New Texts Out Now: Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education

[Cover of Betty S. Anderson, \"The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education\"] [Cover of Betty S. Anderson, \"The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education\"]

New Texts Out Now: Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education

By : Betty S. Anderson

Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Betty S. Anderson (BSA): I always joke that I conceived the project in the pool of the Carlton Hotel in Beirut. In June 2000, I visited Beirut for the first time so I could attend an Arab American University Graduate (AAUG) conference. One day, I walked with some friends all along the Corniche and up through the American University of Beirut (AUB) campus and then back to the hotel. Since it was late June and ridiculously hot, the only option at that point was to jump in the pool as quickly as possible. Two minutes in the pool and the thought occurred to me that my next research project was going to have to be about Beirut in some way. I had fallen in love with the city in just that one day. A half second later, I thought, I should write a history of AUB.

Besides the fact that I wanted to get back to Beirut as soon as possible, I wanted to know why AUB had been so influential in politicizing its students. At the time, I was doing additional research for my book on Jordan (Nationalist Voices in Jordan: The Street and the State) and a number of the political activists I studied had attended AUB. Their memoirs were filled with explanations and stories about how important those four years were for the development of their political identities. However, I had no idea as I floated in the pool that day that I’d have to do extensive research on Protestant missionaries and education long before I could even get to those Arab nationalists. At the time, I really knew relatively little about the school’s history.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address?

BSA: When I finally got back to Beirut in 2004, it was research on the educational systems offered at the Syrian Protestant College and AUB that eventually ended up directing my thesis. I was struck initially by the goals the American founders and their successors set for the school. They talked more about the transformative process they wanted the students to undertake than the course options they were offering. For example, Daniel Bliss (1866-1902) preached about producing Protestants who understood not only the liturgy but the lifestyle required of one converting to this faith; Bayard Dodge (1923-1948) exhorted students to follow the model of the modern American man as they sought to develop new characters for themselves. The former presided over a missionary educational system, the latter the new liberal education system then being formulated back in America. The first half of the book discusses this shift as the American University of Beirut was renamed in 1920.

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[Main gate of AUB campus. Photo by Betty S. Anderson.]

Liberal education, as American educators developed it in the second half of the nineteenth century, asks its students to be active participants in their educational experience. Before this point, professors taught their students a fixed body of knowledge; students were required to memorize and recite the data to prove that they had learned it. In liberal education, the system asks that professors teach students how to think and analyze so they can produce data on their own.

The second half of the book examines how the students reacted to this shifting pedagogical focus. The American leaders of the school repeatedly stated their goals for the students, and most books and articles on AUB focus on only those voices. However, that stance leaves out an important element of the AUB story, because only the students can truly determine whether the programs are effective. AUB is famous for the many student protests that have taken place on campus, starting with the Darwin Affair of 1882, leading to the Muslim Controversy of 1909, and then on to the large protests of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. As I discovered when I delved into the archives, students used dozens of newspapers to explain why they were protesting. The catalyst was always a particular event, on campus or off, but the students always framed their arguments around the freedom they felt the liberal education system promised. They fought against any administrative attempts to curtail their actions and frequently accused the administration of not following the guidelines set by American liberal education. This issue became increasingly contentious as students worked to define an Arab nationalism that called on them to be politically active while on campus. The administration continually opposed this position, and many of the student-administrative conflicts centered on the differing definitions of freedom put forward on campus. I put “Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education” in the subtitle of the book because by the twentieth century, these were the two dominant elements defining the relationship between the students and the administration.

J: How does this work connect to and/or depart from your previous research and writing?

