In response to growing criticisms leveled against the academy’s Middle East Studies establishment, MESA president Joel Beinin sent along an email to certain members of the Middle Eastern Studies Association urging them to fight to regain public credibility. The text of that email is recounted by Beth Henary, writing in The Weekly Standard:
'You are probably aware that the public attack on American Middle East studies and MESA in particular that began with the publication of [editor of the Middle East Quarterly's] Martin Kramer's Ivory Towers on Sand has continued throughout the year in the mass media . . . and many other places as well as articles and radio shows by one Stanley Kurtz (a fellow at the Hoover Institution located uncomfortably close to my house) [...]
'While the intellectual criticisms of MESA members are mostly mean spirited, ad hominem, and spurious, there is a significant threat to Middle East studies from this assault . . . . In the xenophobic current atmosphere [sic] of the United States, we would be seriously remiss if we failed to make a public case for the value of our scholarly enterprise not only for its own sake, but also for the public good it provides to American society at large.'
“But,” Henary notes, “when urging his fellow professors to speak publicly about the value inherent in Middle East studies('explain why our understandings of the Middle East are often at variance with popularly held views'), Beinin offered specific advice about what they should say”:
'Keep the focus on the positive work of MESA. . . . It is better to avoid engaging with the calumnies that have been directed against us.'
Translation: keep to the talking points, y’all. Don’t venture beyond what’s outlined in the memo.
As Henary herself quips, “Yes, indeed. In academia things are always easier without a debate.”
“Xenophobic atmosphere”?
What “xenophobic atmosphere”?
You know, all the mobs that have been attacking strangers who happen to wander into town. Oops—sorry, just got back from Bizarro World—I get a little confused sometimes…
Maybe the denizens of Academia are starting to think of themselves as a separate race. (Or maybe they forgot about their disguises—what about it, Jeff? Have any of your colleagues been acting odd lately, drinking coffee through their ears, levitating, displaying the odd tentacle or two, suddenly screaming “Silence, puny humans!” at faculty meetings?)
(Or are you one of them???)
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Or, to answer you in ways you can understand: no
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Well, these guys’ whole profession is to sugarcoat the intentions and actions of a hostile foreign power, and many of them receive funding from that power, and after agents of that power attack us, they panic because we might be miffed? We might blame them in lieu of the folks who actually did it? They sense the noose tightening as the stoopid ‘Muricans restlessly finger their six irons and glance nervousely from side to side?
Granted, they’re due a generous dose of contempt for their posturing, preening, and general fatuousness. Is that xenophobia? Uh, here’s where I could toss in a cheap joke about Lucy Lawless, but I can’t get that worked up.
These people need to get out more. How can people say things like that without smirking, unless they really are cut off from the rest of the country? Generally we only expect this degree of cluelessness and smug superiority from the State Department.