Strings on Foreign Aid Trouble Colleges

To UCLA officials in the midst of a $1.2-billion fund-raising campaign, the Turkish government’s offer of $1 million--to endow a chair in Turkish and Ottoman history--seemed like a welcome gift.

Then Armenian scholars around the nation learned of the offer--and complained that there were strings attached.

What did it mean, for instance, that the gift required the new professor to “maintain close and cordial relations with academic circles in Turkey”?

To the Armenian scholars, this and other conditions were intended to dupe the university into helping Turkey spread propaganda hushing up its role in the massacre of 1 million Armenians during World War I.

To the Turkish officials who offered to fund the professorship--and similar ones at six other universities--the complaints were “nonsense,” politically motivated distortions of innocuous language.

Last month, however, UCLA “indefinitely postponed” acceptance of the gift to make sure it would not compromise academic integrity--and to keep the controversy from escalating into the uproar that followed Princeton University’s acceptance of a gift from Turkey last year.

UCLA’s dilemma is a familiar one for America’s universities as they turn to private donors to augment student fees and government funding. Big donors are not always satisfied just seeing their names chiseled onto buildings--many want a say over what goes on inside them as well.

That can be tricky even when the donors are doting alums, as Yale University discovered when it rejected one graduate’s $20 million--because he restricted it to the study of Western Civilization--and another’s $3 million for a professorship in gay studies.

But just as Democrats learned with campaign fund-raising, it becomes even more delicate when the generosity comes from abroad.

Schools from UC Berkeley to Georgetown University recently have had to ponder whether to accept multimillion-dollar offers from overseas, in Berkeley’s case on the condition it name a program after a controversial foreign leader.

“There are more of these opportunities from special interest groups than you could imagine,” said Morton Owen Schapiro, USC’s dean of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

“I cannot think of a bigger sin in higher education than letting our objectivity be compromised. [But] when facing a fund-raising goal, it is very easy for a dean to convince himself . . . that it fits in with the university’s mission.”

University officials say the challenge is to resist creating an unneeded program or professorship--perhaps in an obscure or frivolous subject area--just because a donor dangles funds for one. But most schools certainly can use more money, particularly for cash-strapped programs in international studies.

In UCLA’s case, the school already has two endowed chairs in Armenian specialties--one in history, the other in Near Eastern languages and cultures--and officials said the history department was eager to add a Turkish expert. The school’s only Turkish historian, Stanford J. Shaw, is retired, and has had to be called back to teach a few courses.

At UC’s nine campuses, professors’ salaries must come primarily from tax dollars, so they are beholden only to the public. But outside funds can upgrade the position to an endowed chair and subsidize research, hire graduate assistants, pay travel expenses and sponsor lecture series--extras that can attract a leading scholar to the professorship.

Funding Pressures

Getting outside money was easier during the Cold War, when the federal government and nonprofit foundations devoted millions of dollars to the study of China, Russia and Southeast Asia, along with other regions considered important to U.S. interests.

But that funding “has dried up almost completely,” said former Berkeley political scientist Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a San Diego-based think tank. “With the end of the Cold War, Americans have become inward-looking and parochial.”

The result? Some academic programs have been forced to scale back, shut down--or find backing elsewhere.

And some foreign powers have been all too happy to help.

One reason: This is where their own sons and daughters are educated. For all the criticism of America’s K-12 public schools, U.S. colleges and universities still are revered as the best in the world. Some 450,000 students come from abroad for higher education here every year. USC alone has more than 4,000 foreign students, about 15% of its enrollment.

But there can be another reason for the generosity: an attempt to curry favor with the world’s only remaining superpower. Foreign donors often say they simply want to foster better relations through cultural understanding and academic cooperation.

Self-interest, however, may play a bigger role, said Johnson, the former Berkeley political scientist.

“The people giving money are not interested in academics,” he said. “They are interested in legitimacy and buying their way into the establishment. . . . Whether these are strings or not, they certainly are golden threads. If you write something hypercritical, you can expect a call, ‘Why in hell did we give you any money?’ ”

The Korea Foundation, for instance, has been the target of academic critics since it was established in the early 1990s to help struggling programs in Korean studies. Backed by the South Korean government, it now supplies the majority of money for Korean studies at U.S. colleges and universities.

It was modeled after the Japan Foundation, which was created to “promote international cultural exchange” and now doles out $3.5 million a year to American universities and scholars. But whereas the Japanese government effort set up an independent peer-review board to make sure professors did not feel pressure to do only sympathetic research, the Korea Foundation did not--prompting some American scholars to refuse any help from the “South Koreans’ Academic Lobby,” as one critic branded it.

Whether a university is receptive to a foreign offer often hinges on America’s attitude toward the country at the moment.

“Six or seven years ago, a Japanese chair in international trade could have sparked a major controversy,” said Michael Clough of UC Berkeley’s Institute for International Studies. “Today it wouldn’t.”

Indeed, no less than Harvard University has been running full-page ads in Japan’s English-language Nikkei Weekly newspaper announcing, “Harvard University is now engaged in fund-raising activities in Japan” for a new Asian studies program. The ads invite other Japanese firms to join corporate sponsors such as Mitsubishi, Sanyo Special Steel and Nissan Motors.

Earlier this decade, Northwestern University’s graduate school of management accepted $1 million from Tokai Bank of Japan to set up a chair in international finance.

Berkeley found itself in a brouhaha last December over a possible $3-million grant to open a center for Chinese studies, funded by a Taiwanese foundation. The hitch: the foundation’s insistence that the center commemorate Chiang Ching-kuo, the late president of Taiwan. Chiang once headed a secret police force during the rule of his father, Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Nationalist leader who took his government to the island after the communists ousted him from mainland China.