BSA: Most of my work has centered on education in one form or another. In my book on Jordan, I wrote of the politicizing role high schools in Jordan and Palestine, as well as schools like AUB, played in mobilizing a national opposition movement in the 1950s. I have published a number of articles analyzing the narratives the Jordanian and Lebanese states present to their students in history and Islamic textbooks. Moving on to a comprehensive study of one particularly influential school was a natural progression. The difference was that I now had to study American education in the same way I had previously examined the influence of education in the Middle East.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

BSA: I hope AUB alumni want to read the book and, equally, that they find something of their story in it. I did not want to cite just the Americans who founded and ran the school; I purposely wanted to write about the students themselves. Typical university histories leave out the words and actions of the students in favor of hagiographies about the founders and their famous successors. I also hope that scholars and students interested in studies of education and nationalism will be interested. This is a book that addresses both Middle Eastern and American studies.

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[Assembly Hall and College Hall, AUB Campus. Photos by Betty S. Anderson.]

J: What other projects are you working on now?

BSA:
I have a contract with Stanford University Press to publish a book called State and Society in the Modern Middle East. Like with anyone who undertakes to write a textbook, I am frustrated with those that are currently available. Textbooks of the modern Middle East typically focus just on state formation, the actions of the chief politicians, and the political interplay between states. My text focuses instead on the relationship between state and society as it developed over the last two hundred years. The states in the region centralized in the nineteenth century, faced colonialism in the early twentieth century, and then independence after World War II; these stages created new roles for state leaders. Civil society, in the broadest definition of the term, emerged from the eighteenth century forward as people sought new ways to organize within and against the states now intruding on their lives. They took advantage of the new institutions the states built to establish for themselves new class, national, and gender definitions, while frequently opposing the states that had introduced these very institutions. My text examines how schools, government offices, newspapers, political parties, and women’s groups constantly negotiated new relationships with their respective states.

Excerpt from The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education

From Chapter One:

"The great value of education does not consist in the accepting this and that to be true but it consists in proving this and that to be true," declared Daniel Bliss, founder of Syrian Protestant College (SPC; 1866–1920) and its president from 1866 to 1902, in his farewell address. President Howard Bliss (president, 1902–1920) said in his baccalaureate sermon in 1911, "In a word, the purpose of the College is not to produce singly or chiefly men who are doctors, men who are pharmacists, men who are merchants, men who are preachers, teachers, lawyers, editors, statesmen; but it is the purpose of the College to produce doctors who are men, pharmacists who are men, merchants who are men, preachers, teachers, lawyers, editors, statesmen who are men." Bayard Dodge (1923–1948) stated at his inauguration as president of the newly renamed American University of Beirut (AUB; 1920– ), "We do not attempt to force a student to absorb a definite quantity of knowledge, but we strive to teach him how to study. We do not pretend to give a complete course of instruction in four or five years, but rather to encourage the habit of study, as a foundation for an education as long as life itself." The successors to these men picked up the same themes when they elaborated on the school`s goals over the years; most recently, in May 2009, President Peter Dorman discussed his vision of AUB’s role. "AUB thrives today in much different form than our missionary founders would have envisioned, but nonetheless—after all this time—it remains dedicated to the same ideal of producing enlightened and visionary leaders."

In dozens of publications, SPC and AUB students have also asserted a vision of the transformative role the school should have on their lives. The longest surviving Arab society on campus, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa, published a magazine of the same name during most academic years between 1923 and 1954 and as of 1936 stated as its editorial policy the belief that "the magazine`s writing is synonymous with the Arab student struggle in the university." From that point forward, the editors frequently listed the society`s Arab nationalist goals. In the fall 1950 edition, for example, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa`s Committee on Broadcasting and Publications issued a statement identifying the achievement of Arab unity as the most important goal because "it is impossible to separate the history, literature and scientific inheritance of the Arabs" since "the Arab essence is unity." Toward this end, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa pledged to accelerate the "growth of the true nationalist spirit" among the students affiliated with the organization. In describing education as an activist pursuit, the statement declares, "To achieve political ideas which are aimed at our nationalism it is necessary for we as students to seek information by many different means." In this call, the AUB Arab students must take on the task of studying the Arab heritage as thoroughly and frankly as possible so that when they graduate they can move into society with solutions to the many problems plaguing the Arab world.

