Cultural studies is fighting for its survival in a harsh research marketplace, says Richard Maxwell, while Mica Nava argues that shopping is all part of politics :
Quote this story in discussion of the commericialization of the university

"The treatment of students as retail customers is part of the routine mission of higher education to link the goals of universities to the needs of business (codified in recent Labour proposals for education reform). In the US, this has been the politics of higher education for decades, becoming more explicit in the post-cold-war period when the corporate university and the audit culture it promotes dropped the pretence of having any serious commitment to liberal arts education. In a recent commencement speech at my college, the acting president assured the audience of mostly working-class parents that their sons and daughters had been well prepared as 'human capital'. While a few faculty members glanced around in stunned horror, most were un-moved by the president's candour. And a good number of anxious parents nodded their heads, relieved to hear that their children's liberal arts education did not liberate them from a good job in the real world. "

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Consumption's potent political purchase

Mica Nava
Published: 20 December 2002

Cultural studies is fighting for its survival in a harsh research marketplace, says Richard Maxwell, while Mica Nava argues that shopping is all part of politics

Until the late 1980s, consumption was a neglected topic of study. This was despite its centrality to the production-consumption cycle and therefore to the historical development of capitalism and related political, social and symbolic formations in the West. For more than two centuries, consumption practices and aspirations to transform ourselves and our environment through acquisition of goods have been crucial elements of the modern world. Yet, as the Canadian anthropologist Grant McCracken put it in 1990, "the history of consumption has no history, no community of scholars, no tradition of scholarship".

This has changed. In 2001, the Economic and Social Research Council, in collaboration with the Arts and Humanities Research Board, developed a £5 million research programme, Cultures of Consumption, that attracted an unprecedented number of proposals from a wide range of university departments and theoretical perspectives. Publications, journals and courses in the field are proliferating. Expansion is only one feature of the new picture. There has been a paradigm shift: consumption, previously considered uninteresting, is now often conceptualised as being as significant a determinant of historical and global change as production. For some, it has become the motor of history and the primary means through which individuals have participated in culture. Cultural studies has been at the forefront of this development. Yet some consider that the turn to consumption has had a depoliticising impact on the field.

One way of addressing this view is to consider why consumption was so marginalised in the first place. Its absence from the intellectual agenda throughout the middle decades of the 20th century must be attributed in part to the legacy of neo-Marxists whose focus was predominantly on production, the public sphere and the (male) workforce. Consumption was perceived as part of capitalism's drive to fetishise commodities. Among the most influential proponents of the latter view were Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School. They argued that mass culture - which included cinema, fiction, popular music and modern commerce - was not only without aesthetic and social value, it was also part of a strategy by the culture industry to engineer political acquiescence. Their conceptual framework, which persists to this day in some strands of consumer studies, assumes that consumers - shoppers, viewers, readers - are easily manipulated and incapable of making critical judgements. The passive masses in this dystopian vision are usually coded as women. During the 1930s, women constituted the overwhelming majority of cinema-goers, shoppers and readers. Adorno and Horkheimer were ambivalent about these sociocultural transformations, and elsewhere in their writings expressed their anxieties, shared by the left and the right, about the growing personal and economic independence of women and their increasingly active participation in consumer culture.

My argument is that the long absence of consumption from political, social and cultural theory - like all intellectual work - is embedded in part in historical factors outside the theoretical frame of the topic itself. Consumption was for many years ignored or trivialised because of the privileging of production and the neglect of demand, because of an elitist disdain for mass culture and the world of commerce, and because of its association with the labour and imagined pleasures of women.

This genealogy explains the multi-pronged recovery of the subject. During the 1980s and 1990s, consumption was "discovered" and developed. Anthropologists refocused the field through their interest in the meanings attributed to objects in different contexts, rather than their material worth or who produced them. Weberian historians were interested in the influence of consumer desire and aesthetic preferences on the formation of demand. This was a neglected topic in the orthodox accounts of markets driven by the need for profit and needs created by producers and marketers.

The contribution of cultural studies was seminal to the new focus on consumption. Analyses of the meaning of youth culture styles and the semiotics of appearance in everyday life were linked to the study of the consumption of media texts through their common emphasis on ordinary people's active participation in meaning-making. Some of this work suggested that deliberate opposition to the dominant culture could be played out in the realm of consumption and the "sign". The new work on advertising focused on the discriminatory skills of audiences as well as the haphazard ways in which advertising texts were produced. Feminists reinforced the emphasis on the agency of audiences by pointing to the strategic ways "feminine" cultural texts (romantic fiction, magazines and cinema) were consumed. It was also feminists who insisted on the value of the labour, knowledge and social networking involved in shopping. One paradoxical outcome of women's authority in the market, it was argued, was a heightened awareness of rights in other sociopolitical spheres.

Another focus for feminist theorists and historians was the part played by women in the production of the symbolic maps of class distinction and the processes of individualisation. This was achieved in part via the consumption of goods in the new spaces of modernity such as department stores in 19th and 20th-century western society. This rich literature shows that, during the early years of the 20th century, commercial spaces offered more congenial and supportive climates for female shoppers and workers, as well as for supporters of the women's suffrage movement, than did the public service sector and trade unions.

The relationship of citizenship to consumption has also turned out to be more complex than political-economy approaches allow. The denial of equal access to the marketplace has sometimes had more far-reaching political consequences than has exclusion from conventional democratic processes. The trigger for the civil rights movement in the southern states of the US in the 1950-60s was the racial segregation of lunch counters and buses, not the denial of the vote. The rhetoric of the free market contributed to the mobilisation of citizens of the former communist bloc. The power of organisation at the point of consumption has been underestimated by political theorists who have found it hard to imagine politics outside the traditional spaces of the workplace, government, media and the street. Yet consumer militancy can be most effective, as was demonstrated by the boycotts of South African products in 1980s and unethically produced brands and genetically modified foods more recently. But these practices remain relatively untheorised - a consequence, again, of the association of shopping with women's work and the feminine.

This compressed account of developments in the study of consumption cannot do justice to the complexity of the work but gives a flavour of the innovative and polemical range of theoretical, ethnographic and historical investigations. What is surprising therefore is the persistence of the political-economy denial of its significance. Even where consumer culture is the focus of attention, the centrality of women to both the processes and the literature of consumption is sometimes disavowed. An example of this is political economist Martyn Lee's edited 2000 collection The Consumer Society Reader , which claims to be "the most substantial collection ofI literature on consumption and the consumer society". Although it includes many good pieces, only one and a half of the 28 chapters are by women, and, of these, the one is minimally concerned with gender. The subject index suggests that there are only two references to women in the whole book. The groundbreaking scholarship by and about women that has made such a significant contribution to the constitution of the academic field is overlooked. This is despite the fact that Lee's aim is to demonstrate how "theoretical, philosophical and speculative approaches to consumptionI have emerged and (are) connected with real material and historical developments during the last one hundred years" (my italics).

So, despite the expansion of the field, the case for the study of shopping and the participation of women in consumer culture needs to be made over again. The claim that consumption is somehow "not political" perpetuates old priorities and prejudices.

Mica Nava is professor of cultural studies at the University of East London. Her publications include Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity and Buy This Book: Studies in Advertising and Consumption . She is currently writing about cosmopolitanism and commerce.

Where Did Our Love Go?

Where Did Our Love Go?

by STEPHEN SARTARELLI

[from the January 12, 2004 issue]

Where Did Our Love Go?
by STEPHEN SARTARELLI

[from the January 12, 2004 issue]

One notable casualty of the diplomatic tug-of-war between France and the United States over the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq has been verbal restraint. From the renaming of French fries to "Freedom fries" in the cafeteria of the House of Representatives, to George W. Bush's claim on NBC News that France's antiwar position was "anti-American," to Thomas Friedman's op-ed declaration in the New York Times that "France is becoming our enemy," the accusations and exaggerations, especially on the American side, have come fast and furious this past year. So systematic, in fact, has been the anti-French tone that late last spring the French Ambassador to the United States, Jean-David Levitte, raised the specter of a campaign of "denigration and lies" allegedly orchestrated by some American media outlets and their sources in the Bush Administration.

But, opposition to Bush's foreign policy aside, is it really an exaggeration to speak of anti-Americanism in France? Certainly French ambivalence toward American power and influence--from de Gaulle's insistence on military and diplomatic autonomy to present-day state-sponsored protectionism in the film industry--has long been a commonplace of modern political life. And certainly many French intellectuals, such as Jean Baudrillard and Régis Debray, to name only two, have made the critique of American cultural and political dominance a central part of their work. Whatever the case, anti-Americanism has lately become a sensitive issue in France, where it is not uncommon these days to hear someone preface a criticism of US policy or society by uttering a disclaimer along the lines of "I am not anti-American, but..." This sort of self-consciousness predates the ongoing diplomatic debacle and even, in many cases, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, though there is no question that the latter brought the issue to a head as never before. Even the famous front-page declaration of solidarity (indeed, of identity) with Americans--Nous sommes tous Américains ("We are all Americans")--made by Le Monde's editor in chief, Jean-Marie Colombani, on the day after the attacks spoke directly to the instinctual French embrace of difference in regard to the United States, asserting a common bond of humanity intended to trump any and all reflexive prejudice. And by echoing the famous cry of the May '68 student rebellion--Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands ("We are all German Jews")--it seemed to be appealing, at least in part, to elements on the French left often accused of anti-Americanism and less likely than most to identify with American suffering.

