Article in Middle East Report

Turkey's Little Tiger

Princeton University recently launched a massive fundraising campaign 
in its palatial Prospect House for maximum media exposure. But its 
public relations people are unhappy with reporters snooping around the 
Near Eastern Studies division--a lumbering dinosaur of a department 
housed in nearby ivy-covered Jones Hall. The unwelcome attention 
involves a new member of the faculty, Professor Heath Lowry, whose 
Ataturk chair in Turkish Studies is paid for by the Turkish state. 
Lowry has a history of being beholden to Turkish governments and, as 
City University of New York psychologist Robert Jay Lifton charges, of 
doing their bidding.

Lowry's appointment to the Ataturk chair in 1994 was itself a surprise. 
Although the pashas of Princeton Near East Studies do think the 
intellectual universe revolves around themselves, many are nonetheless 
highly renowned and productive scholars. By contrast, Lowry's 
scholarship is an embarrassment; he has written three "thin" volumes, 
one little more than a pamphlet published in Istanbul and another 
published in Cranbury, New Jersey by the Princeton department's own 
long-time vanity press. His meager academic output may itself hold a 
clue to how Lowry won out in a field crowded with better, if less 
well-connected scholars.

For 12 years prior to his winning the Princeton lottery, Lowry ran the 
Washington-based Institute of Turkish Studies, which the Turkish state 
founded in 1982 to improve "knowledge and understanding of a key 
NATO ally of the United States... among [US] citizens." Lowry and the 
Institute pushed the project to fund professorships at Princeton and 
others select spots (Georgetown, Harvard, Chicago) that, by mere 
coincidence, now pays his salary plus perks.  But his record of service 
to the Turkish state is far more extensive.

It was Lowry's role in the ongoing campaign to rationalize the Armenian 
genocide that led Robert Lifton, following a remarkable paper trail, to 
him. In 1986, Lifton published The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and 
the Psychology of Genocide. In 1990, Turkish Ambassador to the US 
Nuzhet Kandemir took umbrage at Lifton's brief discussion of "the 
so-called 'Armenian Genocide,'" as Lowry clumsily phrased it in a memo 
to the ambassador. According to Lowry, the real problem was Ankara's 
"failure to respond in a prompt fashion" to burgeoning historical 
literature on the "Armenian Genocide" (Lowry quickly dropped the "so-
called" prefix) on which Lifton relies. Kandemir called on Lowry -- his 
historian-cum-lap-dog -- to ghost write a letter denouncing Lifton's 
mistaken beliefs and shoddy scholarship. Lowry complied, and the 
letter, signed by the ambassador was sent to Lifton.  

The ambassador's delayed response to Lifton's book was not the only 
sign that he and his staff were overworked: Lowry's draft letter and 
his private memo to the ambassador were inadvertently included in 
the final copy mailed to Lifton!  As a result, the psychologist was 
handed some unique sources for his continued studies into the 
phenomenon of genocide denial as well as damning evidence of Lowry's 
toadying to Turkish power.  Lifton and two colleagues reproduce the 
documents and discuss the case at length in "Professional Ethics and 
the Denial of the Armenian Genocide" "Holocaust and Genocide Studies" 
Vol. 9, Number 1 (Spring 1995), which has led to a petition campaign 
denouncing the Turkish government's involvement in US universities and 
American scholars' involvement with the Turkish state's propaganda 
efforts.

The story was picked up by the otherwise-staid Chronicle of Higher 
Education (October 27, 1995). Lowry, evincing a deep commitment to the 
free flow of ideas, refused to speak with the Chronicle reporter 
leaving Avram Udovich, Lowry's predecessor as chair of the department, 
to mount his defense. Udovich was obliged to claim that Lowry's 
appointment was simply a matter of academic excellence. Thus, he would 
have us believe that Lowry's 12 years of service to the Turkish state 
"wasn't part of his dossier." Privately, Udovich is also critical of 
Lowry, mainly for his ineptness in handling the publicity. Lifton 
offers a far more significant critique of scholars such as Lowry who 
act out of complex motivations: "self-serving ideology, bigotry, 
intellectual confusion, careerism, identification with power, and a 
particular conception of knowledge."