Since the school`s founding in 1866, its campus has stood at a vital intersection between a rapidly changing American missionary and educational project to the Middle East and a dynamic quest for Arab national identity and empowerment. As the presidential quotes indicate, the Syrian Protestant College and the American University of Beirut imported American educational systems championing character building as their foremost goal. Proponents of these programs hewed to the belief that American educational systems were the perfect tools for encouraging students to reform themselves and improve their societies; the programs do not merely supply professional skills but educate the whole person. As the quotes from al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa attest, Arab society pressured the students to change as well. The Arab nahda, or awakening, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries called on students to take pride in their Arab past and to work to recreate themselves as modern leaders of their society; the Arab nationalist movement of the twentieth century asked that students take a lead in fighting for Arab independence from foreign control. The students streaming through the Main Gate year after year used both of these American and Arab elements to help make the school not only an American institution but also one of the Arab world and of Beirut, as the very name, the American University of Beirut, indicates. This process saw long periods of accommodation between the American-led administration and the Arab students, but just as many eras when conflict raged over the nature of authority each should wield on campus; the changing relationship between the administration and the students serves as the cornerstone of this book, for it is here where much of the educational history of SPC and AUB has been written.

From Chapter Five:

The 1952 April Fool’s Day issue of Outlook (called Lookout on that day) satirized the proliferation of student protests that had dominated campus life for the previous few years. In the paper’s lead article, the author declared, “A School of Revolutionary Government, designed to equip AUB students with a wide knowledge of modern techniques of conspiracy and revolution, is to be opened during the fall semester, a communique from the President’s Office announced late Friday.” Continuing the same theme, the article reports, “All courses will include a minimum of three lab hours to be spent in street battles with gendarmes and similar applications of theories learned in classrooms.” President Stephen Penrose (1948-1954), the article stated, gave a Friday morning chapel talk on the new school motto: “That they may have strife and have it more abundantly.” In a further announcement, the paper described the day’s protest.

There will be a demonstration this afternoon at three in front of the Medical Gate to object against everything[.] All those interested please report there promptly five [minutes] before time. The demonstration promises to be very exciting—tear gas will be used, and the slogans are simply delightful. If all goes well, police interference is expected. If not to join, come and watch.

This, of course, had not been the first era of student protest; the difference by the 1950s was the widespread and sustained nature of the conflict between the administration and the students. When Lookout published its satirical articles in 1952, students had been organizing demonstrations in support of Palestinians and Moroccans, and against any and all things imperialist, since 1947; these events only petered out in 1955 as the administration banned the two main groups organizing them, the Student Council and the Arab society, al-cUrwa al-Wuthqa. Students engaged in these exercises explicitly as Arabs, proud of their past, and striving toward cultural, political and economic unity in the future. In their actions, students sought to integrate their educational experiences at AUB with the real-life events taking place outside the Main Gate, for only then did they feel they could be trained to function as the vanguard initiating the necessary changes in their society.

[Excerpted from Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. © 2011 by The University of Texas Press. Excerpted by permission of the author. For more information, or to order the book, click here.]

New Texts Out Now: Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman, The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans

Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman, The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans: Addressing Pedagogical Strategies. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011.

Jadaliyya: What made you write this book?

Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman: The book started off as something quite different than what I intended. I began my research in the summer of 2005 with the intention of examining how Palestinian and Israeli youth produce cultural and political change together as "equal" partners for "peace." Obviously, at the time I held a typically liberal, soft Zionist, and rather naive understanding of the situation. I was teaching at Al Quds University in Abu Dies and working with the International Solidarity Movement while conducting research at Seeds of Peace. The combination of these activities raised a number of questions for me. It did not take long for me to realize that Seeds of Peace and other coexistence organizations were tools used by Israelis to further entrench colonial policies by normalizing relationships that were anything but normal under the guise of working for peace. The unequal power dynamics I observed and the structural inequalities within the organization made me alter both my political point of view and my book project after a relatively short period of time.