As the rift between the two countries has widened, the debate over anti-Americanism in France has changed, becoming even more clouded than before by the political sympathies of the parties involved. Unlike Bush, however, few have directly accused the Chirac government of anti-Americanism for its opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq. Such charges have been reserved, rather, for the great antiwar movement and, by extension, for the general population, which in France, as in Western Europe as a whole, was overwhelmingly against military intervention.

In France a rather complex polemic has been waged against the "peace camp" by a number of prominent intellectuals. Foremost among them has been a troika of former leftists: writer Pascal Bruckner, filmmaker Romain Goupil (who still considers himself a leftist)and philosopher André Glucksmann, who first achieved prominence as one of the spiritual leaders of the May '68 rebellion. In one of several co-signed editorials published in Le Monde last spring, the three deplored the tactics of Chirac's "peace party," saying that it actually "precipitated" war by "playing Asterix vs Uncle Sam." But they saved their bitterest vitriol for "public opinion." One day, they said, someone will tell the real story of "the hysteria, the collective intoxication that has gripped [France] for months...the quasi-Soviet atmosphere that has bound together 90% of the population, in the triumph of a monolithic idea allergic to the slightest contestation"--a description that seems oddly applicable to the US mood in the days leading up to the war.

The positions of Glucksmann and Bruckner are puzzling in light not only of the left-wing politics they espoused before reinventing themselves as anticommunist, pro-West "new philosophers" in the 1980s, but even in light of their current ideas. Bruckner, for example, is an eloquent critic of what he calls "economism," that is, "the glorification, by all camps [left and right], of a discipline claiming to govern all of society, transforming us into hard-working hamsters reduced to the simple roles of producers, consumers, or stockholders." For his part, Glucksmann, an outspoken critic of Russia's brutal "war on terror" in Chechnya, has been a lifelong foe of tyranny in every form and was critical of Marxism even as a young radical in 1968. In Dostoïevski à Manhattan (2002), a meditation on the implications of the 9/11 attacks in the broader context of modern history, he identifies the kernel of "nihilism" at the heart of every one of the modern radical impulses--from Communism to Nazism and now to Islamic fundamentalism--for whom "all is permitted" in the attempt to attain one's goals. How and why Glucksmann and Bruckner would exonerate the Bush government--which has made no secret of its intention to use force to reshape a reticent world to fit its vision of free-market "democracy"--of the respective sins of "economism" and "nihilism" are questions they have yet to answer.

Their support for Bush's war is, on the other hand, consistent with a position they embraced at the time of the first Gulf War along with Bernard Kouchner, former health minister of France and co-founder of the Nobel Prize-winning NGO Doctors Without Borders. I am speaking of the droit d'ingérence, the "right to intervene" or "interfere," militarily if need be, in the affairs of a nation conducting war crimes against its own citizens. They appealed to this principle at the time of the Balkans wars when, in the face of overwhelming opposition on the European left, they supported NATO intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, and they also did so during the Rwandan genocide, when the UN and the West stood passively by. When it became clear that President Chirac, in keeping with popular opinion in France and Europe, would oppose any American attack on Iraq, they defended the war as a case of humanitarian intervention and denounced the antiwar camp. While expressing some misgivings as to the methods of the Bush government in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Kouchner complained that, unfortunately, "anti-Americanism is submerging everything and making the situation unreadable."

A similar critique of the peace coalition was expressed in late March, after the start of the Iraq invasion, by sociologist Michel Wieviorka in an op-ed piece in the daily Libération. Troubled by what he saw as an alliance of "pacifists, pro-Palestinians, antiglobalists, anti-Americans, French nationalists, anti-European sovereignists, and many others [coming] together in an astonishing front of refusal," Wieviorka characterized the spontaneous expression of antiwar sentiment as "the zero degree of politics." The zero degree of logic, however, seems to have been reached the following day by Robert Redeker, a philosophy teacher on the editorial board of Les Temps modernes, the journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre. The peaceniks, Redeker said in a front-page editorial in Le Monde, are "at war against peace." Their rhetoric is "unpeaceful in the aggressive virulence of its pronouncements against the United States." "'War on America!'" says Redeker, "has been the sole rallying cry of every form of pacifism of the last sixty years."

As the debate over anti-Americanism in France obviously predates the current diplomatic crisis over Iraq, there has been ample time for temperatures to rise and ink to spill. Two much-discussed books confront the subject of French anti-Americanism head-on. The first of these, L'Obsession anti-américaine, by Jean-François Revel, now published in English as Anti-Americanism, is an unbridled polemic against a perceived enemy camp and a follow-up to the author's earlier exploration of the subject in his 1970 bestseller, Without Marx or Jesus. Revel, a conservative member of the Académie Française, sees anti-Americanism in his country rather as right-wingers in the United States see a "liberal conspiracy" in the American media. It is ubiquitous, and the charge is above all abstract, rhetorical. Though he writes with verve and not without humor, Revel is anything but a detached observer. "The principal function of anti-Americanism has always been...to discredit liberalism [i.e., free-market capitalism] by discrediting its highest incarnation," he argues, one of several claims suggesting that his gripe has as much to do with France's socialist left as it does with French perceptions of Uncle Sam. And when he speaks of "the hatred that the majority of Muslims living among us feel for the West," he begins to sound like some of the darker voices on the French political scene.

In the end, Revel's own obsessions get the better of his judgment. This is unfortunate, because his spirited discussions actually manage to shed light on some of the positive results of global capitalism. But he simply can't resist spinning out passages like the following:

Whatever reproaches American environmental policy may (or may not) deserve, it's clear that the crux of the debate is situated elsewhere. The environmentalists' agenda is to set up the United States, which is to say capitalism, as the supreme culprit, indeed the sole culprit, behind worldwide pollution and the supposed warming of the atmosphere. For our Western environmentalists are hardly objective scientists: they are leftists. They are interested in the environment only insofar as they can exploit it as an issue to attack liberal societies.

A more scholarly book on anti-Americanism in France is L'Ennemi américain, by Philippe Roger, which traces the history of French hostility toward America from the Age of Enlightenment to the mid-1950s, including a quick wrap-up of the past half-century. Subtitled a "genealogy of French anti-Americanism," it is a vast compendium of quotations from virtually every field of human knowledge and across the political spectrum, all sharing a hostile or critical (and often hypocritical) assessment of one or many aspects of life in America: its natural habitat, its native populations, its European settlers, its evolving social conditions, politics, culture and so on.

L'Ennemi américain makes lively reading, due in no small part to the author's energetic, ironic commentary. Roger--a professor at the Sorbonne, editor in chief of the review Critique and a member of the prestigious Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, a government-funded research institute--has assembled a gallery of all the negative commonplaces, stereotypes and clichés about the United States: bad climate, savage natives, Indian-killers, slavedrivers, robber barons, capitalist fat cats, unlivable cities, soulless scientists, etc. The caricatures are occasionally drawn by some of France's finest pens, and they get our attention. As this culture of complaint builds and ramifies, we witness the birth and development of an intellectual reflex.

It all began, Roger argues, with the suspicious glance cast westward across the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, around the time of the new nation's founding. This was when Cornelius de Pauw, a Dutch natural philosopher widely read in France, first claimed that "dogs cease to bark" when brought to America--a myth that survived all the way to the 1930s, when the great poet Paul Claudel, during his unhappy tenure as French ambassador to the United States, repeated the fiction, citing Alexander Hamilton as his source! In fact, the "barkless dog" derived from a broader misconception of the New World's natural environment as insalubrious and debilitating. The French naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon (1707-88), was instrumental in spreading this fallacy, which he'd managed to "prove" through a series of erroneous studies comparing New World and Old World species, with the latter always emerging as stronger, larger and just plain better. Farfetched as it may sound, the misconception lasted well into the nineteenth century and was often used to explain what was seen as the erratic behavior of Americans of European origin.

As the nineteenth century marched on, negative French perceptions of the United States also became colored by politics (the Monroe Doctrine, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, etc.), American social realities (slavery, the slaughter of Indians, the proliferation of religious sects) and perhaps above all by a generalized animosity toward Anglo-Saxon civilization, of which North America came to be seen as the supreme extension. Then, as the Industrial Revolution began to spread and bear its bittersweet fruits, the image of America as the vanguard of a new, mechanized human society--the polar opposite of a still-agricultural, "Arcadian" France--combined ingrained Anglophobia and the Gallic disdain of American "uncouthness" to create the durable stereotype of the Yankee: rich, powerful, vulgar and a menace to all the things in life the French hold dear.

During the twentieth century, French hostility to America became even more complicated, according to Roger. As a colonial power, France viewed an ever-expanding United States as a direct threat to its own imperial ambitions, especially given the new dominions won by the United States in the Spanish-American War. The relentless thrust of American progress, the demon of the reactionary French right, came to be perceived as a danger by the internationalist left as well when early labor movements in the United States suffered serious setbacks at the hands of the country's great industrial-financial interests. The picture further darkened in the wake of World War I, when France, frustrated in its desires to have the United States forgive its war debt, began to see itself as yet another victim of Uncle Sam, now redubbed by some "Uncle Shylock." (Although French anti-Americanism has not always been tinged with anti-Semitism, their histories have sometimes overlapped, as Roger makes clear.) And the US liberation of France from Nazi occupation in World War II did little to simplify matters. The presence of US troops on French soil sparked new resentment among nationalists, while the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe stirred fears of a new occupation and rancor among many former resistance fighters with its contingent demands that Communists be excluded from office. Finally, with the 1960s came a renewed anti-Yankee, anti-imperialist vocabulary, spiced with neo-Luddite yearnings and Situationist anarchism, and so on up to the new millennium.

