(Petro ) Dollars for Scholars

...This article is the first in a three part series...

...The greatest leverage on influential public opinion is to be found in this area for three reasons," the official pointed out...

...Georgetown's President, Reverend Timothy Healy, S.J.—who arrived on the Georgetown campus two years ago, when the Center's existence was already a fait accompli—is reported to be increasingly uncomfortable with the lobbying activities of his Arab studies staff...

...In most cases, they are doing nothing illegal...

...To be sure, the Arab academic juggernaut has been successfully derailed on certain campuses, as Jews and non-Jews have learned of impending and morally objectionable Arab-American contracts or endowments of one sort or another...

...Its largest gift to date— $750,000—came from the government of Libya...

...The money, given in May, 1977, goes to endow the Center's Umar Al-Mukhtar Chair of Arab Culture...

...A more obvious—and whorish— sales pitch could scarcely be imagined...

...Center Director Hudson predictably insists that "we don't mix politics and education...

...According to the State Department, cooperative programs, or linkages between Arab agencies and American universities, have increased ten-fold since 1973...

...Israeli Consul Daniel Mokabi, who keeps regular tabs on the American academic scene, puts the matter more bluntly...

...Five American Jews, one Israeli—and about 450 other students...

...Krogh, when reached for comment, was unfazed...

...At the University of Alabama at Birmingham, for example, the announcement of a "mutually beneficial and cooperative" educational exchange program with the Tripoli-based University of Al Fateh touched off a crisis of conscience among several dozen Jewish faculty, eventually leading to organized protest...

...they may also be used to skew university curricula, underwrite biased anti-Israel programs and support on-campus propaganda activities not consonant with the universities' fundamental quest for truth and knowledge...

...Nearby, the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies also matter-of-factly states in its prospectus that it doesn't really care where its foreign benefactors reside—as long as they can produce legal tender...

...It was Krogh who originally laid the groundwork for the Center and continues to be its chief dues collector...

...Thus, for example, a tacit stipulation of most contractual arrangements with Arab states is that Jewish staff will not be employed in projects funded with Arab dollars...

...Cynics have called Saudi Arabia a "USC field project...

...We can't depend on the law to fight off the Arabs," Israeli Consul Mokabi says...

...Nor, as we shall see, is it merely coincidence that the Georgetown Center, whose members have managed to make their voices heard on a number of other recent Middle East developments as well, receives most of its Gordon Sander is a New York-based freelance journalist...

...In July 1975, the Midwest Universities Consortium for International Activities—which consists of Indiana University, Michigan State, the Universities of Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota—terminated its program of academic assistance at the University of Riyadh after the Saudis refused a visa to a Jewish professor...

...Then friendly faculty are hired...

...In short, it is an especially tempting plum, of obvious interest to Libya and the United Arab Emirates...

...And then they are replaced with even friendlier staff, and so on...

...Last March, in the wake of the Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon, a Washington-based spokesman for the League of Arab States, Dr...

...The answer, it turns out, is ambiguous and disturbing...

...The first issue of "Petro Impact," a newsletter put out by the American Jewish Committee to help keep track of the growing Arab penetration into American affairs, surveys the situation as follows: "In the quest for new sources of financial support, many American colleges and universities have sought grants or research contracts from Arab sources...

...It is located virtually within whispering distance of Congress and the Washington press corps...

...The invasion doesn't constitute a response to the Palestinian raid," Maksoud said...

...What makes the sudden and dramatic expansion in such activities worrisome is that they are so clearly an opportunistic response to the new Arab wealth rather than to the considered requirements of higher education...

...In this case, however, there were explicit strings attached to the bequest: University President Dr...

...Holyoke, Swarthmore, Williams, Wellesley, Carleton, Grinnell, Reed, Oberlin, Rice, and perhaps thirty others...

...I don't know Uganda," he told a reporter from The Washington Post, who was wondering whether the Jesuit institution would indeed accept the African dictator's charity...

...We are counting on moral bulwarks, not legal ones," says Mokabi...

...that the quality of the people available to guide research and teaching in a field that has so long been neglected is necessarily uneven...

...Continuing vigilance by an attentive public may be a more dependable defense...

...Don't ignore the self-corrective capacity of a university, regardless of the source of the gift," Healy said in a recent interview with Gene Maeroff of The New York Times...

