By Lis Verderman '96
What happens when a university is called upon by the intellectual community to defend its academic credibility? Faster than you can say "genocide denial" or "hiring co-optation," the wagons circle: the university spokesperson hurries to the scene to support the accused and denounce the accusers; and professors, instead of engaging in intellectual debate, give each other alibis.
This is what is happening in our Near Eastern Studies Department. In the course of researching what I had supposed would be a fairly straight-forward piece about the controversy surrounding Heath Lowry, Ataturk Professor of Ottoman and Near Eastern Studies, a complex web of subterfuge slowly began to unravel. The result of my investigation has been what amounts to a recantation on Lowry's part: his position on the subject of teh Armenian genocide, as written in his official statement, as explained to outside media, and as initially explained to me, has significantly changed. Whereas Lowry once expressed reluctance to call the deaths of as many as one million Armenians under Ottoman rule during World War I a genocide, he now concedes that a genocide may indeed have occurred during those years.
The prevailing view among American historians is that from 1915 to 1917 the Armenians, a non-Muslim minority, were all but wiped out as the result of a state planned process of genocide. Due to mass deportations in 1915, the Armenian population of 1.75 million decreased by anywhere from 600,000 to 1.5 million people. However, the Turkish government and a small group of academics, holds that the deaths were part of a bloody civil war. Not only did Lowry support the government in its view of history, but he worked for twelve years as head of the Institute for Turkish Studies, a Washington-based educational organization funded by the Turkish government. Then, in 1993, when Princeton established the Ataturk Chair as the result of a $700,000 grant in matching funds from the Turkish government, Lowry was awarded the position. But it was not until this year, in stories in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Trenton Times, and The Daily Princetonian, that any concern about Lowry was voiced by the media.
This sudden tide of journalistic attention was due to a scholarly article by Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at CUNY Robert Jay Lifton and two other genocide scholars, published in the spring of 1995 in The Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The article, title "Professional Ethics and the Denial of Armenian Genocide," concerns a letter Lifton received from the Turkish Ambassador which criticizes references to what the letter terms "the so-called 'Armenian Genocide'" in his book The Nazi Doctors. Lifton and his colleagues had often received similar letters from the Turkish Ambassador discouraging them from calling the fate of the Armenians a genocide. What made this letter exceptional was that a draft of it had been accidentally placed in the envelope, and that the author of the draft was Heath Lowry. To Lifton, it seemed highly suspect that a historian would put his academic skills to work for a government, expressly for the purpose of genocide denial.
Close on the heels of this revelation, Peter Balakian, Professor of English at Cornell University, circulated a petition denouncing Lowry for his collaboration with the Turkish government, and suggesting a link between the money Princeton received from Turkey to create the Ataturk Chair and Lowry's selection to fill it. The petition now includes over 100 signatories, among them such literary greats as Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, and and Susan Sontag, as well as noted genocide and holocaust historians.
In an interview, university spokesperson Jacquelyn Savani countered accusations that the university's hiring process had been co-opted, explaining the rigorous process whereby faculty are hired at Princeton: tenured faculty members of the department recommend top candidates to the Committee on Appointments and Advancements, formed from the faculty at large, which makes the final decision. She also pointed out it is not unusual for a university to accept money from a foreign government, nor is a grant of $700,000 a particularly large sum of money, as gifts to Princeton go. "From the point of view of the University, there was just no tinkering done. The Department of Near Eastern Studies that voted to give him this job thought he was the best candidate, period," she said.
Lowry's colleagues in NES clearly are pleased with his work: after only a year at Princeton as Ataturk Chair, they asked him to take on the position of head of the department as well. Their letter of support for Lowry in The Daily Princetonian was unequivocal. So I wondered whether the professors in NES had known about his reluctance to call the Armenian deaths during World War I a genocide at the time they chose him and if so, whether that was an accepted view of history for a scholar in their field to hold, or a slightly renegade one. I spoke with NES professors Norman Itzkowitz and Avron Udovitch, both of whom told me that they had been fully aware of Lowry's leanings when he was hired. In answer to the second question, Udovitch would only say, "No, professor Lowry's opinion is not renegade. People come to their own conclusions." Itzkowitz was more explicit, "It's not renegade at all...Professor Lowry's point of view is considered one that many people in Turkish and Ottoman history would claim, and that is: they'd like to see a body of scholarly literature developed." Lowry's ideology, however unpopular elsewhere, seems to be the norm in Princeton's NES department. The department is also home to Professor Bernard Lewis, who was found guilty in a French court in August under a French "hate-speech" law for expressing doubts that massacres of Armenians should be called "genocide."