Throughout this vast historical reconstruction, Roger skillfully documents the sedimentation of an attitude, the weaving of an artificial, self-referential récit, or "narrative," of America in French discourse. And the evidence is, at least quantitatively, overwhelming. From Stendhal's categorical assertion that there is "no opera" in America, to Sartre's offhanded dismissal that "America rings hollow," the tendency of many French minds great and small to resort to facile formulas or received ideas when discussing the United States emerges in rather sharp detail.

This said, Roger never actually defines "anti-Americanism." He simply describes it, in the French context, as "an endless war of words waged by France on the United States"; his stated task, in the book, is "to reconstruct its polemical logics." It is, he believes, in the accumulation of details, the establishment of a lexicon of negative reference, that the "anti-American" reflex is born. In so broad a perspective, however, the concept of "anti-American" can become frustratingly subjective. What is "anti" to you might not seem "anti" to me.

In the early days of the American Republic, for example, a visiting Talleyrand undertakes, we are told, to demystify the image of the idealistic white homesteader. In this secluded wilderness he encounters only drab farmers who "greatly resemble the indigenous savages they have replaced"--a rather tame picture compared with, say, Melville's Indian-hater in The Confidence-Man or Cormac McCarthy's band of white mercenary scalpers in the contemporary classic Blood Meridian. Does that make these great American writers contributors to the récit of anti-Americanism? Or take the case of the Surrealist writer André Breton, whose visit to the United States in 1949 left him with unpleasant memories of antiblack racism. One would think that this experience would make what Roger calls Breton's "anti-Americanism" more understandable. At the very least, Breton's dislike of the States seems a lesser offense than the crimes he cited.

Roger does not try to defend the wrongs committed by the American Republic over the course of its history. But he also refrains from expressing his opinions on them. And since he does cast judgment on his French compatriots for jumping to conclusions, this reticence sometimes has the odd effect of turning the United States into the elephant in the room that we're all supposed to ignore. Moreover, his tendency to discuss specific events only insofar as they provide grist for the mill of the French "anti-Americans" wrenches them from their context, robbing them of any significance they may have held outside his argument.

Finally, Roger's exclusion of the other face of the Franco-American relationship--the commerce of political ideas between the world's two oldest democracies, and especially the French love of American literature, cinema and music--gives his otherwise admirable book a rather one-sided feel. It would have been interesting to see how the periodic disappointment of this love has contributed to French acrimony toward the United States. I think there are traces of this unwritten story in L'Ennemi américain, but they are viewed from an exclusively negative angle and ultimately lost in the deluge of details.

How real, then, is anti-Americanism in today's France? Although one sees nothing here like the vicious anti-French campaign recently mounted in the American media, there is no doubt that, as in much of the world, the great sympathy felt for the United States in the wake of September 11 has long since given way to feelings of dismay and outright alarm at the actions and methods of the Bush Administration, and puzzlement at the lack of domestic opposition. Indeed, by the time US troops were approaching Baghdad, Le Monde's Colombani wrote that "vengeance does not make a policy," and that, "seen from Europe," Bush sometimes has "a new-look Dr. Strangelove air about him." Nous ne sommes pas tous Américains, apparently. At the same time, French criticism of American policy is often tempered by an anxiety to appear as evenhanded as possible toward the United States, especially in the mainstream coverage of the occupation of Iraq. And the embrace of American popular culture has been unaffected by thetension between the two countries.

If there is anything that might be accurately termed "anti-American" in France today, it's pretty much confined to far-left critics who view the excesses of the Bush Administration as inherent in the American system and not as the radical anomaly they are. By the same token, the pro-interventionists who, like Bush himself, level indiscriminate charges of anti-Americanism at those who oppose those excesses make the similar mistake of presuming the current Administration to be representative of American values. The greater sensitivity to anti-Americanism in France today may, paradoxically, be due in part to the Bush Administration, whose radicalism has made it more important than ever to distinguish the nation from its policies. This was one of the fundamental points made in another much-discussed book of the past year, Après l'empire (translated into English as After the Empire), by Emmanuel Todd, a demographer and sociologist whose 1976 book, The Final Fall, correctly predicted the breakup of the Soviet sphere. Todd writes:

Thinking reasonably about America in no way means trying to get rid of it, diminish it, or undertake any other fantasy-filled violence toward it. What the world needs is not that America disappear but that it return to its true self--democratic, liberal, and productive.

It is equally important to distinguish prejudice from sincere dissent. Many of the millions who filled Europe's streets last winter wear Levi's and Nikes, watch American movies, read American authors and probably eat more hamburgers than they would like to admit. They oppose not America but the politics of force, coercion and unregulated capitalism promoted by a small handful of people at the summit of world power. Their massive turnout was as much a message to their own conservative leaders--especially in Italy and Spain--as it was a challenge to the United States.

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Stephen Sartarelli is a poet and translator living in France. His recent works include a collection of poems, The Open Vault (Spuyten Duyvil), and Songbook: Selected Poems of Umberto Saba (Sheep Meadow), winner of the Raiziss/DePalchi Award of the Academy of American Poets.

Death of a Discipline; ; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak


"Death of a Discipline is not a lament but a promise. Professor Spivak invites us to imagine an inclusive Comparative Literature freed from its traditional national anchorings, a border-crossing discipline honed by careful reading that encourages linguistic competence and includes the languages of the Southern Hemisphere 'as active cultural media.' This is a visionary work that charts not only the possibility of a reformed discipline that opens itself to learning from many quarters, but also identifies emergent collectivities."
–Jean Franco, Columbia University

"Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Death of a Discipline does not tell us that Comparative Literature is at an end. On the contrary, it charts a demanding and urgent future for the field, laying out the importance of the encounter with area studies and offering a radically ethical framework for the approach to subaltern writing. Spivak deftly opposes the ‘migrant intellectual´ approach to the study of alterity. In its place, she insists upon a practice of cultural translation that resists the appropriation by dominant power and engages in the specificity of writing within subaltern sites in the idiomatic and vexed relation to the effacements of cultural erasure and cultural appropriation. She asks those who dwell within the dominant episteme to imagine how we are imagined by those for whom literacy remains the primary demand. And she maps a new way of reading not only the future of literary studies but its past as well. This text is disorienting and reconstellating, dynamic, lucid, and brilliant in its scope and vision. Rarely has ‘death´ offered such inspiration."
–Judith Butler, UC Berkeley

"In this remarkable series of lectures Gayatri Spivak outlines the genealogy of Comparative Literature as a discipline, its successive intellectual affiliations, and the potentialities that an association with area and cultural studies opens. Through a complex and rigorous exploration of the various places of enunciation from which a comparatist perspective can be built up, she traces the contours of a fascinating intellectual project grounded in a 'planetary' vision as opposed to 'globalization.' It is essential reading."
–Ernesto Laclau, professor of comparative literature, SUNY Buffalo

"This thought-provoking slim book is written in an eclectic style . . . We have been on a planetary tour, which makes us rethink human collectivity across borders -thanks to Spivak."
–Ferial J. Ghazoul H-Gender-Mideast

For almost three decades, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been ignoring the standardized "rules" of the academy and trespassing across disciplinary boundaries. Today she remains one of the foremost figures in the study of world literature and its cultural consequences. In this new book she declares the death of comparative literature as we know it and sounds an urgent call for a "new comparative literature," in which the discipline is given new life -one that is not appropriated and determined by the market.

In the era of globalization, when mammoth projects of world literature in translation are being undertaken in the United States, how can we protect the multiplicity of languages and literatures at the university? Spivak demonstrates how critics interested in social justice should pay close attention to literary form and offers new interpretations of classics such as Joseph Conrad´s Heart of Darkness and Virginia Woolf´s A Room of One´s Own. Through close readings of texts not only in English, French, and German but also in Arabic and Bengali, Spivak practices what she preaches.



Acclaim for Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and her work:

"[Spivak] pioneered the study in literary theory of non-Western women." -Edward W. Said

"She has probably done more long-term political good, in pioneering feminist and post-colonial studies within global academia, than almost any of her theoretical colleagues." -Terry Eagleton

"A celebrity in academia . . . create[s] a stir wherever she goes." -The New York Times

Contents

Chapter 1: Crossing Borders
Chapter 2: Collectivities
Chapter 3: Planetarity


About the Author

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Myself I Must Remake; In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics; The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues; Outside in the Teaching Machine; and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. She is the translator of Jacques Derrida´s Of Grammatology and Mahasweta Devi´sImaginary Maps, Breast Stories, Old Women, and Chotti Munda and his Arrow.

From the series The Wellek Library Lectures

Education news & jobs at the Times Higher Education Supplement:

A clear riposte to her critics and enemies
John Higgins
Published: 19 December 2003

As the Modern Language Association prepares for its annual convention in San Diego, December 27-30, The THES looks at key themes and contributors

Stung by the attacks on her notoriously difficult writing style, Gayatri Spivak (pictured) decided to learn from her attackers and to strive for clarity. The result, says John Higgins, is undiminished intellectual depth made accessible

Didn't you think Death of a Discipline was written in cleaner prose?" asks Gayatri Spivak, as we discuss her new book over a slightly garbled telephone line between Cape Town and New York. I agree, curious to find out why and how that change in style - like a shift to a smoother intellectual gearing - had occurred.

