KC Johnson

KC Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. For the 2007-2008 academic year, he is Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at Tel Aviv University. Educated at Harvard University, he has authored several books on Congress and U.S. foreign policy (More bio here).

An early critic of the prosecution's conduct in the Duke Lacrosse case, Johnson published a highly regarded blog on the issue, Durham Wonderland. He then co-wrote, with Stuart Taylor, the recently published Until Proven Innocent. The book argues that "law enforcement, a campaigning prosecutor, biased journalists, and left-leaning academics repeatedly refused to pursue the truth while scapegoats were made" of the falsely accused Duke students.

We will discuss issues related to academia, the U.S. and Israel. Readers can send questions to rosnersdomain@haaretz.co.il.

Dear Prof.,

The last question will be about Congress and foreign policy. You wrote a book about Congress' role in the cold war, I want to ask you about the role of congress in Iraq today, and maybe Iran tomorrow. How big a role will it play / should it play / in devising American policy in the middle east?

Best and happy thanksgiving,

Rosner

Broadly speaking, the Constitution gives three types of foreign policy powers to the Congress: the power to declare war; the Senate's power to approve treaties; and the appropriations power.

During the Cold War (1947-1989), the first two of these powers weakened. From the Korean War onwards, presidents argued that the commander-in-chief power gave them authority to send troops abroad without congressional approval. And executive agreements, unilaterally made by presidents, gradually replaced treaties.

So the power of the purse - spending bills - became the most significant way for Congress to influence foreign policy. Beginning in the 1960s, Congress started attaching policy riders first to foreign aid bills and then to defense spending measures. That's how Congress ultimately mandated the withdrawal from Cambodia in 1970; similar bills cut off funding for the U.S. covert operation in Angola (1975-1976) and restricted covert operations in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

So, it's not that surprising to see Congress, especially now that the Democrats have the majority, using defense spending bills to try to accelerate the withdrawal from Iraq.

That said, there are several practical obstacles to a congressionally mandated withdrawal.

First, the balance of power in the current Congress lies with moderate or conservative Democrats - people like Claire McCaskill (Missouri) in the Senate or Heath Shuler (North Carolina) in the House. They've made clear that they oppose immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Democrats seem likely to gain seats in the 2008 elections, but until then, the narrowness of the Democratic majority means that the party leadership needs the votes of people like McCaskill or Shuler to prevail.

Second, attaching policy riders to defense spending bills when troops are in the field exposes supporters to (unfair) charges that they're "playing politics" with the troops' well-being. And there's no guarantee of success even if such an amendment were passed, especially with a president like Bush, who has been very aggressive at bypassing congressional will.

Third, at least two of the leading Democratic candidates (Obama and Clinton) have implied they don't support an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops. It's unlikely that congressional Democrats will want to adopt legislation that would put them at odds with the party's presidential nominee.

As a result, while Congress has the tools to force a pullout?and precedent exists for such an action - it's doubtful we'll see any move in this direction, at least until after the 2008 elections.

Dear Prof.,

Moving on to a totally different topic, I want to ask you about a US President with which you've been dealing a lot: Lyndon Johnson.

Way back, in a dialogue I had with the Israeli Prof. Abraham Ben-Tzvi, he claimed that Johnson - rather than Clinton or Bush - was the president entitled to be labeled "the friendliest president" to Israel. Would you agree?

Best

Rosner

I'd agree with that assessment - in part because Johnson operated in a much different strategic, regional, and political environment than either Clinton or Bush.

In the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower seemed to look upon Israel as (at best) an inconvenience in his efforts to construct an alliance of anti-communist Arab states. He consistently spurned Israeli requests for military assistance, was skimpy in the economic aid he provided, and resisted calls for a U.S. security guarantee of Israel's borders.

John Kennedy's administration authorized an important arms sale to Israel (of Hawk missiles, in 1962) - but Kennedy made clear that this was a one-time move. Nuclear non-proliferation was also a major issue of Kennedy's foreign policy, and U.S.-Israeli relations in the early 1960s were complicated by Prime Minister Ben Gurion's reluctance to allow U.S. inspectors into the Dimona facility.

The Dimona issue persisted throughout the 1960s, though LBJ didn't press the nonproliferation question to the extent that Kennedy had. And he proved much more sympathetic to Israel on the question of arms sales, even as his Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, urged a different course. In 1965, after West Germany backed out of a deal to supply Israel with tanks, the United States filled the order itself, selling 210 M-48 Patton tanks. The next year, Johnson authorized the sale to Israel of 48 A-4 planes - the first time the United States supplied Israel with combat aircraft. The move represented a clear statement of U.S. support for Israel's security.

Johnson also provided Israel with diplomatic backing in the aftermath of the 1967 war. The President resisted pressure from the Soviet Union for a UN resolution that would demand an Israeli withdrawal from all territory occupied in the conflict before the two sides addressed the political and diplomatic issues that had caused the war.

What explained Johnson's sympathy for Israel?

