The Chronicle of Higher Education Has a Symposium on Juan Cole

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a symposium on the career of Juan Cole. Its anonymous editorial voice writes:

The Chronicle: 7/28/2006: Can Blogging Derail Your Career?: Juan R.I. Cole became arguably the most visible commentator writing on the Middle East today. A professor of modern Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and president of the Middle East Studies Association, Cole has voiced strong opposition to the war in Iraq and to the treatment of the Palestinians, garnering him plaudits from the left and condemnation from supporters of Israel and President Bush's foreign policy. In the words of a colleague, Cole has done something no other scholar of the region has done since Bernard Lewis: "become a household word."

Among the worthwhile contributions are Juan Cole's:

The Chronicle: 7/28/2006: Juan R.I. Cole Responds: The ability to speak directly and immediately to the public on matters of one's expertise, and to bring to bear all one's skills to affect the public debate, is new and breathtaking. I have had some success in explaining the threat of Al Qaeda and suggesting how it should be combated, and have addressed U.S. counter-terrorism officials on numerous occasions on those matters. And then there is Iraq, about which I was one of the few U.S. historians to have written professionally before the 2003 war. In the summer of 2003, when the general mood of the administration, the news media, and the public was unrelievedly celebratory, I warned that a guerrilla war was building and that powerful sectarian forces such as the movement of Moktada al-Sadr were a gathering threat. I gained a hearing not only with broad segments of the public but also at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

I am a Middle East expert. I lived in the area for nearly 10 years, speak several of its languages, and have given my life to understanding its history and culture. Since September 11, 2001, my country has been profoundly involved with the region, both negatively and positively. Powerful economic and political forces in American society would like to monopolize the discourse on these matters for the sake of their own interests, which may not be the same as the interests of those of us in the general public. Obviously, such forces will attempt to smear and marginalize those with whom they disagree. Before the Internet, they might have had an easier time of it. Being in the middle of all this, trying to help mutual understanding, is what I trained for. Should I have been silent, published only years later in stolid academic prose in journals locked up in a handful of research libraries? And this for the sake of a "career"? The role of the public intellectual is my career. And it is a hell of a career. I recommend it.

Michael Berube:

The Chronicle: 7/28/2006: The Attention Blogs Bring: By MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ: Juan Cole's blogging may, indeed, have cost him a job at Yale. I think that's Yale's loss rather than Cole's, so I don't see it as a blow to academic freedom or to the professor's scholarly reputation.... Cole is sui generis: He's a prominent academic blogger who writes about the contemporary Middle East. For the culture warriors of the right, it doesn't matter that he is a moderate who supported the removal of Saddam Hussein; what matters is that he has become the go-to person on the Middle East for many readers of liberal blogs, where is he widely admired (and sometimes criticized) for his commentary on the war in Iraq and all related matters. I can't think of another academic blogger who would generate the kind of vile attacks mounted against him this year by John Fund at The Wall Street Journal (who called him "Taliban Man") and Christopher Hitchens at Slate (who called him "a minor nuisance on the fringes of the academic Muslim apologist community").

But in another way, the campaign against Cole bespeaks a broader phenomenon. In much of academe, blogs are still considered to be variants of personal diaries or individual soapboxes. When two young bloggers — one a political scientist, one a physicist — were denied tenure at the University of Chicago last year, academic bloggers speculated that their blogging had something to do with the decision.... I don't know whether my own blogging has enhanced or damaged my academic career. I know it's brought more public attention to some of my academic work; I know it's allowed me to respond quickly and effectively to people like David Horowitz, and I've enjoyed debunking some of his more lunatic claims about me — and about liberal professors in general. So far, most of the feedback I've gotten from colleagues has been good, but I've had plenty of detractors, too...

Siva Vaidhyananthan:

The Chronicle: 7/28/2006: The Lessons of Juan Cole: By SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Ever since the publication in 1987 of Russell Jacoby's narrative The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, I have been rolling my eyes every time I read or hear yet another public intellectual complaining that they don't make public intellectuals like they used to. Now, I've never considered the heyday of the Partisan Review and Dissent the apex of intellectuals' relevance in the United States. But most of all, I am tired of hearing that there is no space for intellectuals to make a difference today in American thought and political debate.

There has never been a better time to be a public intellectual, and the Web is the big reason why. Juan Cole is exhibit No. 1. Cole is an academic who writes clearly and forcefully about the most trenchant issues of the day (academics are not supposed to know how to do that, remember?). Cole gets quoted by the mainstream news media. He appears regularly in popular publications like Salon. And — love it or hate it — everyone who is anyone reads his blog. For the past four years, he has been as influential as any other major American academic. If Jacoby were right, Juan Cole never should have happened...