For Spivak's various writings - including In Other Worlds (1987), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993) and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999) - have been the topic of much, often heated, dispute in the halls of academe. Indeed, of all the academics likely to figure on any cool graduate student's list of must-reads - Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, the late Edward Said, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler - Spivak is, perhaps, the most controversial in terms of style, expression and readability. While some praise Spivak for the intensity and commitment of her thinking, others condemn her writing as the epitome of postmodern jargon, a great deal of sound and fury, but signifying nothing much.

At the core of the new book is an impassioned plea for the relevance of the humanities in a political and intellectual climate largely inimical to them. In conversation, Spivak, a key speaker at this year's Modern Language Association convention, is urgent and forthright about the "trivialisation of the humanities" evident in most higher education policy attitudes and in broader currents of public opinion. This negative attitude is due largely, she suggests, to the fact that "the humanities don't really lead to economic growth immediately, and they don't show ascertainable results immediately. It's just as vulgar as that."

It is in this general context that Death of a Discipline strikingly announces itself as "the last gasp of a dying discipline". She is speaking specifically about comparative literature, but her comments embrace literary studies as a whole. For all the energy of its particular arguments and engagements, the book as a whole is pervaded by a deep sense of melancholy at the prospect of losing the social and political insights that the skills of literary analysis alone can provide. "We have forgotten how to read with care," she suggests; and the book argues a powerful counter-case for the renewal of comparative literary studies through an alignment with the social sciences, which, she says, have tended to ignore literature almost entirely.

Spivak argues that in the media and politics the demand is for "immediate comprehensibility" rather than true clarity, and she cites the fact that in the aftermath of the US war in Iraq it was never going to be easy for the 101st Airborne Division to just "present themselves to Iraqis as friends and not as enemies".

Against this culture of almost wilful ignorance, she stresses the need for the precise, detailed attentiveness to the reality of the other that literature can yield, one where the reader makes the imaginative effort necessary to see the other's point of view rather than adopting the stance of the so-called objective (but usually western) observer, whose whole attitude contains and conveys an automatic assumption of dominance and superiority. So it is that Death of a Discipline calls for "an inclusive comparative literature", one "whose hallmark remains a care for language and idiom".

In much of this, Spivak sounds - somewhat against the grain of orthodox expectation - very much like a traditional humanist scholar. Her new study emphasises the possibilities of imaginative and ethical identification with the other that can come through careful reading with just as much force as an F. R. Leavis; it insists on the importance of reading with all the skill, care, ingenuity, attention and preparation that is possible, with all the insistence of a Frank Kermode.

Where then lies the difference in Spivak's writing that can generate the kind of controversy that tends to accompany her? Responses to this question are likely to be divided sharply between critics and advocates, with each side focusing, with very different emphases, on the question of style.

Contra Spivak, the main complaint is that, for all the claims to depth of thinking and analysis, the difficulty of her writing - in describing "the proper study of literature", for example, she says it "may give us entry to the performativity of cultures" - merely testifies to haste in expression and articulation. The first impression is the correct one, and that is less of achieved composition than of someone thinking aloud. In this perspective, her writing resembles a kind of shorthand in which thoughts are referred to rather than fully articulated; it does not enable the arrest of thought that more careful prose can achieve.

Pro Spivak, the emphasis falls on the difficulty of style as a conscious alienation, deliberately achieved. It is her way of responding to the challenge of received ideas in a society where thought itself is commodified. The paradox is then Flaubert's paradox: that of someone trying to challenge received ideas when there can, by definition, be no shared vocabulary to challenge them with. The writer is then driven to tactics of frequent neologism (as with Derrida), the straining of syntax (as in Tom Raworth's poetry of defamiliarisation), or deliberate obscurity (as in Adorno's negative dialectics).

I ask what she makes of attacks on her style of writing and expression, and how these have affected her book. "One should learn from one's enemies," she responds. "It seems to me that the objections that were made to my obtuse and turgid style were not made in good faith." But she soon moves on from this initial and unsurprisingly defensive posture. Simply rejecting the accusations, and "showing up how meretricious they are" would have meant she'd "learnt nothing from them". Instead, and more interestingly, she "took the objections seriously" and accepted the offer of friend and admirer Henry Staten to "make my prose more reader-friendly" by acting as her first reader (he is duly credited in Death of a Discipline).

This led to a reworking at the surface, but one that left the depth of thinking intact and, she found, just as challenging as before. "Henry said that my writing had become 'mysterious in ways that are not tied to the difficulty of the prose'," she says, finding that, in the end, "so-called simplicity of vocabulary does not assure the possibility of being understood easily". At the same time, accepting and internalising some of the criticisms meant losing some intellectual insecurity: "I began to accept my shortcomings, and accept to work within them."

"I am a generalist," she continues, "not a specialist, so I don't have the kind of profound scholarship that you find in good specialists. But I began to find that this was a strength rather than a weakness."

John Higgins is professor of English and a fellow of the University of Cape Town. Death of a Discipline is published by Columbia University Press, £12.90.

Education news & jobs at the Times Higher Education Supplement

Don't be embarrassed to embrace new era
Hera Cook
Published: 19 December 2003
THES

The THES serves up six pages of reflections on some of the changes that have been making many people in our society feel increasingly anxious and frightened

Britons are dropping the stiff upper lip and loosening their grip on their emotions. But many do not feel as happy as they believe they ought to be.

Hera Cook says we should stop worrying and just celebrate change for a change

Back in the 1940s and '50s, the English used to claim that they felt as much or more than anyone else, they just didn't wear their hearts on their sleeves. Observers such as the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer reported that foreigners found them cold and repressed. Then, some time in the mid-1990s, people realised that emotional change had taken place. There was an attempt by rightwing critics to pin the blame on Princess Diana - not only had she topped all her other melodramatic excesses by dying dramatically, but people actually mourned for her.

In fact, emotional change was like the sexual revolution: no one was quite sure what had changed, or how it had happened, but it was obvious that something big had taken place. Most people seem to have been rather pleased - at least in principle. Expressing your feelings was thought to be the gateway to a happier, freer life. In practice, it is rather more difficult and painful. A person sets out to express his feelings and doubts set in.

Is this really the right way to go? Is it necessary to say all that? Isn't it a bit self-indulgent? And then the moment is gone. Depression is said to be rising. Some psychotherapists say we need more emotional intelligence, others that we live in a low-serotonin culture. All of them agree that we need more therapists.

It is argued that our expectations of life are too high and that this makes us depressed. Relationships are crucial. Individualism and self-indulgence lead us to demand too much of intimacy and thus to divorce. One psychoanalyst claims that the half-century of divorce since the 1950s has had worse effects on happiness than the 470,000 dead in the second world war. Could divorce be worse than the death of a parent or partner? Perhaps, but unlikely. On the one hand, exes often hang around poisoning the children's minds and sneering at the new love. On the other hand, death often came to those who would be missed from the family hearth. The most that can be said for this unconvincing argument is that pain is more painful when it is recent.

Surveys do suggest that rates of depression are rising across the western world. But as the English don't like to intrude, there are few surveys asking English people about their emotions. There did seem to be a jump in depression between a survey taken in 1977 and one in 1985. This is unsurprising; it is difficult to think of a more depressing period since the end of the war (winter of discontent, Margaret Thatcher, rising unemployment), but by the same token it probably isn't good evidence for a long-term trend.

There is also a confounding factor - one so big it seems almost cruel to mention it. Surveys of national depression, fear, anxiety and so on depend on self-reporting. But greater willingness to self-report, otherwise known as talking about your feelings, is the area in which emotional behaviour has changed the most, and not just in England. The English were always the top nation in emotional restraint, but 50 years ago even the Americans were not such full-on cheerleaders in the cause of emotional expression.

In the early to mid-20th century, the English did keep themselves to themselves. The war generations believed in stoicism. Even when they failed to control their emotions, they believed that they should have done so, and they felt even worse because they blamed themselves for their failure.

Those generations weren't just interested in controlling negative emotions - too much intense excitement, joy or passionate love was out as well. And they didn't just control their emotions, they were proud of doing so. They believed that those who expressed more - foreigners - felt less. Such people were superficial, hysterical and manipulative. Today, many English people feel vaguely ashamed of being emotionally restrained; they label it self-disparaging, undemonstrative, deadpan. They are still embarrassed in the presence of intense emotions, but now they get ashamed of their own ineptitude.

Are people more depressed today? Did those who expressed less emotion feel better? Conservative critics suggest that self-fulfilment doesn't make people happy; that hedonism, self-indulgence, disregard for hierarchy, snacking and therapy have destroyed a once-proud culture of self-control, stoicism and sit-down dinners. Like Thatcher and even some of the therapists, they locate this golden past in the 1950s. It is possible that this was a peak moment for happiness. The war was over and another looked unlikely. Wages were rising and, thanks to the new welfare state, people didn't have to pay for education or a visit to the doctor. Though it took a while, more and more people had a home with running water and a private toilet. But the novels of the time don't suggest a diet of national happiness.

