Observations

By Craig Calhoun

Closing Our Borders—Closing Our Minds?

In our current era of global social issues, it is imperative that social science also be global. This cannot be merely a matter of promulgation or dissemination of research findings to every corner of the globe. It must also be a matter of public debate and intellectual exchange among scholars from various countries.

Indeed, one of the basic principles of science is openness to public debate. This is a crucial reason for publication: in order to allow critical evaluation. It is a crucial reason for conferences: to allow face-to-face give and take, more nuanced interpretations, and more precision about agreements and differences. By these processes, errors are identified, good arguments improved, and knowledge advanced.

It is therefore deeply worrying when governments block communications among scholars. This is action against public communication—vital to democracy—and against one of the crucial processes by which knowledge is improved. Some governments try to block open Internet communication, and we routinely criticize this (and debate just how far private corporations that claim to serve the public good—like Google—should go in cooperating with such regimes). But there are also efforts to block communications based on older technologies—like simply flying to international conferences.

Sadly, the United States has become a prominent offender, closing its borders and its intellectual gatherings to many significant scholars and making participation difficult for many more. Sometimes no reasons are given. Sometimes there is a pretext of national security (though often the focus seems less future security than an attempt to punish those whose past actions were contrary to U.S. policies or preferences). But over and again it is public and scientific knowledge that suffers—and this loss is a loss to the United States itself.

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), describes two such cases in his Nov. 6 e-newsletter, "The New Iron Curtain" (PDF). In each case, U.S. officials blocked an invitation to an SSRC meeting, and neither protests nor explanations of scientific purposes made any difference. In the relatively well-known case of Tariq Ramadan, the U.S. government went so far as to prevent him from assuming a position as Luce Professor of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. Ramadan is one of the most intelligent voices in the dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims in the West. Surely, the United States does not prefer dogmatic extremists, but this is hard to tell from official actions.

In the less well-known case, Adam Habib, a top official of South Africa's Human Sciences Research Council, was detained and turned back at the airport even though he had valid documents. Nothing other than his name, with its hints of ethnicity or religion, indicates a reason. This hasn't stopped the United States from compounding the initial dubious judgment with others. It is as though our government believes that open scientific communication is not part of advancing democracy in South Africa. Or indeed in our own country. We should all be deeply disturbed.