The questions that lingered for me, however, remained. I still felt there was something related to children and youth, especially Jewish youth in the United States, who were educated in a way that taught and reinforced the normalcy of inequality between Israelis and Palestinians, even when teachers appropriated the language of "peace." I decided to see how that happens in the United States and researched American Hebrew school curricula to see what Jewish Americans learn about Zionism, and how that has changed over time and trickled into mainstream American schools. Given how dependent Israel is on financial and political support from the United States, I thought it would be important to trace this history while also suggesting methods of intervening in it. The first half of my book focuses on the problems of education and coexistence models, while the second half offers specific ideas about how to teach Americans about Palestine in American schools as a way of disrupting Zionism.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address?

MJK-N: The book has three major components. It starts with a history of how American Jews have been indoctrinated with Zionism, particularly since 1967. I explore the way that American Hebrew schools slowly replaced subjects like the Bible and Hebrew with a Zionist curriculum and how various changes in the political landscape emboldened their curriculum. The second chapter covers coexistence, otherwise known as normalization. Many former Zionists, myself included, often look to Palestinian and Israeli coexistence as a paradigm that seems deceptively logical as a way to achieve "peace," whether used in an educational or activist context. I explore both coexistence programs like Seeds of Peace, as well as literary and cinematic texts that portray normalization; these are often texts that get adopted for classroom use because their politics are palatable even to liberal Zionists. The final two chapters are the heart and soul of the book. It shifts from these negative models of Zionism or soft Zionism into illustrating how one should teach Americans about Palestine. I use a framework, inspired by educators like Paolo Freire and Howard Zinn, to provide teachers with both texts they can use in the classroom to teach American students about Palestine as well as a method they can adopt in order to do so in a way that is respectful of Palestinian voices and rights.

J: How does this work connect to and/or depart from your previous research and writing?

MJK-N: My last book was about quite a different subject, breast cancer. However, the idea undergirding both books is similar. My research interest focuses on the way in which culture can be used to create political change. With breast cancer, I wrote about how women`s writing about the disease was used to intervene in repressive medical practices and public policies. In that context, it was not hard to prove that these cultural texts played a role in facilitating significant changes. With this new book, the idea is that the cultural texts I hope teachers will incorporate into their classes could ultimately have that same effect. In the United States, there is a long history of literature and film moving people to act—whether we`re talking about the abolitionist movement or the civil rights movement. I argue that these texts about Palestine can have the same kind of effect on American students, although, of course, it also matters how teachers use these texts in the classroom. 

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[Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman. Photo by Tamara Qiblawi.]

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MJK-N: I wrote this book primarily for teachers in the United States, although certainly activists who do work in churches or community centers or on college campuses can benefit from it. The examples I use in the book are subjects already found in a typical US social studies or English curriculum that can easily be connected to Palestinian historical and cultural texts. My hope is that teachers wanting to incorporate Palestine into the classroom can select from the various music, film, literature, art, and historical texts I analyze and find a way to integrate them into teaching they are already doing.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MJK-N: The research for this book pushed me to think about teaching in the United States, but because I have been teaching in the Arab world I also spent quite a bit of time thinking about teaching here. One of the issues I`ve come up against repeatedly is the way in which the United States pushes an educational and cultural agenda in countries like Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon in a neocolonial manner, often through USAID. I want to spend time investigating this context, as well as the actual textbooks that teachers in English-language programs use, to see what kind of messages students glean from these sources and what kind of impact it has on Arab youth. Given the way that the media—both news media and Hollywood films—saturate the region and occupy the minds of many youth, I think it is important to consider how textbooks are reinforcing those images. When youth internalize negative images about themselves and the part of the world they come from and that gets reiterated in a classroom, the long-term effects can be quite damaging.