And how long could this continue anyway? After only a decade or so, the young began to take the pleasures of domesticity, adequate food and healthcare for granted. They threw caution to the wind and started marrying too young. In the 1960s, they began ingesting life-changing substances such as the birth-control pill and demanding easy divorces. Some began to feel sophisticated and drink very sweet white wine. By the 1970s, the nation was going to pot. This is the first generation able to get depressed because their expectations of life had grown and their aspirations were too high.

Parents in the 1960s resented their children disturbing their new-found peace and quiet. In their youth, memories of the first world war had been recent and intense, and they grew up in the Depression. In the second world war, 15 per cent of the UK's housing stock was wiped out. It was thought that citizens might become hysterical during the bombing raids, but they pulled themselves together and levels of neurosis were low. Life might have been simpler then. Perhaps that generation didn't compare and compete the way succeeding generations have, but does that mean they were not frightened and depressed?

For a while family historians believed that people in centuries past (all of history before us and anyone we knew) didn't feel as much as people did in the mid-20th century. For example, they explained, in past centuries parents didn't get attached to babies and little children because they knew they were likely to die. Research has disproved that theory, but many people believe that pain is more painful when it is recent. In fact, it is probable that people in the past often lived with more pain than we can imagine. Today, people are unhappy and they talk about it. In the 1930s, or the 1950s, people were unhappy and they kept themselves to themselves.

Their lives almost certainly were harder than our experience of seeing our aspirations for the perfect life dashed. They just didn't talk about it much.

Today people can stay up late and fall in love, eat snacks and go through several partners and different phases in their lives. Many, perhaps most, people want to do this. The tides of sexual change since the 1960s are still not at the high-water mark, and those who disapproved are barely visible above the waves. Emotional change is following a similar path.

There are the claims from all sides that we live in a culture of fear, or rather many mini-cultures of fear. At work, in homes, schools, hospitals, on TV, on the streets. Fear, it seems, is everywhere. The barricades around No 10 Downing Street are anxiety made manifest. Yet, in spite of our government's best efforts in the past year, most of us still have little to fear - nothing, in fact, but fear itself. Let's celebrate change for a change. Instead of complaining this Christmas, let us extravagantly, intensely, excitedly enjoy our loved ones and welcome the strangers in our midst!

Hera Cook is a postdoctoral fellow in the department of history at the University of Sydney. Her book, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception 1800-1975, will be published by Oxford University Press in February, £35.00

Taylor & Francis Group - Article

Critical Studies in Media Communication
Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group
Issue: Volume 20, Number 4 / December 2003
Pages: 335 - 361
URL: Linking Options

Making the News: Anarchist Counter-Public Relations on the World Wide Web

Lynn Owens, L. Kendall Palmer

Abstract:

Traditionally, radical social movements faced a dilemma regarding media coverage: focus either on mass media, but lose control of their representation, or on alternative media, but fail to get their message to the broader public. The World Wide Web overcomes these problems, allowing movements to create their own media with mass distribution. However, it has two key weaknesses of its own: attracting audiences and mixing in- and out-group communication. In this paper, we show how the structure and content of the anarchist Web-based media work together to separate in- and out-group discourses. We then demonstrate how the anarchists attracted an audience to their Web media. The Black Bloc tactics at the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization brought an increase in media attention, albeit negative. We examine how anarchists took advantage of the larger audience created by this bad publicity and mounted a counter-public relations campaign online. We argue that the Web alters the power relationship between mainstream and alternative media without displacing the need for mainstream coverag

LexisNexis(TM) Academic - Document:

Copyright 2002 Newspaper Publishing PLC
The Independent (London)
August 29, 2002, Thursday

SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 4

LENGTH: 563 words

HEADLINE: HIGHER EDUCATION: WHAT THE ACADEMICS SAY;
WHY ARE ACADEMICS SO UNDERPAID AND UNDERVALUED IN BRITAIN? AND HOW CAN THEY GAIN THE RESPECT THAT THEY FEEL THEY DESERVE? MICHAEL DUNNING REPORTS

BYLINE: Michael Dunning

BODY:
Professor Lewis Elton, education,
University College London
As a higher proportion of the population goes to university, the domestication of academics has started to appear. The public perception of academia is tied to the perception of the quality of teaching. I think it has remained unchanged during my time in academia and the quality has been mixed and often inadequate. When I tell people that my job is to improve university teaching, they say, "And about time, too." But when I talk to academics, I get the response: "What on earth for?" There is a discrepancy - and I fear I am on the side of the public.

Chris Pole,
sociology lecturer,
Leicester University
People often think that academics live in ivory towers. The public sees that academics in medical schools or in engineering have a direct relevance, but with philosophy or fine art, they ask: "What are they for?" Many base their idea of academics on media representations, which are often of bumbling boffins. Governments, too, often have a negative view of academics - just look at the Thatcher years and her mistrust of anything social and, therefore, of social scientists.

Professor Gordon Campbell, English, Leicester University
Ancient stereotypes of academics are still in place. People don't understand what academics do. My neighbours think I'm a teacher.

Academic pay has sunk and there is no serious use of academics in political life, unlike in other European countries. The present government has continued the Tories' stance by underinvesting in and undervaluing academics. They treat us with contempt and indifference. New Labour has carried on the audit culture put in place by the previous administration, which sees universities as places that churn people out for the economy. They don't see universities as places where people learn citizenship.

In the media, academics either play the boffin role, as experts talking about a given issue, or they appear on late-night arts slots on Channel 4, which are quite marginal. This is partly the fault of academics because, unlike Simon Schama, they can't communicate well with the public.

Professor Susan Bassnett, comparative literary theory, Warwick University
The English aren't profoundly intellectual, so academics aren't admired and given much status. Poor pay reflects that. In the Eighties there were lots of novels about academics, which contained a great deal of humour, but that interest has waned, and there is little media representation now. By contrast, in France academics comment on all sorts of issues.

Dr John Medaliavich, physics, Leicester University
Media representations of science are poor. Science is often treated in terms of deficiency: "They can't do this" or "they can't do that". "We've been waiting for a cure for Aids for 20 years." This comes from a failure to understand what science is at a fundamental level. It stems from an inability to distinguish between science and technology. Technology is about providing things for need, whereas science is about enquiry.

Science and engineering have never really been held in high esteem and the Government reflects this. Inevitably, we are paid less. But that doesn't stop scientists thinking of themselves as some kind of elite. Ultimately, scientists' ideas are the engine of civilisation and progress.

MD

LOAD-DATE: August 29, 2002

EBSCOhost

Quote Graff's argument in "Hiding ..." p. 248. Consider the issue of "So what"
also relate it to the work of the dramaturg
also use Brunett's nice turn of Phrase "this sort should be the reduction of the complex to the simple, but never to the simplistic"

EBSCOhost

From Brunett's review of Encylclopedia:

Their translations, he suggests, 'exist where otherwise there would be silence'. The perspective that this statement endorses distinguishes a new, positive approach to the activity of translation, which has contributed so crucially to the establishment of Translation Studies as a discipline, from the earlier, and negative, view that held translation to be at best derivative or at worst deviant. It is, of course, a similar turning of the tables that has ensured success in the construction of other new paradigms such as Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Cultural Studies. In this respect, the entry in this encyclopedia on TRANSLATION STUDIES itself is both a rallying call for the further strengthening of the discipline, and a judicious warning that 'there can be no benefit in setting various approaches in opposition to each other nor in resisting the integration of insights achieved through the application of various tools of research, whatever the origins'. The importance of the issue is underscored by the fact that the piece is written by the editor, Mona Baker. "

Education news & resources at the Times Higher Education Supplement: "End doctoral dog's breakfast"

End doctoral dog's breakfast
Susan Bassnett
Published: 10 January 2003

It's time to rethink the inconsistent, muddled criteria by which PhDs are awarded, says Susan Bassnett

Stories abound about the future of doctoral research in universities. Will some institutions shift to focus on undergraduate teaching, with a select group of universities hiving off the postgraduate population? As someone who works in a postgraduate centre, I have a keen interest in such questions. But if there are to be big changes, more thought should be given to the criteria and processes by which PhDs are awarded. What we have at the moment, at least in the humanities, is something of a dog's breakfast.

Once upon a time, when small numbers pursued doctoral study, the ground rules were fairly clear: originality was essential, and the finished product had to be of publishable quality. Vestiges of those criteria remain in the regulations of some institutions, but as numbers have expanded, the rules have altered. These days, some students apply for PhDs without even having a topic in mind, let alone an original one. I regularly receive letters from well-meaning young people with funding assured who ask for advice on what they should do for their PhD. The idea of pursuing a line of original research does not even occur to them.

Many postgraduate students have no idea how to embark on research, how to use archival materials or how to structure an argument. Some universities provide extra training and courses on basic research methods, but often to little effect. The role of the supervisor is tricky, too: some universities provide supervisor training, some supervisors are excellent, some are unreliable, some welcome research students, others see them as a nuisance.

In the past year, I have examined half a dozen PhDs. It is fascinating and not a little depressing to observe the different behaviour of examiners and supervisors, and the criteria for the award of PhDs. Forget consistency: in some places, a viva is properly conducted with a chair who acts in a neutral capacity and puts the candidate at ease. In others, it is held behind closed doors and examiners can behave as they like.

Criteria for referrals vary, too. In some cases, examiners can award a degree "subject to minor corrections". Others have something called "major corrections", which falls short of what I have always understood as a referral. This means that a thesis can be sent back for a few months for corrections, thereby ensuring that nobody loses face because it is not called a referral, though in effect that is what it is. In universities that do not have this get-out clause, referral is the only option.