Geopolitics played some role: throughout the late 1960s, the United States was intent on bolstering King Hussein's beleaguered Jordanian regime, and Israel's willingness to accept U.S. arms sales to Jordan was a precondition to U.S. backing for the Eshkol government. Politics also was a contributing factor: during his time as Senate majority leader in the 1950s, Johnson had worked closely with American Jewish leaders in raising money for Democratic Senate candidates. As President, he respected the power of the Israel lobby and was loath to cross it.

But Johnson also seems, on a personal level, to have considered the U.S.-Israeli alliance morally important.

Johnson's decisions laid the foundation for the U.S.-Israeli alliance on which future Presidents, including Clinton and Bush, would build.

Dear Prof. Johnson,

A couple of years ago you wrote this:

Two factors more strictly related to the academic world join anti-Semitism in explaining the growth of anti-Israel attitudes on contemporary campuses. The first... is the increasing tendency of professors to use Israel (which is, after all, the most faithful American ally in the world) as a proxy for their criticizing U.S. foreign policy... The most significant such change centers on a movement that urges colleges and universities to redesign their courses to focus on teaching "democratic citizenship," a scheme... [that] has championed restructuring curricula to "provide students with the knowledge and commitments to be socially responsible citizens."

Is this trend still growing, or is it declining? And do you see any new factors playing a role?

Best,

Shmuel Rosner

I fear that both patterns are becoming more pronounced.

A good example of the conflation of academic anti-Bush and anti-Israel activism came just last week, at Columbia University. On 12 November, around 70 professors calling themselves "Columbia University Faculty Action Committee" issued a public letter accusing Columbia president Lee Bollinger of failing "to make a vigorous defense of the core principles on which the university is founded, especially academic freedom."

The group's evidence for this extraordinarily serious charge revealed much more about the signatories that about Bollinger. The president, they asserted, had "allied the University with the Bush administration's war in Iraq, a position anathema to many in the University community" - because he had the temerity to rebuke President Ahmadinejad during the Iranian leader's recent visit to Columbia (It goes without saying that millions of Americans who oppose the war in Iraq nonetheless find Ahmadinejad's policies repulsive, a distinction that apparently evaded Bollinger's faculty critics).

The signatories then moved on to criticize Bollinger's conduct on issues relating to the Middle East. They faulted the president for not publicly saying that alumni and the media have no right to comment about Middle East Studies faculty, as the president of Barnard had done after an outcry when a rabidly anti-Israel professor, Nadia Abu El-Haj, received tenure. And, as the New York Sun noted, the list of signatories included many who "signed a petition two years ago calling on Columbia to divest from companies that sell arms and military hardware to Israel."

Similarly, the last few weeks featured an egregious example of how focusing on "democratic citizenship" functions as a code for ideologically one-sided instruction. The University of Delaware implemented a curriculum for its residence halls designed to provide "treatment" for students whose ideas did not conform to an extreme political correctness.

Students were told "a racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. 'The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture, or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists.'" In one-on-one meetings with resident advisors, white students were pressed to disclose how they had oppressed people in the past, or when they discovered their sexual orientation.

Incredibly, a senior administrator at the University described the program as one in which "students are challenged to express themselves as free-thinking citizens."

Since I wrote the passage quoted in your question, the media (and some alumni groups) have become more aware of the pervasiveness of "groupthink" in the academy. Most important, there seems to be a growing recognition that the problem of groupthink is not a left-versus-right issue but one of protecting students' rights to free speech and to learn in an intellectually open campus atmosphere. The Delaware example cited above, for instance, was terminated after massive media criticism, from newspapers of all ideological persuasions. Similarly, the anti-Bollinger professors have received no substantial editorial support, even from newspapers (such as the New York Times) whose editorial boards are clearly left of center.

Dear Prof.,

The illuminating book you wrote about the famous Duke Lacrosse rape case contends that it was not just academia, but also the mainstream media and many other forces who bear responsibility to the group-thinking that made this case possible. However, if one is trying to apply the same method to the issue of Israel many will argue that the opposite is true: pro-Israel forces are generally so powerful and influential in America that only in academia one can hear dissenting voices.

Would you accept such argument?

Best

It's clear in the Duke lacrosse case that a "groupthink" mentality initially seized institutions - the academy, the mainstream media, civil rights organizations - that we expect to uphold due process. All betrayed their ideals in gleefully rushing to judgment, perhaps none more so than the "Group of 88," the 88 arts and sciences faculty who signed an April 2006 statement declaring unequivocally that something had happened to the rape accuser and saying "thank you for not waiting" to protesters who had, among other things, carried "castrate" banners in front of the lacrosse players' house.

But in the end, nearly all of the media and (more reluctantly) most civil rights groups admitted their error, and conceded that this case was really about massive abuse of power by a local prosecutor. The Group of 88, on the other hand, remained defiant - this January, after the criminal case had collapsed, nearly all signed onto another statement affirming that they never would apologize for presuming guilt. Eschewing the dispassionate evaluation of evidence, they instead clung to their ideological prejudices and displayed an almost stunning closed-mindedness. In other words, whether theirs was a majority opinion or the perspectives of dissenters, the Group of 88?s quality of thought was unimpressive.

