May
14, 2002, 8:45 a.m. The
Death of Objectivity
A common refrain.
By Roger Kimball
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?
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