Some universities have word limits, others do not. Some have rules about presentation, others do not. Some pay examiners appallingly (£105 for at least three full days' work, a written report and a viva in a university at the opposite end of the country) but then rely on the examiner to save the situation if supervisory standards are low. It is not a dignified situation, and it needs rethinking.

What should we do? Learn from the US model for a start. Students should follow courses for a year then formulate a proper doctoral research proposal and write a shorter but better thesis. Funding criteria should be adjusted accordingly. Supervisors should be trained, and universities should look as closely at their examining criteria as they do for undergraduate degrees. The viva should be chaired by a senior academic who is not the supervisor and be open to observers should the student so wish it.

Heaven forbid that we should establish yet another central body to police our postgraduate system, but there really should be more consistency across the system. I have seen PhDs awarded in some universities that would have not made the grade in others, and that should not happen. I have seen brilliant theses by overseas students, and theses so poor that you sense that the institution was blinded by lucre. We need changes to ensure that a UK PhD is a quality degree worth having.

Susan Bassnett is pro vice-chancellor of the University of Warwick.

Education news & resources at the Times Higher Education Supplement:

Be rigorous at the start and the marriage will survive

Susan Bassnett
THES - 10 October 2003

The relationship between a PhD student and their supervisor can be a tricky one. Susan Bassnett has a recipe for success.

Sooner or later, most academics find themselves examining a doctoral thesis. When a thesis is good, the viva can be a rewarding experience for all concerned. It is always a moving moment when the candidate learns that he or she has satisfied the examiners and the doctorate is in the bag.

But what about those times when it isn't possible to pass a thesis and when the examiner confronts the unsuccessful candidate's misery? I have found myself faced with the dilemma of referring a thesis or, worse still, recommending a lower degree. On another occasion, once the candidate had fled from the room in tears, I was placed behind a desk to give the verdict because the internal examiner felt the candidate might attack me.

Each failed thesis is a distressing event. Not least because there is often a doubt as to where the responsibility for failure lies. Sometimes the cause of the problem is clear: the candidate was not up to writing a doctorate, the research was not sufficiently rigorous or was unoriginal, or the topic was wrongly conceived. But there may also be other problems - poor structuring of an argument, poor presentation, an inadequate bibliography - and here we enter the grey area of shared responsibility between candidate and supervisor. At a time when there is a consultation document doing the rounds seeking to improve the quality of doctoral work generally, it is fair to reflect on the role of the supervisor and to ask what exactly is expected of them.

We have all heard tales of supervisors who saw their students once a year for ten minutes in the pub. These days there is talk of extensive training for supervisors, of mentoring and guidelines and I even heard it suggested that supervisors should sign a declaration accepting liability should something go wrong in the viva. Clearly, the pendulum is swinging away from the idea of a supervisor as a source of expert advice to someone who is expected to take ever greater responsibility for students' work. This doesn't seem reasonable to me, particularly when the number of doctoral students is rising and many of those students do not have English as their first language. What should a supervisor do?

For a start, there needs to be a clear division of labour, ideally a contract clarifying who does what and what supervisor and candidate can expect in terms of contact hours and reading of drafts. Some institutions have such guidelines, some don't. If there isn't a system, you need to set up your own. I take the view that creating a bibliography is part of the process of acquiring a doctorate; the supervisor can make suggestions, but bibliographical research is not their job.

I also take a tough line on drafts: some candidates rewrite so many times that you would go mad if you read every version. One student once gave me a 400-page "final" draft then changed it completely without telling me. I refused to read the new version.

It is also important to ensure that a draft is as close to perfect as possible. There is no point reading something that is scrappy, lacking footnotes and has not been proofread. My tactic in such cases is to read one chapter in that condition, noting how many hours it takes me to do so and correcting every single error. This is generally so shocking to the candidate that the next chapter arrives in much better shape.

Should a supervisor proofread a thesis? If you don't help students whose English is poor or who can't write or spell, they will be disadvantaged, but the final responsibility must be the candidate's. Consequently, supervision needs to vary at different points in the doctoral lifecycle: too much talk doesn't help anyone, rigorous correcting does, and there should always be detailed written feedback because information given orally will be misheard or forgotten.

A good relationship between supervisor and student is one of the most powerful and lasting relationships you can have. Get it right and the bond will be sealed for life. Get it wrong and the candidate will blame you forever. Not unlike a marriage.

Susan Bassnett is professor at the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Warwick.

LexisNexis(TM) Academic - Document

Copyright 2003 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education

May 2, 2003, Friday

SECTION: THE CHRONICLE REVIEW; Pg. 14

LENGTH: 2638 words

HEADLINE:

The Neoconservative-Conspiracy Theory: Pure Myth

BYLINE: ROBERT J. LIEBER

BODY:
The ruins of Saddam Hussein's shattered tyranny may provide additional evidence of chemical weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, but one poisonous by-product has already begun to seep from under the rubble. It is a conspiracy theory purporting to explain how the foreign policy of the world's greatest power, the United States, has been captured by a sinister and hitherto little-known cabal.

A small band of neoconservative (read, Jewish) defense intellectuals, led by the "mastermind," Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (according to Michael Lind, writing in the New Statesman), has taken advantage of 9/11 to put their ideas over on an ignorant, inexperienced, and "easily manipulated" president (Eric Alterman in The Nation), his "elderly figurehead" Defense Secretary (as Lind put it), and the "dutiful servant of power" who is our secretary of state (Edward Said, London Review of Books).

Thus empowered, this neoconservative conspiracy, "a product of the influential Jewish-American faction of the Trotskyist movement of the '30s and '40s" (Lind), with its own "fanatic" and "totalitarian morality" (William Pfaff, International Herald Tribune) has fomented war with Iraq -- not in the interest of the United States, but in the service of Israel's Likud government (Patrick J. Buchanan and Alterman).

This sinister mythology is worthy of the Iraqi information minister, Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who became notorious for telling Western journalists not to believe their own eyes as American tanks rolled into view just across the Tigris River. And indeed versions of it do circulate in the Arab world. (For example, a prominent Saudi professor from King Faisal University, Umaya Jalahma, speaking at a prestigious think tank of the Arab League, has revealed that the U.S. attack on Iraq was actually timed to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Purim.) But the neocon-conspiracy notion is especially conspicuous in writing by leftist authors in the pages of journals like The Washington Monthly and those cited above, as well as in the arguments of paleoconservatives like Buchanan and his magazine, The American Conservative.

Many of those who disseminate the new theory had strenuously opposed war with Iraq and predicted dire consequences in the event American forces were to invade. The critics had warned of such things as massive resistance by the Iraqi military and people, a quagmire on the order of Vietnam, Saddam's use of weapons of mass destruction (though some of the same voices loudly questioned whether Iraq had such weapons at all), Scud missile attacks that would draw Israel into the fray, destruction of Iraq's oil fields (thus creating an ecological catastrophe), and an inflamed and radicalized Middle East in which moderate governments would be overthrown by an enraged Arab street.

Authors disparaged the notion that the Iraqi people could ever welcome coalition forces as liberators. In words dripping with sarcasm, Eric Alterman asked readers of The Nation, "Is Wolfowitz really so ignorant of history as to believe the Iraqis would welcome us as 'their hoped-for liberators'?" And the inimitable Edward Said, writing in the London Review of Books, offered a scathing denunciation not only of Wolfowitz but of such apostates as Fouad Ajami, the Iraqi exile author Kanan Makiya, and the exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi for their "rubbish" and "falsifying of reality" in selling the administration a bill of goods about a quick war. Instead, Said asserted, "The idea that Iraq's population would have welcomed American forces entering the country after a terrifying aerial bombardment was always utterly implausible."

One of the less fevered explanations, as offered by Joshua Micah Marshall in the April Washington Monthly, asserts that the invasion of Iraq was not primarily about eliminating Saddam Hussein, "nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction." Instead, Marshall presents the war as the administration's "first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East."

But more extreme versions of the argument are readily available. For example, Alterman writes that "the war has put Jews in the showcase as never before. Its primary intellectual architects -- Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle (former aide to Senator Henry M. 'Scoop' Jackson; assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration; now a member of the Defense Policy Board, an unpaid body advising Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld), and Douglas J. Feith (the No. 3 official at Defense) -- are all Jewish neoconservatives. So, too, are many of its prominent media cheerleaders, including William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and Marty Peretz. Joe Lieberman, the nation's most conspicuous Jewish politician, has been an avid booster."

Alterman adds, "Then there's the 'Jews control the media' problem. ... Many of these same Jews joined Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Richard B. Cheney in underselling the difficulty of the war, in what may have been a deliberate ruse designed to embroil America in a broad military conflagration that would help smite Israel's enemies."

Michael Lind's language is more overtly conspiratorial. In an essay appearing in London's New Statesman and in Salon, after dismissing the columnist Robert Kagan as a "neoconservative propagandist," Lind confides the "alarming" truth that "the foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made by a small clique." They are "neoconservative defense intellectuals," among whom he cites Wolfowitz; Feith; Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; John Bolton at the State Department; and Elliott Abrams on the National Security Council.

