Social Science Research Council

The Council is deeply concerned about growing threats to intellectual integrity and openness in the present political climate. We offer here several links to information and opinion relating to this subject. They call attention to such threats both as they exist in the United States and other parts of the world.

Our first link goes to Lisa Anderson's Presidential Address to the Middle East Studies Association. Anderson is also chair of the SSRC Board of Directors. In this address, she provides a deeply reasoned and thoughtful overview of the problems faced by colleagues in the Middle East who operate under highly repressive conditions and the problems of an increasingly politicized academic politics in the US. She argues that an impassioned pursuit of knowledge and a firm defense of the right to information, expression and association are what best serve the public good, both here and abroad.

As Anderson makes clear, one important threat to intellectual freedom in the United States has been the efforts in Congress to exercise greater control over the Title VI International Studies program. Our second link is to the latest proposed amendment of Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965. While the bill proposes increased funding for international and area studies and languages, it seeks to impose the oversight of an Advisory Board on International Studies and Area Studies Title VI Centers. Early versions of the bill (H.R. 3077) would have empowered the Board to "annually monitor, apprise, and evaluate the activities of grant recipients—which may include an evaluation of the performance of grantees." Many worried that this would be an inappropriate intrusion of politics upon the academy—especially the implication that the Board could impose curriculum requirements or review faculty. Another concern with early versions was the authority conferred upon the Secretary of Education and the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security for the selection of the Advisory Board. Clearly favoring one party over another, this made even more certain the prospect of political intrusion into the academy.

While revisions have been made both to the purview of the board and its appointment process, questions remain as to whether the revisions are sufficient or if they can even be sustained.

Another link is to a rich and selective bibliography of articles on the subject of H.R. 3077, H.R. 509, Title VI, and Middle East Studies. Put together by staff of the Council's Program on the Middle East and North Africa, the resource directs readers to a sampling of opinion across the political spectrum, most available on-line. Of course the Council endorses no one opinion expressed in this selection.

Threats to to intellectual freedom are not unique to the U.S. In a recent issue of our quarterly, Items and Issues, we carried a piece on scholars at risk outside of the U.S. Meanwhile, we hope the resources here will provide the reader with the basis for a more informed view of an important issue, one that extends beyond the particulars of H.R. 3077 and H.R. 509. What is the proper balance between legitimate security concerns and the intellectual freedoms that undergird a dynamic and productive society? This is a pressing question in the current context of H.R. 3077, H.R. 509, the Patriot Act, various mechanisms for monitoring foreign students, the monitoring of library use, and of some strains of research. SSRC President Craig Calhoun returns us to this larger picture in his piece on Social Science and the Crisis of Internationalism: How We Work after the War in Iraq.

Pressures on free scholarly inquiry and communication continue to mount since the Iraq war. Most recently, there has been a U.S. government prohibition on editing and publishing scientific work by Cuban, Iranian, Sudanese and Libyan authors in American journals. Apparently rescinded on April 6, 2004, the ban by the Bush Administration elicited this declaration by the Cuban Academy of Sciences. On September 27, 2004 a group of U.S. publishers and authors' associations brought suit against the U.S. Government. Clarifications to the government's position</ a> continue.