Northwestern should invest in a program in Islamic World Studies, but not for the reasons proposed by either the administration or the Muslim-cultural Students Association (McSA).
McSA would like to invest in a program to provide Muslim students a "spiritual guide" that would "not be preachy at all." They present the history of the university as "the struggle of minority students to create new programs." African Americans stormed the Bursar's Office in 1968, and Asian Americans held themselves hostage in a 1995 hunger strike.
The problem with the reference to African- and Asian-Americans is that it is completely erroneous. These students are a minority. But I have yet to meet an "Islamic-American." The reason is simply that there is no such thing. There are Muslim-Americans, but no "Islamic Americans."
Islam is a religion. Muslims are individuals who adhere to that religion and are not a minority any more than Packers fans are. Muslims opt into an association with Islam. Packers fans opt into an association with Green Bay. African-Americans, by contrast, do not opt into an association with Africa. When African-American students asked the university to invest in an African-American studies program, they were therefore not taxing the community for their private decisions. McSA, by contrast, seeks to do just that by asking us to pay for a "Muslim Studies" program of suspicious value. Getting together the social scientists and researchers necessary to create such a program guarantees that, unless we sink a substantial amount of money, the result will necessarily be sub-prime.
Most existing programs in Near Eastern or Middle Eastern studies try to create value for their students by offering courses on the history, language, religion and culture of Islam. It would be a mistake for NU to mimic such an offering. We have no comparative advantage in any of those areas. Acquiring an advantage would require us to import ancient scholars from various top-rate universities by offering them correspondingly top-rate wages. Given the demand for scholars of the Islamic world, and given our already atmospheric tuition expenses, importing established scholars of Islamic history would be an expensive and wholly misguided adventure.
Understanding history is not the key to understanding the future. Politics follows a random walk, and this is especially true in the absence of institutional buffers capable of smoothing political vicissitudes. In the absence of institutional controls, political fortunes throughout the Islamic world rise and fall with remarkable volatility. Universities with programs in ancient Middle Eastern studies are well positioned to understand a world that increasingly ceases to exist, and NU would be mistaken to follow their leads.
At the same time, we should create a program in the study of the Islamic world. Our goal must be to maximize the value offered per tuition dollar. Doing so will require inventiveness on our part in creating a value-additive program that exploits existing competitive advantages. Such a program will enable students to perceive changing perspectives, process those changes into information updates, and then produce academic and professional revisions.
1. PERCEIVE
Programs at universities ranging from the University of Chicago to the University of Phoenix excel in perceiving the attitudes and perspectives of individual decision-makers throughout the region. A perspective is ultimately a stock of information available to anyone willing to burn away enough time in a library. The training required to understand perspectives, however, is not the same as that required to identify changes in those perspectives. The now-famous prediction of Princeton academics that American troops would march into the arms of welcoming Iraqis in Baghdad is an example of the failure endemic of the garbage-in, garbage-out approach to scholarship, wherein the output is a biased but consistent paradigm of little utility to decision-makers inhabiting a space beyond the rarified perimeter of the Ivory tower.
NU is fortunate to not only have little institutional inertia forbidding fresh thinking, but also to sit atop massive reserves of synergistic potential with respect to the three key success factors identified above. The Program of African Studies hosts scholars like William Reno and Georgi Derlugian, who specialize in the kind of politics that increasingly dominate contestation throughout the Islamic world. Their training in African and Central Asian political dynamics endows PAS with unique advantages in perception: PAS trains its students to perceive otherwise hidden trends and undercurrents from dispersed and often unreliable information sources, and is just one of several programs of value to the future Islamic World Studies program.
2. PROCESS
The Medill School of Journalism holds the key to success in the second step of processing information on a massive and meaningful scale. A competitive Islamic World Studies program must prepare students to understand political volatility — not fundamentals. The color of the turban worn by Saladin on the occasion of the Second Crusade is not as important as the rapid decentralization of information networks in developing expectations about political volatility across the region. NU would be better off focusing its resources on the latter. Not only is it more relevant, but it is also our competitive advantage. The resources concentrated at NU by Medill in both Evanston and Doha give us an edge in processing data about events into usable information about the present state of political affairs with enough speed to gain and maintain a lead over rival programs in the study of the Islamic world. We would be mistaken not to play an upper hand.
3. PRODUCE
We also have the third of the three factors in our economics department under the stewardship of Mark Witte. Economics is the science of processing information inputs into information outputs, or decisions. Understanding the production of decisions across such a massive political arena depends finally on our ability to combine changing perspectives (or changes in the stock of subjective information about the present or the future) with changing processes (or changes in observed information from the present or the past) to produce (ideally positive) changes in the stock of knowledge about the region.
The program in the study of the Islamic world proposed here does not aspire to train students in the history of Islam, to correct "skewed perspectives," "tell it like it is." or play a role in the struggle of a "minority" that imagines itself on the forefront of a battle that does not exist against an enemy that does not care. Students who hoped to find a solid education in Islamic history bear the burden of explaining why they chose to attend a university that promised no such education instead of, for example, the University of Phoenix. Students who hoped to acquire solid academic and professional preparation bear the burden of undertaking to invest in the programs necessary to fulfill their own expectations. The program proposed here thus deviates from the university's Biblical commitment to study "Whatsoever things are true" in favor of an axiom from the gospel of Capitalism: "Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you."