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August 12, 2002 9:00 a.m. Postmodernism Kills The academic frontlines in the war on terror.

ostmodernism can kill you. That is a lesson we've been taught in the aftermath of 9/11. We already know that intercepted transmissions in Arabic from the men who were about to attack the Pentagon and World Trade Center went untranslated. More broadly, we know that our defense and intelligence agencies are desperately in need of recruits with knowledge of the languages and cultures of the Middle East. Because of this, Congress is now considering doubling its funding for language programs that require government service in national security-related agencies after graduation. Yet, as I've already reported on NRO, professors at America's most prestigious universities are doing everything in their power to destroy these desperately needed language programs. Without those programs — without a significant increase in knowledge of Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages in our defense and intelligence agencies — a very large number of Americans could easily end up dead. Yet because of their belief in the tenants of postmodernism, many of our nation's most esteemed professors have actually launched a systematic attack on America's national-security-related language programs.

What exactly does postmodernism have to do with an attempt to prevent Americans from serving their country by studying the languages and cultures of the Middle East? The answer is to be found in the work of Michel Foucault, one of the founding thinkers of postmodernism. Foucault denied that there was any such thing as objective or disinterested knowledge. All knowledge, according to Foucault, serves, and is created by, a social and cultural power structure. (The influence of Marx here is obvious.) It follows from this that traditional Western scholarship on the Middle East is not the objective or disinterested knowledge it claims to be, but is instead a set of ideas suited to maintain Western colonial domination of the non-Western world.

So for the postmodernist professors who follow Michel Foucault, a government-funded program designed to funnel students of the Middle East into our defense and intelligence agencies is the ultimate proof of what they've been saying for decades. A postmodernist sees something like the National Security Education Program (NSEP), not as a special effort to turn disinterested knowledge to a broadly political purpose, but as the proof that there has never been any such thing as disinterested knowledge in the first place. For a follower of Foucault, every American book about the third world and every American course about the Middle East, is a kind of National Security Education Program in disguise.

Only if you understand this can you understand how extraordinarily important it is to our postmodern professors to boycott the National Security Education Program (NSEP), and its newer companion program, the National Flagship Language Initiative (NFLI). As these professors see it, if they don't have the gumption to oppose a blatant attempt by the federal government to put knowledge of the third world at the service of America's evil imperialistic designs, then they might as well pack up and go home. How can they convince their students to oppose the "subtle imperialism" of all traditional Western scholarship on the Middle East if they themselves won't take action to stop the obvious imperialism of something like the National Security Education Program?

This is the real reason why our postmodern professors are attempting to destroy NSEP and NFLI with a boycott — their belief that America is an evil imperialist power which it would be immoral to aid in any way. But that's not what the boycotting professors are saying publicly. These professors understand very well that, particularly in the post-9/11 world, attacking federally funded language programs on overtly political grounds could never work.

That's why our postmodern professors explain their attempt to destroy the NSEP and NFLI as a step taken out of their tender concern for the safety of their students. The public explanation for the NSEP and NFLI boycott is that students who take money from a program identified with defense and intelligence agencies might be in danger when they travel overseas. Of course, this is nothing but a trumped-up excuse. Very few recipients of NSEP fellowships have experienced any trouble in foreign countries, and in those rare cases when they do, there is little or nothing to differentiate them from students without NSEP funding, who also occasionally run into trouble from foreigners hostile to America.

It's difficult to imagine our postmodern professors trying to put roadblocks in the way of the college students who went to work for civil rights in the American south during the Sixties, often at significant risk to their lives. So why are these professors opposed to American students who hope to work for the CIA or the Department of Defense taking the smaller risk of study overseas. Our postmodern professors are perfectly free to make their arguments about the evils of American imperialism in class, but what gives them the right to take a patriotic funding option for their students completely off the table? In any case, it's downright dishonest to pretend that the boycott of the NSEP and NFLI is based on anything other than politics. The irony is that the boycotters are the very people who have been telling us for years that "everything is political." So when they themselves finally launch a campaign against NSEP and NFLI which is blatantly political, where do they get off denying that politics has anything to do with it?

In an earlier NRO piece, "Ivory Scam," I exposed the political nature of the NSEP boycott, along with the equally outrageous fact that the leading boycotters are themselves taking money from the American government (under "Title VI"), supposedly to uphold our national-security interests. It seems that the same postmodern professors who deem it immoral to allow their students to put their knowledge at the disposal of the United States government have no compunction themselves about taking money from that same government. Supposedly, these Title VI subsidies to our academic Middle East "experts" will enhance our national security. I can think of nothing more likely to undermine America's security than open-ended subsidies to our postmodernist professors.

I've been beating the drum on this issue for some time now, and recently got into a public tiff with the head of the Middle East Studies Association over the issue. (For details, see "The More Things Stay the Same.") But the good news is that now, The Chronicle of Higher Education has taken up the matter of the NSEP, NFLI boycott, and has done so in a fair-minded article that successfully conveys both sides of the argument. Better still, the Chronicle is holding a "Colloquy" this week on the question of the NSEP, NFLI boycott. If you're interested in putting your two cents into this debate in a public and influential forum, simply click on the link to The Chronicle of Higher Education story, "Scholars Revive Boycott of U.S. Grants to Promote Language Training." After reading the story, follow the box inside to the online discussion, read some of the entries, and join in the discussion if you like. But let's return for a moment to the larger questions.

According to the postmodernists, America kills. Our support for Israel, our sanctions against Saddam, and even our nationally funded language-study programs put innocent lives in danger. I don't buy it. But I do think there's a case to be made that an excess of academic postmodernism may itself have deadly consequences for the citizens of the United States (however much Stanley Fish may deny it). That doesn't mean postmodernists ought to be banned from our campuses. It could as easily, and on still stronger grounds be said that "Marxism kills," but I certainly wouldn't suggest that Marxist texts be banned from our universities. (Many postmodernists, by the way, are in some measure Marxist as well.) Let all of these views contend on our campuses, and let a wide array of arguments be made about the political hazards of any given perspective. Unfortunately, the postmodernists reject this view of intellectual freedom, deeming it a cover for the power of oppressive elites. They use their theories to cut off free debate and expel traditional scholars from the precincts of the academy, and that's the shame of it all.

Of course, you may be wondering whether the postmodernists exempt themselves from their own theory. If all knowledge is really just an expression and manifestation of power, and not an accurate account of the world, then what is the status of postmodernism itself? Isn't postmodernism just another form of power-supporting knowledge? In the end, Michel Foucault had to agree that it was.

But if that's true, what grounds do postmodernists have for preferring their own forms of knowledge-power to conventional forms of knowledge-power? This is a question that Michel Foucault and his followers are incapable of answering without recourse to the very ideas of democratic values and scientific knowledge that their own theories critique and reject.

So in the end, postmodernism is a kind of paralysis. It can move only by denying itself. Yet move it does, as long as it can move against what is powerful. In a worldview that sees nothing in life but the sham of domination, resistance to whatever dominates at a given moment is the only morality that remains — hopeless, incomplete, and contradictory as that "morality" may be.

So this is the worldview that our government has been subsidizing, to the tune of millions of dollars in Title VI money, in the vain hope that professors of Middle East studies will somehow strengthen our national security. These are the ideas we pay tens of thousands of dollars to have our children drink in as they spend years of their lives at America's colleges and universities (for the most part, unfortunately, to the exclusion of alternative points of view). For decades Americans have dismissed the postmodern academy as a harmless irrelevance. Maybe now that we see it could actually get us killed, we'll wake up and do something about it.

— Stanley Kurtz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.