Most of these, we are told, have their roots on the left and are "products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and '40s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism" and now "into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history." Lind complains that in their "odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for 'democracy,'" they "call their revolutionary ideology 'Wilsonianism,' ... but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism." Along with the Kristol-led Weekly Standard and allies such as Vice President Cheney, "these neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience."

Lind's speculation that the president may not even be aware of what this cabal has foisted upon him embodies the hallmarks of conspiratorial reasoning. In his words, "It is not clear that George W. fully understands the grand strategy that Wolfowitz and other aides are unfolding. He seems genuinely to believe that there was an imminent threat to the U.S. from Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction,' something the leading neocons say in public but are far too intelligent to believe themselves."

Those themes are echoed at the opposite end of the political spectrum, in The American Conservative, where the embattled remnants of an old isolationist and reactionary conservatism can be found. Buchanan, the magazine's editor, targets the neoconservatives, alleging that they have hijacked the conservative movement and that they seek "to conscript American blood to make the world safe for Israel."

Even in its less fevered forms, the neocon-conspiracy theory does not provide a coherent analysis of American foreign policy. More to the point, especially among the more extreme versions, there are conspicuous manifestations of classic anti-Semitism: claims that a small, all-powerful but little-known group or "cabal" of Jewish masterminds is secretly manipulating policy; that they have dual loyalty to a foreign power; that this cabal combines ideological opposites (right-wingers with a Trotskyist legacy, echoing classic anti-Semitic tropes linking Jews to both international capitalism and international communism); that our official leaders are too ignorant, weak, or naive to grasp what is happening; that the foreign policy upon which our country is now embarked runs counter to, or is even subversive of, American national interest; and that if readers only paid close attention to what the author is saying, they would share the same sense of alarm.

A dispassionate dissection of the neocon-conspiracy arguments is not difficult to undertake. For one thing, the Bush administration actually has very few Jews in senior policy positions and none among the very top foreign-policy decision makers: the president, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Secretary Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice -- all of whom are Protestants. (British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the most influential non-American, is also Protestant.)

But even identifying policy makers in this way carries the insidious implication that religious affiliation by itself is all-controlling. In reality, Americans of all persuasions have exhibited deep differences about foreign policy and war with Iraq. Before the war, public-opinion polls consistently showed Jews about as divided as the public at large, or even slightly less in favor of the war, and Jewish intellectual and political figures could be found in both pro- and antiwar camps. For example, the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, the professor and author Eliot Cohen of the Johns Hopkins University, and Senator Lieberman of Connecticut supported the president, while opposition came from a range of voices, including the radically anti-American Noam Chomsky, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the moderate-left philosopher Michael Walzer, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.; Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan; and a bevy of leftist Berkeley and New York intellectuals -- Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine; Norman Mailer; Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University; and many others.

More to the point, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice are among the most experienced, tough-minded, and strong-willed foreign-policy makers in at least a generation, and the conspiracy theory fails utterly to take into account their own assessments of American grand strategy in the aftermath of 9/11.

The theory also wrongly presumes that Bush himself is an empty vessel, a latter-day equivalent of Czarina Alexandra, somehow fallen under the influence of Wolfowitz/Rasputin. Condescension toward Bush has been a hallmark of liberal and leftist discourse ever since the disputed 2000 presidential election, and there can be few readers of this publication who have not heard conversations about the president that did not begin with offhand dismissals of him as "stupid," a "cowboy," or worse. An extreme version of this thinking, and even the demonization of Bush, can be found in the latest musings of Edward Said, as quoted in Al-Ahram Weekly: "In fact, I and others are convinced that Bush will try to negate the 2004 elections: We're dealing with a putschist, conspiratorial, paranoid deviation that's very anti-democratic." That kind of disparagement has left critics ill prepared to think analytically about the administration or the foreign-policy imperatives facing the United States after 9/11.

Whether one favors or opposes the Bush policies, the former Texas governor has proved himself to be an effective wartime leader. The Bush Doctrine, as expressed in the president's January 2002 State of the Union address ("the United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons") and the September 2002 document on national-security strategy set out an ambitious grand strategy in response to the combined perils of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

Reactions to the doctrine have been mixed. Some foreign-policy analysts have been critical, especially of the idea of pre-emption and the declared policy of preventing the rise of any hostile great-power competitor, while others (for example, John Lewis Gaddis of Yale University) have provided a more positive assessment. But the doctrine has certainly not been concealed from the public, and the president and his foreign-policy team have spoken repeatedly of its elements and implications. While Bush's February 2003 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, in which he articulated a vision for a free and democratic Middle East, has been criticized as excessively Wilsonian, its key themes echo those found in the widely circulated Arab Human Development Report 2002, written by a group of Arab economists for the United Nations Development Program, which decried Arab-world deficits in regard to freedom, knowledge, and the role of women.

Partisanship aside, the president has shown himself to be independent and decisive, able to weigh competing advice from his top officials before deciding how to act. In August of last year, for example, he sided with Secretary of State Powell over the initial advice of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cheney in opting to seek a U.N. Security Council resolution on Iraq. Powell's own February 5 speech to the Security Council was a compelling presentation of the administration's case against Iraq, and well before the outbreak of the war, Powell made clear his view that the use of force had become unavoidable.

Conspiracy theorists are also naive in expressing anxieties that the Defense Department may sometimes be at odds with State or the National Security Council over policy. Political scientists and historians have long described policy making as an "invitation to struggle," and Richard E. Neustadt's classic work Presidential Power characterized the ultimate resource of the presidency as the power to persuade. Franklin D. Roosevelt deliberately played his advisers against one another, the Nixon presidency saw Henry Kissinger successfully undercut Secretary of State William P. Rogers, and the Carter and Reagan presidencies were also conspicuous for the struggles between their national security advisers and secretaries of state. In short, competing views among presidential foreign-policy advisers are typical of most administrations.

Nor is Bush's support for Israel somehow a sign of manipulation. From the time of Harry Truman's decision to recognize the Jewish state in May 1948, through Kennedy's arms sales, the Nixon administration's support during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the close U.S.-Israeli relationships during the Reagan and Clinton presidencies, this is nothing new. American public opinion has consistently favored Israel over the Palestinians by wide margins, and a February Gallup poll put this margin at more than 4 to 1 (58 percent versus 13 percent). The strongest source of support for Israel now comes from within Bush's own Republican base, especially among Christian conservatives; and in addition to his own inclinations, as a politically adroit president, he has repeatedly shown the determination not to alienate his political base.

Ultimately, the neocon-conspiracy theory misinterprets as a policy coup a reasoned shift in grand strategy that the Bush administration has adopted in responding to an ominous form of external threat. Whether that strategy and its component parts prove to be as robust and effective as containment of hostile Middle Eastern states linked to terrorism remains to be seen. But to characterize it in conspiratorial terms is not only a failure to weigh policy choices on their merits, but represents a detour into the fever swamps of political demagoguery.

Robert J. Lieber is a professor of government and foreign service at Georgetown University and the editor of Eagle Rules? Foreign Policy and American Primacy in the Twenty-First Century (Prentice Hall, 2002).

LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2003

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REPORT available at
http://hdr.undp.org/reports/view_reports.cfm?region=ABS®ionname=ARAB%20STATES%20

Copyright 2003 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education

November 7, 2003, Friday

SECTION: INTERNATIONAL; Pg. 47

LENGTH: 424 words

HEADLINE:

Scholars Criticize Arab Colleges

BYLINE: DANIEL DEL CASTILLO

BODY:
For the second year in a row, a team of prominent Arab scholars has sharply criticized the state of Arab higher education, saying that repressive governments are hindering the growth of scholarship at universities and other academic institutions in the Arab world.

The scholars' conclusions are part of a 217-page study, "Arab Human Development Report 2003: Building a Knowledge Society," that was released last month. The annual study is supported by the United Nations Development Program and the Kuwait-based Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development. It is intended to provide a critical assessment of the problems plaguing the Arab world and its intellectual advancement.

"The biggest obstacle we are facing is the restriction of our freedoms. That comes at the top of the list," said Nader Fergany, the report's lead author and director of the Al-Mishkat Center for Research and Training, in Cairo. "We are hoping to contribute to a process of internal reform within the Arab world, and higher education plays prominently in this role."

The study was produced by 40 academics from more than 10 countries. They concluded that Arab governments must focus on "reclaiming Arab knowledge" and building intellectual societies by promoting inquiry and spending heavily on higher education.

To help improve the quality of higher education, the study calls for the establishment of an independent Arab organization for the accreditation of all higher-education programs. Mr. Fergany said the U.N. Development Program had created a pilot accreditation project that it hopes will eventually become a full-fledged accreditation organization. "It has to be independent from government," he stressed.

The authors of the report noted that universities in the region's 22 countries have faced serious setbacks. "Higher education is characterized by decreasing enrollment, and public spending on education has actually declined since 1985," the report said. "In all cases, nevertheless, the most important challenge facing Arab education is its declining quality." Science education in the Arab world is hampered by weak basic research and an almost total lack of advanced research in fields like information technology and molecular biology, the study found.

The report also noted that the number of Arab students in the United States dropped 30 percent from 1999 to 2002, a development the authors said is "interrupting cultural exchanges between the Arab world and the West and cutting off knowledge acquisition for young Arabs."



LOAD-DATE: December 8, 2003

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Copyright 2002 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education
July 26, 2002, Friday

SECTION: INTERNATIONAL; Pg. 46

LENGTH: 455 words

HEADLINE:

Arab Scholars Write Withering Critique of Higher Education in Arab World; Israeli University Tries to Lure Scientists Back to the Country

BODY:
A group of Arab scholars has come up with an unusually blunt critique of higher education in the Arab world.