...support Middle Eastern studies in the normal way, thus retaining academic control over them...

...For twenty years, USC has educated the elite sons of Saudi Arabia, in addition to furnishing many of the plans and ideas which have shaped the modernization of that oil-rich sheikdom...

...In other words, these campuses are likely to be more resistant to Arab influence...

...Less attention has been paid to the developing connection between Arab states and the academic world which comes much closer to the heart of the academic enterprise...

...On the basis of the evidence, one is bound to ask whether it is bonafide educational centers that are being built and expanded or whether, instead, we are witnessing the development of a network of cells for propaganda activities...

...Happily, Swarthmore's good sense, its faculty's alertness, and Jewish vigilance intercepted the solicitation...

...The Saudis of USC may be too busy with their studies—and their volleyball—to engage in demonstrations and pamphleteering...

...Third, "programs followed by the prestigious private colleges influence and set examples particularly for state-run educational institutions...

...The answer, it turns out, is ambiguous and disturbing...

...the Saudis were happy to oblige, forking over a cool million to endow a King Faisal Chair of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the University of Southern California...

...And even where the activities appear entirely respectable and seem to conform to the highest standards of decency...

...Speaking of the Arab world's sudden, and somewhat suspicious fondness for certain prestigious American academies of learning, Mokabi says: "It's really quite simple...

...So much for Georgetown, newest in the expanding galaxy of Arab studies...

...Instead, it points out a contingency plan by Israel to gain suzerainty over Lebanon...

...Obviously, research and teaching about the Arab world are entirely proper and even healthy endeavors for an American university...

...Apparently, no one at Georgetown is particularly troubled by its Center for Contemporary Arab Studies' acceptance of the $750,000 from Col...

...Among other things, he charged that Israel had merely used the PLO Tel Aviv bus bombing as an excuse to implement a longstanding invasion plan...

...One is bound to ask whether the Arab sponsors are committed to academic freedom, or whether it is something very different they have in mind...

...Whether this arrangement is inimical in itself, I don't know," says Silverman...

...I've never been to Uganda," said Krogh...

...It produces annually more U.S...

...Interestingly, half of the protesting Jewish faculty had never before had any tie with the Jewish community of greater Birmingham...

...The answer, again, is ambiguous and disturbing...

...On the basis of the evidence, one is bound to ask whether it is bonafide educational centers that are being built and expanded or whether, instead, we are witnessing the development of a network of cells for propaganda activities...

...Meanwhile, University of Georgia activists managed to cause an "International Student Week" to be cancelled, after objecting to the exclusion of Palestine from the activities—and at Portland State University administrators were forced by Arab protesters to remove an Israeli flag from a lobby display, because, they charged, the display constituted a gratuitous "political statement...

...Because of the respectability of its imprimatur, Maksoud's statement was widely quoted in the press...

...The trio's Quaker conscience dictated against taking money from such a tainted individual, and one by one, the schools withdrew their bids: Of the three, only Bryn Mawr has not totally severed its tie with Khashoggi's charity...

...But moral bulwarks may be inadequate, as recent university experience shows...

...In the fall there will be five American Jews and an Israeli (enrolled) in Arab studies, and a professor would have a hell of a time propagandizing to them...

...Sometimes, indeed, there has been resistance where it was least expected...

...already have centers of Middle Eastern Studies but which may be suffering from inertia and obfuscated policies...

...Not only does the prestigious Jesuit university's rapid embrace of even the most hotheaded Arab donors seem to set a distressing moral precedent...

...Will Saudi Arabia approve of a Jew in the chair...

...that the quality of the people available to guide research and teaching in a field that has so long been neglected is necessarily uneven...

...To be sure, Georgetown is not the only major American college or university that puts out the welcome mat to all Arab comers, regardless of the nature of their respective regimes...

...John Hubbard agreed to choose the chair holder in consultation with the Saudi Minister of Higher Education...

...Nor, one imagines, is there much embarrassment regarding the presence on the Center's faculty of several outspoken PLO enthusiasts...

...Is there a real possibility that the integrity of higher education in the United States is being seriously compromised...

...The others include Issa Al Kawari, Qatar's Minister of Information...

...Muammar el-Quadaffi's pro-terrorist regime...

...They are trying to buy these schools out...

...In testimony before Congressional committees and in background briefings for businessmen and officers," the report blithely continues, "Center members played a part in current Middle Eastern developments in Washington...