Like most elite universities, Duke has had its share of campus controversies on Middle Eastern issues: in 2004, it hosted the conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement, perhaps the most extreme of the anti-Israel groups on American college campuses; some Duke faculty also agitated for the University to divest from companies that did business with the Israeli defense establishment.

Many of the same professors who took an extreme position on the lacrosse case had previously distinguished themselves for vehement anti-Israel beliefs. Dozens signed a 2005 pro-divestment petition comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa and claiming that "torture is endemic and systemic-part and parcel of the Israeli Occupation and Israel's security culture." Wahneema Lubiano, author of the Group of 88's ad, was one of three Duke professors to speak at the PSM conference. She was joined there by another Group of 88 member, Rebecca Stein, who in a 2005 interview pointed to Israeli Jewish racism as among the causes of the second intifada. And Group member Miriam Cooke blamed the West for the Arab states' poor record of women's rights: "When men are traumatized [by colonial rule], they tend to traumatize their own women."

In short, the Group of 88 demonstrated no more intellectual acuity in their comments about issues relating to Israel than they did in their perspective on the lacrosse case. I'm dubious, therefore, about rationalizing academic anti-Israel polemics as a necessary dissenting balance to pro-Israel sentiments in the public, media, or political classes - without examining the quality of those dissenting arguments.

It's also worth remembering that we're less than two decades removed from the frosty relationship between George H.W. Bush and Yitzhak Shamir. Indeed, as recently as the late 1990s, a good portion of the media (and some politicians) blamed Israel for the failure to achieve peace.

The twin events of the second intifada (with the Palestinians launching a campaign that used murder of civilians as a deliberate strategy) and the 9/11 attacks (which made most Americans more sympathetic to the kinds of threats Israel long has faced) helped to create the overwhelmingly pro-Israel nature of contemporary U.S. public opinion. But as memories of both events fade, I suspect public opinion will return to the more varied perspective of the 1990s. The anti-Israel contingent of the academy, however, will remain very much entrenched.

Dear Prof.,

So here is what ought to be the most important question on this issue: to what degree those university scholars actually influence the thinking of their students. Do you suspect that a generation of anti-Israel elites is now planted around the US, and that the impact of such academia-bias will be felt in the coming years?

Best

Rosner

This question, obviously, is key, but also is very difficult to measure. It's comparatively easy to determine what is being taught - you can look at course syllabi or descriptions (and sometimes course assignments) or read the scholarship of professors. In exceptional cases, such as the crisis in Columbia's Middle Eastern Studies Department, students will make public class notes. But it's very difficult to measure how students are receiving the instruction.

A two-part response. At non-elite institutions - a majority of colleges and universities in the United States, after all - the problem is severe. Most students enter such colleges after graduating from public high schools. In most cases, they don't have an in-depth familiarity with international affairs. And most students assume that what professors tell them is true.

For these students, their sole exposure to matters relating to the Middle East will come through heavily ideological, required "diversity" courses on foreign cultures, or through new curricular fads such as "global studies." The latter, which has been adopted at dozens of non-elite schools around the country, sounds banal but in fact almost always consists of a cluster of courses designed to criticize contemporary U.S. foreign policy.

The only other nation targeted through global studies classes is Israel. At St. Lawrence University's global studies program, for instance, the only class offered on Israel is called "Palestinian Identities," which introduces students to Palestinian identification "as a political and cultural community as they continue to struggle to free themselves from Israeli domination." The course concludes with a forced political activity: "using what we have learned," Professor John Collins notes, "we organize and produce a public activity of some sort; with the goal of educating the community about the importance of understanding what Edward Said has called 'the question of Palestine.'"

At elite institutions, the situation is somewhat more optimistic. The bias in classes on the Middle East is still present. Columbia's Rashid Khalidi, for instance, explained his approach in a 2005 interview with New York magazine: "Most kids who come to Columbia come from environments where almost everything they've ever thought [about the Middle East] was shared by everybody around them. And this is not true, incidentally, of Arab-Americans, who know that the ideas spouted by the major newspapers, television stations, and politicians are completely at odds with everything they know to be true." In other words, Arab-American and only Arab-American students know the "truth" about the Middle East. And Khalidi is widely, and correctly, perceived as among the more "moderate" members of the Middle East Studies establishment.

Khalidi's comment, however, also revealed the problem that faculty ideologues encounter at elite schools. Most students there are at least somewhat familiar with Middle Eastern affairs - whether through the media or through following political debates. Because they have some information to challenge the anti-Israel biases of their instructors, these students are far less subject to indoctrination.

That said, it's depressing to note that the best for which supporters of Israel can hope is that students at elite schools will get nothing out of the Middle East Studies classes that they take in college, because these classes tend to be so wildly biased.

Most universities have as part of their mission statements a claim to be training future democratic citizens. Because of the one-sided nature of Middle East instruction, and because of its excessive focus on the issue of Israel, quite beyond the question of possible indoctrination, America's colleges and universities are failing a generation of students - and future citizens - by not providing them comprehensive coverage of a region of the world that will be critical to U.S. security for the foreseeable future.