Three years ago, the university accepted $750,000 from the government of Turkey to endow a new Ataturk Chair of Turkish Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and hired a professor, Heath W. Lowry, who had worked for the Turkish government, as executive director of the Washington-based Institute of Turkish Studies.
Peter Balakian, a professor of English at Colgate University who has helped organize recent protests against the appointment, characterized Lowry's scholarship as "evil euphemistic evasion" and charged that his appointment at Princeton was an instance of a foreign government buying credibility for its propaganda by endowing a chair at an American university and influencing the choice of who fills the post.
Princeton has defended the appointment of Lowry through a terse statement by Amy Gutmann, the dean of the faculty, declaring that the university "does not permit donors of chairs to influence the outcome of its appointment process."
Debates on responsibility for the Armenian massacres in 1915 and 1916 have gone on for years, and have accelerated recently with the rising interest in Holocaust studies. The Turks and a handful of American scholars, among them Lowry, contend that the Armenian deaths were the unintended result of wartime deprivation, while the Armenians and many more American scholars consider it genocide centrally planned by the Ottoman Turks.
The attacks on Princeton erupted last year with a critical article in the academic journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies by the scholar Robert Jay Lifton. In February, a group of 100 scholars and writers published a denunciation of the Turkish government and Lowry in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a weekly journal; the signers included Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Sontag, William Styron, David Riesman and John Updike. And a group of nearly 200 Armenian-Americans held a protest meeting last Wednesday night at the Princeton Club in New York City.
For his part, Lowry says his skepticism about whether the deaths were centrally planned simply reflects adherence to scholarly rules of evidence.
"The Turkish government is just as unhappy with a lot of my work as are some of the Armenians who attack me," he said. "I have never denied the terrible suffering and deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the First World War. But I object to the use of the word genocide until the relevant records are located, studied and have proved that genocide is in fact the most accurate term to describe this tragedy."
The furor over the appointment was prompted by an odd incident involving Lifton, who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan.
In October 1990, the Turkish ambassador to the United States, Nuzhet Kandemir, wrote to Lifton, upbraiding him for referring in his latest book to the "so-called 'Armenian genocide.' "
Lifton was not surprised by the attack, but he was by a puzzling enclosure with the letter. It was a memo from Lowry to the ambassador that showed Lowry had drafted the official Turkish government protest to the Lifton book.
The memo said Lowry was writing to Kandemir "with an eye to drafting a letter for your signature to the author."
In the Holocaust and Genocide Studies article last year, Lifton revealed the memo and branded Lowry as an apologist for the Turkish government.