...But in public Father Healy continues to insist that the school's integrity ha not been compromised...

...It has a longstanding tradition of interaction with the highest officials of the American government...

...Arab student activists were particularly in evidence after the Israeli military action in southern Lebanon...

...He then suggested that the school might next consider creating a "Brezhnev Studies program in Human Rights" or an "Idi Amin Chair in Genocide...

...and members were quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times," etc...

...That, presumably, is why the Center's second annual report proudly notes participation of three of its faculty members in a Bagdad University Symposium on Zionism held in 1976—and of another at a Washington conference on "Zionism and Racism...

...It troubles the more thoughtful scholars in the field as well...

...Otherwise, why does the report proudly note that "faculty members were frequently consulted by Washington media representatives on Middle Eastern developments...

...But when, during the recent nationwide boom in Arab studies, the University decided to expand its offerings in this area, the Saudis were happy to oblige, forking over a cool million to endow a King Faisal Chair of Islamic and Arabic Studies...

...There, the Arab-American connection is so old as to be non-controversial...

...financial support from a group of both radical and moderate Arab states...

...After all, the tune the Arab sponsors call, and the Center pipers play, is primarily "performance grants"—short term arrangements which permit frequent review of the Center's activities...

...however, some of their more radical . peers at other American campuses show no such reluctance...

...Second, he noted, the "major private universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Chicago...

...PETRO) DOLLARS FOR SCHOLARS ARAB MONEY ON THE AMERICAN CAMPUS GORDON SANDER Obviously, research and teaching about the Arab world are entirely proper and even healthy endeavors for an American university...

...Much has already been written about the lucrative consulting contracts which have tempted American universities not less than they have enticed American business firms...

...At the time, Khashoggi was the central figure in a major arms payoff scandal, and today he remains under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission...

...One wonders whether they will be sufficient to provide the "self-correction" Father Healy implies is needed, or to counterattack the Arab largesse which is the Center's principal source of support...

...Nor has there been significant opposition expressed to the appointment of the Libyan ambassador to the United Nations, Mansur R. Kikhia, as one of the eleven advisors to the Center...

...His articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Week in Review, and other national publications...

...If Arab studies became established in them, then public institutions will be encouraged, at public expense, to provide similar facilities...

...But the whole thing certainly doesn't look like a good precedent...

...How many other universities, faced with financial exigencies, will be tempted to sell themselves in equally degrading ways...

...it is also in a position to exert considerable influence upon the shaping of American foreign policy towards the Middle East, a position it has already begun to exploit...

...What makes the sudden and dramatic expansion in such activities worrisome is that they are so clearly an opportunistic response to the new Arab wealth rather than to the considered requirements of higher education...

...I don't know Idi Amin...

...that the dollars which have begun to flow into these programs frequently come with strings attached...

...I don't see why the PLO has to have a PR organization in the United States," wrote Buchwald in one of a number of sharp letters he was to exchange with Georgetown officials, "when Georgetown is doing all their work for them...

...One of the factors which shocked Swarthmore faculty into contacting the American Jewish Committee was an ominously-worded draft memorandum in which a Swarthmore official underlined the tactical advantages of focusing Arab largesse ,on the small, private college level...

...But perusal of the Center's report suggests the opposite...

...First and foremost, "there is no higher percentage of successful men and women than among the graduates of colleges such as Amherst, Bowdoin, Mt...

...But with time and patient stewardship it presents great possibilities for the spread of basic understanding of Arab concerns and for the encouragement of a favorable public relations climate in this country...

...that the dollars which have begun to flow into these programs frequently come with strings attached...

...Among those outraged by Georgetown's blantantly one-sided "press briefing" was Art Buchwald...

...Thanks to the cooperation of Jewish community leaders—and the open-mindedness of the university president, who previously was ill-informed about the true nature of the Tripoli regime—the proposed program was aborted...

...The problem is serious enough so that it troubles not only Jews...

...If there is a solution to this problem, it rests, finally, on the moral and ethical sensibility and sensitivity of the American academic community—campus by campus...

...The professor, Ralph Smuckler, is dean of the international program at Michigan State, and a member of the Consortium board of directors...

...Nevertheless, one is hard put to find administrators who are as opportunistic in this regard—and as candid—as Peter Krogh, Dean of Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, and chairman of the executive committee of the Arab Studies Center...