In a report, they say excessive government control and poor academic quality are hurting the region's universities and its societies in general.

The 178-page paper, "Arab Human Development 2002," which can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.undp.org/ahdr, is the culmination of a yearlong project jointly supported by the United Nations Development Program and the Kuwait-based Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development. While the report looks at human development as a whole, a significant portion is dedicated to higher education.

"What's unique about this report is the way Arab intellectuals and scholars have come together to work on this project," says one of the authors, Atif Kubursi, a professor of economics at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. "We're not outsiders, and we are speaking in a common tongue.

"Our goal is very clear, and our language is blunt: We need to bridge the gap in higher education, and we need decision makers and policy makers to listen," he says.

While noting that Arab countries have made great strides in education since the mid-20th century, the report says academic achievement is still modest and is limited by low literacy rates, especially among women.

Private tutoring has become indispensable for students hoping to qualify for college admission and pass state entrance exams, and thus entire fields of study have become the exclusive domain of the privileged, it notes.

But the biggest crisis now in Arab higher education is a regression of quality in countries from Morocco eastward to Kuwait, the authors charge.

"Poor quality has become the Achilles' heel of education in the Arab world, a flaw that undermines its quantitative achievements," they conclude.

***

Are scientists willing to brave suicide bombers to get good laboratories?

The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is going to find out, as it tries to lure Israeli-born scientists back to the country. The university's president, Yitzhak Apeloig, believes that scientists won't be put off by Israel's security situation if they have the facilities to do good science.

With that in mind, the Technion has established a $20-million "Leaders in Science" program to pay for the labs, equipment, and other expenses that will persuade top candidates in the United States and Europe to return to Israel.

The university cannot compete with private American institutions in terms of salary alone, Mr. Apeloig notes.

As a public university operating under a collective-bargaining agreement, the Technion cannot sign private salary agreements with faculty members.

LOAD-DATE: August 26, 2002

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Copyright 2002 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education

April 5, 2002, Friday

SECTION: INTERNATIONAL; Pg. 35

LENGTH: 1596 words

HEADLINE:

Arab Universities Struggle to Meet Their Nations' Needs

BYLINE: DAVID L. WHEELER

DATELINE: Marrakech, Morocco

BODY:
Is higher education in the Arab world modernizing at a painfully slow pacewhen it needs to be charging at the speed of photons down a fiber-optic cable?

Last month, at a rare gathering of Arab countries' education officials, university administrators, and others concerned with higher education in the Middle East and North Africa, speakers questioned the fitness of the region's universities and suggested that they are behind in information technology, short on research, long on dogma, and too often educate their graduates for government jobs that no longer exist. The meeting here, "Higher Education in the Arab World: Preparing for the Global Marketplace," was supported by Amideast, a nonprofit organization that encourages educational exchanges between the United States and Middle Eastern countries, with 10 field offices in the region.

Speakers from Arab educational institutions, while finding fault with the Western news media's coverage of the Arab world in the wake of September 11, were their own toughest critics. "We cherish our great heritage and our great culture, and rightly so," said Abdulkarim al-Iryani, a former prime minister of Yemen, who studied biochemistry at Yale University and has been an advocate for higher education in Yemen. "But we have lost its great tolerance and openness. We teach science, but we still have taboos." Among the topics not taught at many Arab universities, he said, were some of the basic teachings of evolution -- for instance, that 98 percent of the human genome is identical to that of chimpanzees, a fact that offends many Muslims in the same way that it offends fundamentalist Christians in the United States.

Indeed, professors in the Arab world were compared to clerics. "Education is taught like religion. Students are supposed to believe as a matter of faith," said Nemir Kirdar, the Iraqi-born president of a global investment company, Investcorp Bank, with offices in Bahrain, London, and New York, who was invited to give an employer's view of Arab higher education. Rather than use religion as an educational model, he suggested using science, with the expectation that students would question truth, debate hypotheses, and find solutions to problems. Mistakes, he said, should not be viewed as things that should be avoided at all costs, but as a path to innovation.

Research -- a scarce commodity, since money to support it is in short supply -- also must be added to the agenda of Arab universities, he said. "Universities should not be centers to transmit what is already known. They should produce knowledge to benefit their societies and the rest of the world."

Higher education in the Arab world cannot be separated from the generally grim economic setting in which it exists. Although a few countries are rich in oil, per-capita income in Arab countries is among the lowest in the world, and population growth and unemployment are the highest, said Mr. Kirdar. The League of Arab States, a political group that includes 21 countries and the Palestinian Authority, ranges from Mauritania, on the Atlantic coast of Africa, to Oman, which juts into the Arabian Sea toward India. The countries share the Arabic language, the Muslim religion, and some other common heritage, but are strikingly varied in many other features, such as landscape or society's attitudes toward women. Snow-capped mountains, fertile valleys filled with olive trees, and extensive cedar forests contradict stereotypes of sand dunes.

A few of the Persian Gulf countries, including the United Arab Emirates, have high female college enrollments, but over all, Arab nations lag behind the rest of the world in that respect: Only 12.4 percent of college-age women in the Arab League countries are enrolled in higher education, compared with a world average of 16.4 percent. A report prepared for the conference by the Cairo branch of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization urged the region's universities to do more for women: "Arab states need to take drastic measures for a radical change in their educational standing," it said.

Victor Billeh, director of the regional Unesco office, said that even collecting data for the report had been difficult. Basic information, like the date on which a university was established and the number of students they have enrolled, was hard to come by, and many of the universities have either no Web presence or Web sites that are devoid of information.

Of the 22 members of the Arab League, he said, only 10 had ministries of education, and in the other countries the universities didn't appear to be accountable to anybody. Only in Jordan, he said, do public universities charge tuition, leaving those in most of the region at the whim of national budgets. Governments have demonstrated little interest in developing standards of quality or adopting international ones, Mr. Billeh said. "There is no culture for accrediting programs of higher education, period." What he called "islands of excellence" do exist, but they must become a broader part of the regional educational culture, he said.

Graduates of universities in many Arab countries face unemployment in the double-digit rates, and fewer governments are resorting to the old strategy of bloating their bureaucracy and burdening the taxpayers to give young people jobs, conference speakers said. As a result, a few institutions are trying to foster an entrepreneurial spirit. "If universities are only training people for existing companies," said Najib Zerouali, the minister of higher education in Morrocco, "then they are not doing their job."

In a theme that has been sounded in many other parts of the world, some speakers heralded information technology as a field of commerce in which geographical position and natural resources matter less than knowledge and intellect, making it an arena in which Arab countries can compete. "We lost in the nuclear age, we lost in the space age," said Farouk el-Baz, the Egyptian-born director of Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing, and a champion of scientific research in the Arab world. "The information age has beckoned, but we can't enter it unless we act."

Abdalaziz al-Sugair, head of the Advanced Electronics Company, an electronics-design and manufacturing business in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, said he has built an enterprise in which 78 percent of the employees are Saudi, in a country that depends heavily on foreign labor and expertise. Graduates of Saudi universities contradict the stereotype of spoiled rich kids who don't show up for work and expect to start out in management, he said. They are willing to work their way up. But while they may have a great deal of technical knowledge in fields like engineering, he added, they have weak computer skills and a lack of business training in marketing and accounting.

What's more, he said, Saudi college graduates are not as fluent in English as they need to be in international business. He encouraged Saudi and other Arab universities to introduce job-oriented courses, in which skills like time management and a sense of striving for excellence could be taught. He also encouraged universities to forge connections to the global corporate world, using adjunct-faculty members and summer internships for students.

He and others at the meeting also emphasized that graduates need to be able to speak and write with more clarity and confidence -- echoing the desires of a good many American employers. "Engineers don't like to write, but it is essential," said Yahya al-Salqan, an associate professor at Al Quds University, an Arab institution in Jerusalem, who is also president of the West Bank-based Jaffa.Net Computer Systems. Engineers, he said, have to leave clear instructions for those who have to maintain the software the engineers write. "The software they come up with has to be maintained by totally different individuals," he said.

Driss Laraki, a Moroccan high-technology consultant, said that when he has a job opening, he looks for an applicant "who can write sentences and has an open mind."

At the meeting, a backlash of sorts also emerged from those who felt that universities shouldn't turn into assembly lines producing "robots" that employers then pluck off a conveyor belt. Undergraduates could profitably spend a little time questioning the meaning of their existence, some participants suggested, in remarks reminiscent of curricular debates in the United States. After a luncheon panel of recent graduates, who said universities should do more to help students with resume writing and job placement, Samir Khalaf, a professor of sociology at the American University of Beirut, stood up and said he was disappointed. "Education is more than programming people for jobs," he declared. The university has recently adopted a core curriculum that requires history graduates to take science courses and engineers to dip into the humanities.

But the meeting here, by design, was tilted toward those trying to overcome the high unemployment rates in the Arab world, and toward those with a thirst for more technology.

At the end of a session on improving technology training at universities, an interpreter who had been translating between Arabic and English for members of the audience left his booth in the back of a conference room to plead for more Arabic works on the Internet, so that more people in the region could be included in the technology revolution.

"What is the Arabic word for server?'" he asked. "I don't know."



LOAD-DATE: May 6, 2002