By now everyone has heard of GWOT, the Global War on Terror. If you think the answer is to terrorize the terrorists, fine. But what about GWOS, the Global War on Scholarship? Surely one of the most troubling aspects of GWOT is the extent to which scholars and scholarship have become “collateral damage” -– isn’t it appalling how our language has adapted to our new political circumstances? This morning I read in The Chronicle that a Federal District Court judge in New York had decided that the federal government had broken no law when it denied a visa to the Oxford scholar Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss citizen, who had been hired as a tenured professor at the University of Notre Dame. Whether or not the judge was correct as to the law (he said that the law permitted State Department consular officials considerable discretion), the fact is that the present administration is using its power to prohibit recognized scholars from entering the United States to teach, attend conferences -– and do the things that international scholarly exchange requires.
And the Ramadan case is not an isolated example of this aggressive policy. My friend and former research collaborator (in Mobilizing for Peace, Gidron, Katz and Hasenfeld, eds., OUP, 2002), Adam Habib, has at least twice been prevented from entering the country to attend scholarly meetings. The first time this happened, Adam was briefly detained at JFK airport, and then put on the next plane back to South Africa, where he is a prominent political scientist. He was not told why he was denied admission to the country at the time, and more recently after many requests and protests, he has been told that he has no right to know why he was denied the right to enter the country.
Both Ramadan and Habib are apparently considered “terrorists” by the government of this country, but they (and we) have very little information as to why such a determination was made -– although in Ramadan’s case it was apparently because of donations to Muslim charitable institutions. I don’t know Ramadan, but I do know Habib pretty well, and I surely consider him a serious, accomplished, and responsible scholar. I personally feel diminished by the way my government has treated him, and I think all American scholars should be troubled by this situation. At the very least, good and public reasons should be given for such exclusionary policies. It is, to me, cold comfort to think that the policies may change in 2009. We live in a world of global scholarship, but Americans cannot fully participate in that world until we subscribe to scholarly free trade.