Excerpt from The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans: Addressing Pedagogical Strategies

Those who grow up Zionist, because of family or Hebrew school, have a lot of unlearning to do. When I first embarked on this journey, I considered the point of view of Israelis and Palestinians equally, imagining that a just solution would begin by "both sides" creating change together. When I  began to witness what coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis looked like, and pondered what it meant for Palestinians, I discovered inconsistencies in my thinking. Having studied and taught African American literature, I analogized the contexts: in my classes I didn’t teach writings by slaveholders alongside Frederick Douglass. Nor did I teach writings of the Ku Klux Klan with Gwendolyn Brooks`s poems about lynching. Certainly, I included contextual documents such as advertisements for runaway slaves or relevant laws; but those documents were used to explain the history of state-sanctioned oppression. Why was my instinct now to place the oppressed and oppressor on equal footing? While it is not a perfect parallel, it gives an indication of how my ideas evolved.

Most [coexistence] films are produced by Americans and illustrate how Zionist colonization of Palestine, even when trying to establish “balance,” is always viewed through an Israeli prism. But the struggle is not equal in this colonizer-colonized dichotomy. When the language and historical context, or lack thereof, is analyzed it becomes clear that the objectives are always threefold: first, to make sure Israelis feel secure; second, that Palestinian expulsion and their right of return is obscured by presenting historical roots in 1967 rather than 1948; third, Israelis are always represented more extensively, and their suffering rendered visible through newsreels. Palestinians call coexistence normalization because it normalizes a relationship that is anything but normal. It exposes some of the deep structural inequalities that exist for Palestinians. It also illustrates the problems that arise when one considers "both sides" of the story.

A number of American-produced films grew out of the Oslo Accords that highlight coexistence. These films present a pretence of two "equal" sides sharing their stories. While each offers a cursory glimpse of history, the language used and the emphasis on the West Bank and/or Gaza as occupied Palestinian territories reinformces American perceptions that only these spaces belong to Palestinians and that the struggle began in 1967 rather than 1948. When Palestinian refugees are represented, Israeli colonists counter their story. The fears that Israelis in these films convey—always punctuated by images of suicide bombings—trump the daily violence Palestinians experience from home demolitions to soldiers killing and imprisoning Palestinians, which are not accompanied by news footage. As a result, like the Oslo Accords, these films render Palestine and its history in a post-1967 context. What is pernicious about these films is the fact that they focus on Palestinian and Israeli "peace makers," who are working towards peace through coexistence. This premise for what constitutes "peace," one that also undergirds Oslo, is problematic because the films undermine facts about the colonization of Palestine and in so doing Palestinians` right of return is undermined by Israeli perspectives about their “right” to colonize.

Ronit Avni and Julia Bacha`s Encounter Point tries to argue that Palestinians and Israelis are equals. It does so by featuring eight peacemakers whose lives are dedicated to various kinds of coexistence. The film opens with Sami al-Jundi, a Palestinian from Jerusalem, and Shlomo Zagman, an Israeli settler from the West Bank colony of Allon Shevut (on the land of the Palestinian village Bayt Sakariyya, which the film never identifies. Both are at a checkpoint in the West Bank and viewers witness their unequal treatment. On the screen we see several slides of text with limited background information telling us, "Palestinians struggle to end Israeli military occupation and create an independent state.”[1] A second slide tells us, "Israelis act to secure themselves against attacks by Palestinains, nearby states, and militant groups.” Between the principal image of the occupation—the checkpoint—and the narrative on the screen, viewers are led to believe that the root of the problem began when Israel colonized the West Bank in 1967. They present Palestinian goals as being in sync with Oslo, something that is at odds with most Palestinians who fight for their right of return. The Israeli narrative  immortalizes them as the ultimate victims: they are surrounded by people who attack them; they rationalize their actions in the name of “security” unrelated to their impact on Palestinians. The final slide asserts that the situation for Palestinians and Israelis is fundamentally equal, "People from both sides search for non-violent solutions."

