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About the Author
Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs.
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Teaching the Crisis | Comment [1]
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GWOS
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.
Posted at 04:23:13 PM on December 21, 2007 | All postings by Stan KatzComments
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Yes, and it would be a good idea if scholarly societies joined together to protest this kind of anti-democratic behavior by this Administration. They would receive support from the Association of American University Press of which I am the current President. I have written an op-ed along similar lines: http://www.centredaily.com/331/story/302999.html
— Sandy Thatcher · Dec 31, 09:36 AM · #
Another example of scholarly elites happy to be ignored by society till society, by gross misunderstanding tramples on academia. If you want respect and understanding—ahem—you have to invest in them. Businesses market because even if a product is great, no one will know it exists and that it is great unless someone pays to tell that to them. Academia does not sell itself to those not allumni funding academia, for the most part (a point made every ten years in some book by Derek Bok). If you want to be understood and want respect and want decent treatment and want no inept blunderbus stupidities of policy, then you have to invest in telling society, the non-elite layers of it, what you are all about and how you benefit them, though they cannot afford you and cannot understand what you say and write. You have to sell “educatedness” of life and mind to people lacking it. Failure to invest results in the random acts of goodness stomped out that you report here. Get a life!!
— Richard Tabor Greene · Dec 31, 12:01 PM · #