Dan Drezner:

The Chronicle: 7/28/2006: The Trouble With Blogs: [T]op departments are profoundly risk-averse when it comes to senior hires. In some ways, that caution is sensible — hiring a senior professor is the equivalent of signing a baseball player to a lifetime contract without any ability to release or trade him. In such a situation, even small doubts about an individual become magnified. The trouble with blogs is that they seem designed to provoke easy doubts. Blogs are an outlet for unexpurgated, unreviewed, and occasionally unprofessional musings. What makes them worth reading can also make them prone to error....

In some ways, this problem is merely the latest manifestation of what happens when professors try to become public intellectuals.... Blogging multiplies the problem a thousandfold, creating new pathways to public recognition beyond the control of traditional academic gatekeepers or even op-ed editors. Any usurpation of scholarly authority is bound to upset those who benefit the most from the status quo...

And Brad DeLong.

Comments

[eli]

Drezner's take on tenure is right: it tends to induce aversion to risk, so that safe, dull picks are the norm.

Now multiply that several-fold for Yale. It's not only the pathological risk-aversion--the institution also has an amazing ability to shoot itself in the foot, on every front.

But there are very few consequences for Yale's mismanagement. Their endowment insulates them (what is it 12 billion now or 15 billion?). They still do a decent job educating undergraduates. And they don't get the scrutiny that Harvard does.

They're like the anti-Avis--as no. 2, they feel they don't have to try very hard.

[Bruce Moomaw]

Warning: the Sinister Reactionaries who take an extremely dim view of Cole -- and regard him as writing shameless apologias for Islamic Fascist fanatics -- include one Mark Kleiman, who makes a bulletproof case on the subject: http://www.samefacts.com/archives/the_war_in_iraq_/2005/08/note_to_juan_cole.php . (Note that Kleiman's partial apology in his "update" is actually on his smallest anti-Cole point -- all his more important ones are totally unaffected by the correction.)

[Duh]

But then Mark Kleiman is (relatively speaking) a reactionary on various subjects, including drug (ab)use.

The post you refer to is a fine example.

"It's fair to ask whose side you take: that of the victims, or that of the perpetrators?".

[Bruce Webb]

Juan Cole is perhaps the most dangerous man in America. At least to that large fraction of the political class (including reporters) who now admit they were wrong, but still want to maintain they were right to be wrong at the time, and moreover have no need to apologize for attacking the motives of those who dared to be right the whole time.

Their primary defence is "Who knew?" When certain bloggers raise their hand that defence turns to "Well even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while". When Cockburn and Fisk raise their hands, the defence becomes "Known knee-jerk anti-Americans". But the defence gets progressively more difficult when it comes to Professor Cole, whose credentials should have earned him a more respectful hearing than he in fact received. As such he is exhibit #1 for the prosecution of the "Who knew?" trial and the defence knows it. When they reach into their bag of tricks the only weapon they have left is the smear tactic and they are finding it difficult to get the slime to stick for anyone outside the remaining group that believes that everything is going swell in Iraq. Not that they have given up trying.

[Roger Bigod]

The euphemism for supporters of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War was "premature anti-fascist". Perhaps Cole is a premature anti-invasionist.

I like Yale, having spent a few years there for some post-graduate training, and have remembered them in my will. With misgivings, since they screw up a lot. But they usually screw up trying to do things right, as opposed to other schools I have attended, which have nothing like Yale's endowment. If my money is going to be pissed away, I'd prefer it to be done by the misguided rather than the imbecilic.

That said, I will always wonder if Yale made Cole an offer in good faith. There's been a vicious smear campaign against the guy, and it wouldn't be surprising if the whole affair wasn't orchestrated to embarrass him.

[Bruce Moomaw]

Duh: "It's fair to ask whose side you take: that of the victims, or that of the perpetrators?"

Yep -- and Cole, in that essay, unquestionably took the side of the perpetrators. He wrote a crawling apologia for murderous religious bigots and misogynists, and Kleiman called him on it completely accurately: "In the course of criticizing Mr. Vincent's conduct (both his actual conduct and the conduct you attribute to him) you never find occasion to criticize the conduct of his murderers, whether they were outraged relatives of Nur al-Khal's or members of the local Sadrist death squad... You assert that Mr. Vincent 'was egregiously breaking the rules of gender segregation and female honor. He should have had a male interpreter.' That is, he should have refused to offer a woman a job she was professionally qualified to do [and wanted to do], because local men might disapprove? No doubt the women of Iraq, and of the rest of the Arab world, will be delighted to learn that the head of the Middle East Studies Association is so devoted to keeping them in their place."

I'm getting a teensy bit tired of hearing that leftism requires sympathy for vicious religious bigots and woman-haters merely because they also happen to be anti-American. It's distinctly reminiscent of George Orwell's reminiscences on how he was furiously attacked by British leftists in 1940 for daring to say that the Nazis might conceivably be worse than Chamberlain, and that it might therefore be justifiable to fight to keep them out of Britain.