They maintain this false premise is by augmenting the narratives of at least one Palestinian in the film. Sami, who opens the film, is interviewed with his mother whose story begins in 1967 when their home in the Magharbeh quarter of Jerusalem`s Old City was destroyed. Jonathan Cook explains this annexation days after the June War: "Soon the bulldozers would wreck the Mughrabi Quarter, demolishing the first home with the family inside and terrorizing a further 1,000 Muslim residents into flight.”[2] When Sami`s mother narrates her story in this context, she says would rather die than to become a refugee in Jordan. The story quickly turns to Sami`s narrative about his involvement in resistance, imprisonment, and then his work with Seeds of Peace. Sami`s transformation becomes the focus, and his mother’s story—that she was made a refugee for a second time in 1967is silenced, although it was filmed. Consider how Sami relates this episode in a film about Palestinian refugees:

Then all at once, they said, "the Jews are attacking." People were saying that, "the Jews are attacking, the Jews are attacking." And the shooting started....My father and the elders started to say, "Where should we go?" Because the tanks were shelling. They were shelling the Old City with heavy artillery. The sound of gunfire—we heard it from the house and the air raids were deafening. Where should we go? They said we will take you to—and see here the bad coincidence—they said we will take you to a shelter. And where was the shelter? Also a bakery!...But what happened is that they bulldozed the houses in the area we were living in, near the Wailing Wall. Right, dad? They bulldozed it all, and again they brought new people there, built them new houses and another nakba happened to us once from Dayr Yasin and the second from the Al-Sharif quarter.[3]

His father, originally from Dayr Yasin, and his mother, originally from Zakariyya, were expelled from their homes during the nakba. The exclusion of this aspect of the story distorts the history of Palestine in order to make it appear that the problem began in 1967. Instead, we hear Sami declare that war "only causes more victims on each side.”

Indeed, the film decontextualizes Palestinian history and the root of the struggle to liberate Palestine by failing to address its origins. The film, which is used in American classrooms, sanitizes the history to make it palatable to American audiences and students. Their website uses this method by providing just one Palestinian link among several Zionist ones on their resource page. Likewise the teacher’s guide for discussing the film provides no historical context or discussion questions related to anything before 1967, althoughin the biographies of two Palestinians profiled in the film we learn they are refugees.[4] It is difficult to comprehend how that information can be understood without knowing how or why they became refugees. Other resources for teachers and students include an interactive timeline on which one can click on links to read people’s stories related to a particular year. This is the only place on their website where the word the nakba is mentioned, although it is mitigated by the fact that they allow Palestinians and Israelis to tell their version of how Palestine was ethnically cleansed in 1948.

It is not just a matter of violating the cultural boycott, but rather the larger issue of misrepresenting Palestinians and Israelis as equal subjects. In the United States when teachers present material about the civil rights movement, like King`s "Letter from a Birmingham City Jail," we don’t teach writings by racist white southerners in the Jim Crow South alongside it. When American apartheid is taught, oppressor and oppressed are not presented as equals because they aren’t. Yet this remains a problem when broaching the subject of Palestine in the United States.

Notes
[1] Encounter Point, DVD, directed by Ronit Avni and Julia Bacha (New York: Just Vision, 2006).
[2] Jonathan Cook, Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair. (London: Zed Books, 2008), 52.
[3] Chronicles of a Refugee, DVD, directed by Perla Issa, Aseel Mansour, and Adam Shapiro (Pflugerville, TX: Palestine Online Store, 2007).
[4] See the classroom guides for high school and university.

[Excerpted from Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman, The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans: Addressing Pedagogical Strategies, @ 2011 Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. For more information, or to purchase the book, click here. All proceeds from this book go directly to the Middle East Children`s Alliance (MECA).]