Posted on 05/14/2002 3:17:29 PM PDT by What Is Ain't
I recently wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal reporting on "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance," a course scheduled for next fall in the English department at the University of California at Berkeley. With a reading list featuring no fewer than three books by the Palestine apologist Edward Said, this blatant exercise in political propaganda boasted an amazing course description. The teacher, one Snehal Shingavi, spoke of "the brutal Israeli military occupation of Palestine, an occupation that has been ongoing since 1948, has systematically displaced, killed, and maimed millions of Palestinian people," and concluded with this advisory: "Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections."
Berkeley administrators are content to have just about any sort of garbage taught under the rubric of "English," but Mr. Shingavi made the tactical error of explicitly discouraging students of a certain political orientation from attending his class. Had he just gone ahead and turned them away, everything would probably have been fine. But his candid declaration flew in the face of Berkeley's commitment to "diversity" and so he was sharply reprimanded and the sentence about "conservative thinkers" was dropped from the official course description.
When the controversy over the course erupted, Mr. Shingavi lamely claimed in one interview that by "conservative thinkers" he did not of course mean, well, "conservative thinkers," but rather those that are "limited or narrow in scope." Right. And I am Marie of Roumania.
Berkeley administrators were embarrassed because one of their flock was publicly discriminating against part of the student population. His course description — and a fortiori, his course — was designed to have (in the favored phrase) a "chilling effect" on debate. But what the people running Berkeley really ought to be worried about — but what no one there has uttered a word to criticize — is the patent politicization of the curriculum implicit in courses like "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance."
In my article for the Wall Street Journal, I contrasted such efforts to politicize education with Matthew Arnold's ideal of "disinterestedness" — a habit of inquiry that, Arnold said, that refused "to lend itself to any . . . ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas." Traditionally, some such ideal was at the center of the educational enterprise and the search for truth.
To what extent our colleges and universities can still be said to be engaged in the search for truth is an open question, to say the least. The controversy over "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" provided a vivid illustration of what I mean. On the television talk show Hardball, Chris Matthews carved up Mr. Shingavi and one of his supporters, Sarah Eltantawi, who represented the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Asked whether she defended the course, Ms. Eltantawi delivered herself of this extraordinary pronouncement:
Well, I defend the course, of course, because you know, it's funny, this is based on a Wall Street Journal article today by Roger Kimball and his basis for making this — this basically, critique of any discussion of Palestinian resistance is some sort of academic notion of objectivity and how it's — how, you know, the institutions need to stay objective. Well, the notion of objectivity is in and of itself a politicized notion that — that can be exploited by people like your guests for their own political agenda. You know, anyone who has been in the academy since the civil-rights movement knows that the notion of objectivity in and of itself is very problematic and you can't just bandy it around for your own political reasons. So basically what this is is it's a hit on any class that wants to take as a point of reference Palestinian resistance as a legitimate course of study. There's nothing wrong with this class, it studies Palestinian poets that have been recognized for decades in American universities that — that speak about resistance in the Israeli occupation. And that's what the academy is for.
Okay, so the poor girl was flustered and had trouble articulating what she wanted to say. A friend of mine, having read Ms. Eltantawi's fumbling expostulation, provided this parody: "Well I mean basically I have to say well um fundamentally you have to problematize in a basic sort of way the conceptualization er the system basically must have of the er pedagogization of the er so-called English language." He went on to ask: "Do you think these people have thoughts running through their heads that correspond to their utterances, and if so why don't they commit suicide?" A good question, possibly, though one cannot help noting that, when it comes suicide, Muslims these days seem to have lost the knack of bringing it off without large elements of homicide attached.
In any event, even after every discount is made for the rawness of off-the-cuff remarks, what we are left with in Ms. Eltantawi's remarks is this: There is no such thing as objectivity or disinterestedness — or, rather, such traditional ideals are nothing more than tokens of political power. It's an idea that is common as dirt in the academy today. It is rubbish, of course. But if we do accept it, then we as a society are left with another question: Why should we lavish such attention and largess on institutions that, although the pretend to be pursuing the truth, are really only fronts for political extremism?
She would've made a good model for an antagonist in an Ayn Rand novel.
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