and about 450 other students. One wonders whether they will be sufficient to provide the “self-correction” Father Healy implies is needed, or to counterattack the Arab largesse which is the Center’s principal source of support. After all, the tune the Arab sponsors call, and the Center pipers play, is primarily “performance giants” – short term arrangements which permit frequent review of the Center’s activities.
To be sure, Georgetown is not the only major American college or university that puts out the welcome mat to all Arab comers, regardless of the nature of their respective regimes. Nearby, the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies also matter-of-faculty states in its prospectus that it doesn’t really care where its foreign benefactors reside – as long as they can produce legal tender.
Nevertheless, one is hard put to find administrators who are as opportunistic in this regard – and as candid – as Peter Krogh, Dean of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, and chairman of the executive committee of the Arab Studies Center. (It was Krogh who originally laid the groundwork for the Center and continues to be its chief dues collector.) Art Buchwald, who has made the WASPish Georgetown citadel of learning one of his favorite satirical dartboards of late, sent a barbed letter to the Georgetown Voice, the weekly student newspaper, following the announcement of the Libyan bequest. After calling the bequest “blood money”, Buchwald went on to remind his readers that Libya had “financed, trained, supported and [given] haven to terrorists and hijackers.” He then suggested that the school might next consider creating a “Brezhnev Studies program in Human Rights” or an “Idi Amin Chair in Genocide.”
Krogh, when reached for comment, was unfazed. “ I don’t know Uganda,” he told a reporter from The Washington Post, who was wondering whether the Jesuit institution would indeed accept the African dictator’s charity.
“I’ve never been to Uganda,” said Krogh. “I don’t know Idi Amin.” Suggesting, thereby, that were they to meet, Krogh might be impressed by Amin’s essential decency, and suggesting further that he does know Quadaffi – and isn’t bothered by what he knows.
So much for Georgetown, newest in the expanding galaxy of Arab studies. Over on the West Coast at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, a somewhat different story unfolds. There, the Arab-American connection is so old as to be non-controversial. For twenty years, USC has educated the elite sons of Saudi Arabia, in addition to furnishing many of the plans and ideas which have shaped the modernization of that oil-rich sheikdom. So strong is the Saudi-USC connection, and so certain is a USC degree a guarantee of professional success for a Saudi, that scores of the young sheiks now enter USC each year. (And there’s also the fabled California lifestyle to sample along the way to success.) Cynics have called Saudi Arabia a “USC field project.”
Curiously, USC has never had much of a Middle Eastern Studies department – the Saudis, after all, are more interested in learning about American culture and society than their own. But when, during the recent nationwide boom in this area, the Saudis were happy to oblige, forking over a cool million to endow a King Faisal Chair of Islamic and Arabic Studies. In this case, however, there were explicit strings attached to the bequest: University President Dr. John Hubbard agreed to choose the chair holder in consultation with the Saudi Minister of Hugher Education.
This chummy (and potentially discriminatory) arrangement is particularly irksome to AJC’s Ira Silverman. “Whether this arrangement is inimical in itself, I don’t know,” says Silverman. “Will Saudi Arabia approve of a Jew in the chair? I don’t know. But the whole thing certainly doesn’t look like a good precedent.”
The growing population of Arab undergraduates studying in the United States, estimated at 25,000, is also of concern to Jewish campus monitors – particularly the increasingly vociferous minority of students from the hardline states. The Saudis of USC may be too busy with their studies – and their volleyball – to engage in demonstrations and pamphleteering; however, some of their more radical peers at other American campuses show no such reluctance. Arab student activists were particularly in evidence after the Israeli military action in southern Lebanon. At the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, for example, the Organization of Arab Students distributed flyers proclaiming: “Once again, the Zionists have spread their Nazi tactics upon the Arab people.”
Meanwhile, University of Georgia activists managed to cause an “International Student Week” to be cancelled, after objecting to the exclusion of Palestine from the activities – and at Portland State University administrator were forced by Arab protesters to remove an Israeli flag from a lobby display, because, they charged, the display constituted a gratuitous “political statement.”
To be sure, the Arab academic juggernaut has been successfully derailed on certain campuses, as Jews and non-Jews have learned of impending and morally objectionable Arab-American contracts or endowments of one sort or another. Sometimes, indeed, there has been resistance where it was least expected.