It's even harder not to see the NES department as an old boys' club when Lowry boasts, "In this department alone, we have at least eight people who have done their PhD's here (at Princeton) in last thirty years who are graduates of the department that I taught in (at Bosphorous University in Turkey)." Rouben Adalian, with the Armenian Assembly of America, is particularly vehement in his description of the department. "Princeton has quite a track record in employing scholars who deny the Armenian genocide," he told The Trenton Times. "I am not aware of any other American university where so pronounced a revisionist school on the subject of the Armenian genocide exists." Bearing this in mind, I can't understand why the press has been engaging in ad-hominem attacks against Lowry when the very beliefs for which he draws criticism are shared by his colleagues. And it is likewise ridiculous to suggest that Princeton was paid-off to give Lowry a spot on the faculty. Princeton Professors didn't require a bribe to make them hire a genocide denier-- that would have been totally unnecessary. They hired him, without any qualms, because they agreed with him.
According to those who doubt that a genocide occured, the lack of this "body of scholarly literature" to which Itzkowitz refers, seems to be the only thing preventing them from establishing what happened to the Armenians from 1915 to 1917. Lowry's official statement echoes this sentiment, "...I and many other scholars in the field cannot accept the characterization of this human tragedy as a pre-planned, state-perpetrated genocide...unless and until the historical records of the Ottoman state--which in response to pressure from scholars including myself have recently been opened --are studied and evaluated by competent scholars." Imagine my surprise, then, at learning that the historical records of the contested period were "recently opened" for scholarly review. I wondered, had anything been found in the records that pertained to the subject of the vanished Armenians? Itzkowitz answered my question, "No, There aren't many people who have worked on that."
This was a puzzling response. I hoped speaking with Lowry, who had himself been active in the effort to get the archives opened, would clear up the matter. When I asked about the records, Lowry explained that in 1985, he wrote a letter to the Turkish prime minister which 68 other scholars in the field of Turkish signed, among them Professor Lewis, requesting that the government open its archives in order to throw light on the events of World War I. The Prime Minister acquiesced soon after. Here is what I find troubling: there are historians at this university, Lowry among them, reserving judgement on whether or not a genocide occurred until they get a chance to see documents which have been open since 1989. Yet, according to Itzkowitz, "There aren't many people who have worked on that."
The first time I asked Lowry whether he had read or heard of any new information pertaining to the Armenians in these records, he said, "There are three huge tomes, I've looked at the first one very carefully, I've just gotten the other two, published by the archives itself, specifically dealing Ottoman/Armenian relations of this period." He does not say what he discovered there. Instead, he steers me back to the fact that the archives are open, and that he was instrumental in the effort, "I feel a certain sense of satisfaction, and I know that the other signatories feel that way too, that our perssure may have been somewhat instrumental in getting this rather arcane policy changed, and the fact that this material is now available." This is the same man who tells me, "I'm never going to characterize it as anything other than a terrible human tragedy with terrible loss of life until those kinds of studies are done. And when they are done, based on them, I will characterize it in any way they show it to have been. If it turns out there is a preponderance of evidence that this was state-perpetrated, I'll be th first to call it a genocide." The archives have been open for over six years now, and I can't help wondering why the man who was so instrumental in getting them opened, the historian who is suspending his decision to acknowledge a genocide based on the information they contain, would not be one of the first to study them, or at least keep abreast of what others had studied about them. "As a scholar, whose specialized research has always focused on the question of Ottoman rule of minority peoples, i.e., non-Muslims, I am particularly pleased at the prospect of applying the very first thing tomorrow morning for permission to look at the newly released materials," Lowry announced in a May 1989 speech given in Istanbul on the occasion of the official opening of the archives.
Confused, I called Lowry back for a follow-up. I asked him to clarify whether or not he had seen any information relating to the Armenians in the one volume from the archives that he'd read over. "I looked through one volume quickly, but this is several months work just to sit down and read through them. My point is there was that this material is starting to become available," he said. Lowry explained that there are significant obstacles to studying the massive amount of archival material--there are "several hundred documents" in each volume and "they're not published in English"--and his point is well take. But I was still curious to know whether he had seen any mention ofthe Armenians in what he had read, no matter how little.
Later that day, Lowry called me back. He had an answer: "There was one document I ran across which strongly suggests that there was government involvement in the killing of Armenians. And that particular document is exactly the kind of thing that is going to make me and many other people in the study of history alter their views on this kind of thing as this material becomes available." Perhaps it will.