I ran into an older, retired Israeli colleague who is a fine scholar in his field. We hadn’t met for 25 years and agreed to have coffee in a nearby Tel Aviv cafe. In the ensuing conversation I learned some key things about why current intellectual and political discussion is such a wreck.Continue reading.
The retired professor has read nothing I’ve written. He is on the left-wing politically, in the historic non-Communist sense, but his work has always been first-rate and untouched by any political slant. In addition, he has worked amicably with people of different views.
And that’s why I was dismayed by his first question: “Are you left-wing or right-wing?”
I sighed, partly because I hate this starting point of dividing people into two categories. A more appropriate question would have been: “what do you think of … ?” To classify someone is to decide in advance to agree or disagree with whatever they say. To ask someone their view makes it possible to listen and think about the quality of their ideas.
A scholar or analyst, whatever his personal views, should do work that is beyond politics.
Many years ago I wrote a scholarly article on American radical professors of the 1930s and 1940s. I was almost unable to find a single case in which anyone had even been accused of politicizing their academic work or classroom teaching. They viewed such behavior as inappropriate, and perhaps some were worried about how being outspoken might hurt their careers. At any rate, even during the McCarthy era people were pursued for their organizational memberships and not their classroom behavior.
Today, all those old issues of professional ethics have vanished. Professors may spend most of their time being propagandists: throw away scholarly standards and energetically persecute dissenters.
That sounds pretty accurate to me with respect to political science. There's lots of great research out there, but I find even the most rigorous scholarship often omits evidence that would debunk the prevailing left-wing frame in the academy. I'm impressed though when I talk to scholars who expressly reject politicization of their work. I remember Colin Kahl's outstanding essay from a few years ago on the norms of civilian protection during wartime, "In the Crossfire or the Crosshairs? Norms, Civilian Casualties, and U.S. Conduct in Iraq." When I blogged about it at the time he said he regretted that his findings had partisan political implications and preferred to view the work as dispassionate scholarship. On the other hand, leftist Michael Desch omits the internment of Japanese Americans in his article, "America's Liberal Illiberalism: The Ideological Origins of Overreaction in U.S. Foreign Policy." Desch argued that the Bush administration's domestic counter-terrorism policies resulted in the most dramatic curtailment of civil liberties in American history, but for some reason FDR's policy of rounding up 125 thousand Japanese Americans in the name of national security during World War II wasn't even considered. The case didn't fit the thesis and was quite ominously absent.
So yeah, there's still excellent work in my field, but partisan biases show up quite dramatically in some research, and I've only provided these two contrasting examples. There are many more works by leftists that would fit Rubin's description of throwing away scholarly standards and so forth. (And I'm being kind here. The work of Mearsheimer and Walt has cast a repugnant stain on security studies, and seeing the defense of these idiots by otherwise reputable scholars has been a particularly disappointing experience.)
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