Today in Opinion: True Colors

We at the Commentariat don’t shy away from trashing other publications. We do this partly out of fairness: publications sometimes deserve it, and you the reader deserve to know that they deserve it. In a more reflective vein, we do it because it’s a time-honored journalistic tradition to couch one’s sense of journalistic superiority in a larger critique of “the media.” No one is better at this than Slate’s Timothy Noah, who successfully lays waste to his competition under the spurious veneer of “journalistic integrity.” And you gotta love him for it–whatever their motivations, it’s the Timothy Noahs of the world that keep the rest of us bastards honest.

And on that note, lets have a look at the Blue and White’s most recent cover story. Like any good piece of journalism, it’s selective in what it says about its topic–in this case, the current state of the MEALAC department. But like any questionable piece of journalism, it’s breathtaking in what it omits, and it subsequently qualifies as one of the strangest pieces I’ve ever come across in Columbia’s student press. And here, “strange” doesn’t necessarily equate with “good.”

Reedy pegs the article around a “long-simmering existential crisis” within MEALAC–in a nutshell, postmodernism versus pragmatism, humanities versus the social sciences, Edward Said versus the CIA. She explains that MEALAC was a reaction to the politically (and colonially)-motivated Area Studies of the 1950s and 60s, a mode of scholarship that favored pragmatism, the social sciences, the CIA, and cynical political opportunism.

But the Area Studies straw man is effectively dismantled by Hamid Dabashi, who sees the spectre of Area Studies as being so distant that he has “no problem” with potential State Department influence-peddling:

“I don’t have a problem with getting money from the State Department. After all, that’s my tax money too,” said Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature. “I’d rather have it spent on training a student in Arabic and learning culture than [spent] on bombs, guns, bullets, tanks.”

And yet Busch expressed concern that students may be trading intimate knowledge of language for more practical tools. She articulated the central dilemma of the MEALAC debate: “How can we outfit our students without compromising our humanistic values?”

Umm no, that’s not the “central dilemma of the MEALAC debate”–rather, that’s a (as in not the only or even the most important) central dilemma of any educational undertaking that aspires to some version of real-world relevance. More importantly, it is an attempt to obfuscate some of the very real dilemmas facing MEALAC, none of which are mentioned in Reedy’s article. These include:

-The place of African studies. Although Reedy quotes African studies head Mamadou Diouf, she doesn’t seem interested in answering (or even asking) what should have been a painfully obvious question: what is sub-Saharan African studies doing in the Middle East Asian Languages and Cultures Department? Stated differently: doesn’t MEALAC forfeit its specified geographical or cultural focus by taking on areas of study that are geographically and culturally distinct from it?

I would have been interested in knowing what MEALAC’s long-term plans were for getting rid of sub-Saharan African studies and helping to establish it as an independent department. But in the course of her ringing, 3000-word infomercial, Reedy assumes that languages like Xosha and Swahili will be eased into the lager MEALAC curriculum–and takes no interest in the conflict this would represent for Middle Eastern and African studies both.

-The place of Israel studies. The Israel studies institute currently has one post-doctoral fellow, one tenured professor, and no permanent director. The post-doctoral fellow is a talented scholar of Jewish women’s studies on loan from JTS; the professor is sociologist Yinon Cohen.

The Israel studies predicament is rankling for two reasons: firstly, the fact that it doesn’t fall under the MEALAC umbrella suggests that Israel can’t be studied in MEALAC, and at the very least, it means that somebody thinks that Israel can’t be studied in MEALAC (the fact that the only Israel studies post-doc at Columbia is teaching in the religion department raises questions of its own). This is a problem–unless we’ve forgotten, Israel is part of the Middle East. Sub-Saharan Africa is not.

Secondly, the conflation of Israel and Jewish studies suggests that the study of Israel is so peripheral that it can somehow be subsumed into Judaic Studies (as opposed to Said-style anti-Israel studies, which gets its own department). Interestingly, Columbia views Yiddish and Jewish studies as distinct, although Yiddish studies is a far more developed and much less controversial field than its Israel-related counterpart.

So in a sense, the MEALAC department’s now-notorious ideological bent–or even perceived ideological bent–is underwriting Israel Studies’ slow-motion identity crisis. And this has the potential to institutionalize the divide that was exposed during the MEALAC row of ‘04-’05–which is something apparent fans of MEALAC like Reedy should be very worried about.

-The beatification of Edward Said. About half way through the article, I noticed that Reedy was committing a crucial categorical error: there is no MEALAC-Area Studies divide, since Area Studies refers to a cold-war phenomena that could never be reproduced within any intellectual climate as progressive as ours. As I noted above, Area Studies a useful straw man, one that distracts from the far deeper rift that separates Said-craven departments like MEALAC from ones that take a more intellectually moderate approach to things.

I’m of course thinking of EALAC, which has produced three of the finest old-school regional scholars American higher ed has ever seen. MEALAC can claim Edward Said, but EALAC claims Burton Watson, Donald Keene and William Theodor de Bary, academics and translators out of sync with the post-colonial, post-structuralist orthodoxy practiced in MEALAC. So while MEALAC is drenched in the language of cultural theory, EALAC is not, and a quick look at their course offerings this semester reveals the departments’ very different approaches to cultural and regional studies.

Reedy all but glosses over the Saidization of MEALAC. She makes a good-faith effort at addressing it in terms of its opposition to colonially-minded Area Studies–but I would argue that an uncritical embrace of Said-style cultural theory presents dilemmas which have nothing do with Reedy’s specious pragmatism/post-modernism divide. It has the potential to seriously damage the department’s intellectual credibility, and to ward off scholars who haven’t been indoctrinated into post-colonial theory.

So the article  succeeds in evoking a department that’s at organizational and intellectual peace with itself, and tells us nothing of how MEALAC plans on resolving some of these very real, long-outstanding issues. What we get is more an endorsement than a journalistic investigation–an endorsement of a controversial status quo that could compromise one of the most important departments on campus. So what is it doing in the Blue and White?

I can think of a single possibility: last month, Blue and White editor-in-chief Anna Philips wrote an article on the trepidation of Columbia’s urban studies department in confronting the Manhattanville expansion. It was an exercise in self-contradiction: one of the article’s subjects had quit her post at Columbia to work as Bloomberg’s urban planning advisor, while another was one of the founding members of Bollinger’s Manhattanville faculty committee. Yet the article operated off of the assumption that professors were somehow obligated to speak out on Manhattanville–which, in the context of the article’s non-interest in its pro-expansion subjects (remember: it was entitled Columbia Spectators. I wouldn’t characterize Esther Fuchs as a “spectator”), meant speaking out againstManhattanville.

At the time, I read this as an attempt at reassuring the campus radicals who provide the Bwog and the Blue and White with tips, interviews and stories. The Blue and White is usually terrified of appearing too ideological–one of the reasons I resigned as a Bwog daily editor was because my editors found this post too controversial. But one need only read the last paragraph of the MEALAC article to see just how political the undergraduate magazine’s motivations have become:

So that’s the kicker–3,000 words of MEALAC controversy-free reporting, followed by a contextually gratuitious reference to the David Project. Yeah, take that people who have huge problems with Hamid Dabashi writing that Israelis have no souls, or who are offended by Joseph Massad’s belief that Zionism is a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world!