At the University of Alabama at Birmingham, for example, the announcement of a “mutually beneficial and cooperative” educational exchange program with the Tripoli-based University f Al Fateh touched off a crisis of conscience among several dozen Jewish faculty, eventually leading to organized protest. Thanks to the cooperation of Jewish community leaders – and the open-mindedness of the university president, who previously was ill-informed about the true nature of the Tripoli regime – the proposed program was aborted. (Interestingly, half of the protesting Jewish faculty had never before had any tie with the Jewish community of greater Birmingham.)
A similar firestorm recently erupted on the Quaker-affiliated campuses of Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, and Haverford, after it was discovered that a philanthropic foundation to which Swarthmore officials had applied for a $590,000 grant for the propagation of Arab studies was actually the creature of Saudi arms dealer, Adnan Khashoggi. At the time, Khahsgoggi was the central figure in a major arms payoff scandal, and today he remains under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The trio’s Quaker conscience dictated against taking money from such a tainted individual, and one by one, the schools withdrew their bids: Onf the three, only Bryn Mawr has nor totally severed its tie with Khashoggi’s charity.
“This is a good case history of how we can be effective in working with colleges to limit Arab influence on campuses,” the AJC’s field report on the episode concluded, “although in view of the school’s Quaker background and Khashoggi’s cloudy reputation as an arms merchant, its happy ending is not likely to be replicated in other cases.”
One of the factors which shocked Swarthmore faculty into contacting the American Jewish Committee was an ominously-worded draft memorandum in which a Swarthmore official underlined the tactical advantages of focusing Arab largesse on the small, private college level. “The greatest leverage on influential public opinion is to be found in this area for three reasons,” the official pointed out.
First and foremost, “there is no higher percentage of successful men and women than among the graduates of colleges such as Amherst, Bowdoin, Mt. Holyoke, Swarthmore, Williams, Wellesley, Carleton, Grinnell, Reed, Oberlin, Rice, and perhaps thirty others…”
Second, he noted, the “major private universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Chicago… already have centers of Middle Eastern Studies but which may be suffering from inertia and obfuscated policies.” (In other words, these campuses are likely to be more resistant to Arab influence.)
Third, “programs followed by the prestigious private colleges influence and set examples particularly for state-run educational institutions. If Arab studies became established in them, then public institutions will be encouraged, at public expense, to provide similar facilities.”
“This is a program that will not produce instant results,” the memo concludes. “But with time and patient stewardship it presents great possibilities for the spread of basic understanding of Arab concerns and for the encouragement of a favorable public relations climate in this country.”
A more obvious – and whorish – sales pitch could scarcely be imagined. Happily, Swarthmore’s good sense, its faculty’s alertness, and Jewish vigilance intercepted the solicitation. How many other universities, faced with financial exigencies, will be tempted to sell themselves in equally degrading ways? With representatives of the Arab states baldly flashing their bankrolls, with universities so adept at rationalizing their own behavior and so imbued with a sense of their incorruptibility the temptation will be – is – substantial.
The problem is serious enough so that it troubles not only Jews. It troubles the more thoughtful scholars in the field as well. Thus, the prominent Middle East specialist at the University of London P.J. Vatikiotis, recently wrote, “The implication of this development for Middle Eastern studies in America cannot be, at this moment, precisely determined or foreseen. The trend, however, suggests that American universities cannot… support Middle Eastern studies in the normal way, this retaining academic control over them. In the meantime, the financing of programs and centers by foreign governments jeopardizes, to say the least, the independence of Middle Eastern studies in America.”
If there is a solution to this problem, it rests, finally, on the moral and ethical sensibility and sensitivity of the American academic community – campus by campus. “We can’t depend on the law to fight off the Arabs,” Israeli Consul Mokabi says. “In most cases, they are doing nothing illegal. Everything happens very subtly. First, money is obtained for development. Then friendly faculty are hired. And then they are replaced with even friendlier staff, and so on. We are counting on moral bulwarks, not legal ones,” says Mokabi.
But moral bulwarks may be inadequate, as recent university experience shows. Continuing vigilance by an attentive public may be a more dependable defense.