...And there's also the fabled California lifestyle to sample along the way to success...

...The so-called Buchwald-Maksoud affair is but one of a chain of controversies which has recently erupted on American campuses as the Arab presence in academe has increased...

...Foreign Service and State Department officers than any other school in the country...

...This chummy (and potentially discriminatory) arrangement is particularly irksome to AJC's Ira Silverman...

...Georgetown is hardly a backwater institution...

...What distinguished Maksoud's attack from the others was that it was issued on the stationery of Washington's most regarded institution of higher education, Georgetown University...

...The growing population of Arab undergraduates studying in the United States, estimated at 25,000, is also of concern to Jewish campus monitors—particularly the increasingly vociferous minority of students from the hardline states...

...At the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, for example, the Organization of Arab Students distributed flyers proclaiming: "Once again, the Zionists have spread their Nazi tactics upon the Arab people...

...Clovis Maksoud, issued a bitter condemnation of the Israeli action...

...Suggesting, thereby, that were they to meet, Krogh might be impressed by Amin's essential decency, and suggesting further that he does know Quadaffi—and isn't bothered by what he knows...

...Maksoud was a member of the Georgetown stafT, a visiting lecturer at Georgetown's recently established and highly controversial Center for Contemporary Arab Studies...

...It was at the Center that Maksoud and other members of the vociferously anti-Israel faculty gave their well-attended "press-briefing" for the Washington press corps...

...The Bagdad participants included Center Director Michael Hudson...

...First, money is obtained for development...

...A similar firestorm recently erupted on the Quaker-affiliated campuses of Bryn Mawr, Swarth-more, and Haverford, after it was discovered that a philanthropic foundation to which Swarthmore officials had applied for a $590,000 grant for the propagation of Arab studies was actually the creature of Saudi arms dealer Adnan Kha-shoggi...

...The trend, however, suggests that American universities cannot...

...Over on the West Coast at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, a somewhat different story unfolds...

...After calling the bequest "blood money," Buchwald went on to remind his readers that Libya had "financed, trained, supported and [given] haven to terrorists and hijackers...

...No deception there...

...Consider the case of Georgetown...

...Everything happens very subtly...

...While these funds may be used for perfectly legitimate purposes—including study of the contemporary Arab world...

...This is a good case history of how we can be effective in working with colleges to limit Arab influence on campuses," the AJC's field report on the episode conluded, "although in view of the school's Quaker background and Khashoggi's cloudy reputation as an arms merchant, its happy ending is not likely to be replicated in other cases...

...Curiously, USC has never had much of a Middle Eastern Studies department—the Saudis, after all, are more interested in learning about American culture and society than their own...

...So strong is the Saudi-USC connection, and so certain is a USC degree a guarantee of professional success for a Saudi, that scores of the young sheiks now enter USC each year...

...I don't know...

...In the meantime, the financing of programs and centers by foreign governments jeopardizes, to say the least, the independence of Middle Eastern studies in America...

...How did Maksoud put his hands on Georgetown stationery...

...Maksoud's broadside differed little in either tone or content from those unleashed by any of the other numerous U.S.-based Arab propagandists...

...Thus, the prominent Middle East specialist at the University of London, P. J. Vatikiotis, recently wrote, "The implication of this development for Middle Eastern studies in America cannot be, at this moment, precisely determined or foreseen...

...This is a program that will not produce instant results," the memo concludes...

...With representatives of the Arab states baldly flashing their bankrolls, with universities so adept at rationalizing their own behavior and so imbued with a sense of their incorruptibility the temptation will be—is— substantial...

...At least 75 American colleges and universities^—and quite possibly many more—have accepted gifts from various Arab states in order to establish new or to bolster existing departments in Middle Eastern or Arab studies—quite apart from those which have negotiated research or consulting contracts...

...Of all the myriad institutions which have forged new links with Arab league governments, it is Georgetown which understandably causes the most concern...

...Qais Al Zawawi, Oman's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, a Mobil Oil vice president, Chase Manhattan's director of international relations for the Middle East—and J. William Ful-bright, now a registered foreign agent...

...Art Buchwald, who has made the WASPish Georgetown citadel of learning one of his favorite satirical dartboards of late, sent a barbed letter to the Georgetown Voice, the weekly student newspaper, following the announcement of the Libyan bequest...