The issue is volatile in the Bay Area, where Taiwan-born journalist Henry Y. Liu was killed in his Daly City home in 1984 after writing a critical book about the younger Chiang. Two Taiwanese gang members were convicted of murdering Liu on orders from Taiwan’s military intelligence chief.

What’s more, some faculty members worried that Taiwan might be trying to influence research on its embattled relationship with China.

On the other side, some Asian Americans complained that a generous offer was being unfairly eyed with suspicion because of the controversy in Washington over allegations of foreign political fund-raising involving Asians.

Controversy on Campuses

A year later, the fate of the money is unresolved. Berkeley finally offered to name a program--not a whole center--after Chiang. But the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation is considering offering the $3 million instead to Columbia University, Stanford University or the University of Chicago.

“If we give the grant to Berkeley, it is proper to use our name,” said Hsing-wei Lee, head of the foundation’s North American office in McLean, Va. “I cannot think of a better name.”

Although such proposed donations have spurred debates at Berkeley, Yale and elsewhere, UCLA’s consideration of the Turkish professorship is just starting to generate controversy.

The backdrop is a feud that has raged for generations. Armenians have long tried to bring attention to “the forgotten genocide” of more than 1 million of their people by the ruling Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1923.

The Turkish government vehemently denies the allegations of genocide, saying the hundreds of thousands of victims were casualties of war. It thwarted an effort in Congress in 1990 to designate a day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide.

The issue flared at Princeton last year when the school accepted $750,000 from Turkey for a chair in Turkish studies and hired a professor, Heath W. Lowry, who had worked for the government. Lowry even had ghost-written the Turkish ambassador’s official denunciation of one scholar for writing about the “so-called ‘Armenian genocide.’ ”

A group of 100 scholars and authors led by poet Peter Balakian, a Colgate professor, signed a petition criticizing the Turkish government for trying to manipulate an American university into “fraudulent scholarship.” The signers included Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron.

Armenian Americans also staged protests at the Princeton Club in New York City.

The Turk-Armenian tensions reached UCLA last May, when history professor Richard Hovannisian organized a scholarly conference on Armenia.

H. Hayret Yalav, the Turkish consul general in Los Angeles, attended so he could rebut any “Armenian falsifications.” Given that three of Yalav’s diplomatic predecessors were assassinated in Southern California between 1973 and 1982, his State Department security detail insisted that all 700 conference participants be cleared through metal detectors and that handbags be searched.

Armenian scholars complained that the security was a form of intimidation. Yalav, in turn, wrote a protest letter to UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale, denouncing the conference “as a series of lectures invoking hate, revenge and blood feuds against the Turks.”

Then, on Oct. 10, the Turkish Embassy announced that UCLA had accepted a $250,000 down payment to create an endowed professorship, following the University of Chicago, Harvard, Georgetown, Indiana University, Portland State University and Princeton in doing so.

Armenian historian Hovannisian said he was shocked to learn of the decision by his school. He believed that he had been “intentionally left out of the loop” by the director of UCLA’s center for Near Eastern Studies, who picked up the check in Washington.

Hovannisian and other Armenian scholars then questioned the terms of UCLA’s agreement with the Turkish government, suggesting that the conditions would greatly influence who could be hired to fill the chair.

The agreement limited the search to scholars having “cordial relations with academic circles in Turkey” and “whose published works are based upon extensive utilization of archives and libraries in Turkey.”

That wording, Hovannisian complained, guarantees getting someone sympathetic to the official Turkish stance, because “anyone who wants to write about the Armenian genocide is excluded from those archives.”

But Aykut Sezgin, a consular officer at the Turkish Embassy who helped set up the UCLA endowment, said the school will be free to pick the scholar it wants. Accusations to the contrary are part of “a propaganda machine to create a false Turkish image in the minds of Americans,” he said.

Consul General Yalav complained that the Armenian view dominates academic discussions. “What we are asking for is, ‘Please, give us an equal voice,’ ” he said. “This is the reason we are looking for the chair. Because there is no way for us to reveal to Californians what really happened. I challenge the whole Armenian community, let’s sit down and look at the facts.”

The debate even spilled onto the floor of Congress this month. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks), a UCLA graduate, expressed concern about “those who would want to cover up the history of genocide.” Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), who became active in the Princeton debate, decried “this unfortunate use of a major prestigious university as a vehicle of indoctrination by another country.”

UCLA’s history department had been scheduled to consider the professorship Oct. 31, but the matter was removed from the agenda at the last minute and rescheduled for Dec. 5.

“There is reason to be cautious,” said department Chairman Richard von Glahn, “given the previous experience at Princeton.”

It doesn’t take a political science professor to sense that the issue won’t go away as the proposed chair goes before von Glahn’s department, the full Academic Senate and officials all the way up to UC President Richard C. Atkinson.

About a third of the nation’s 1 million Armenian Americans live in Southern California. Some of them called Meredith J. Khachigian, who last month was named chairwoman of the UC Board of Regents.

Khachigian, who married into an Armenian American family, said she was assured by UCLA’s Carnesale and UC Provost C. Judson King that the proposal has been halted until they “make sure the intellectual integrity is maintained and that there are no strings attached.”

Ted Mitchell, a UCLA vice chancellor who oversees fund-raising, echoed the sentiment that the university remains watchful for gift horses with untenable reins.

“Like all other first-rate institutions,” he said, “UCLA has and will continue to refuse gifts that are not aligned with our priorities or compromise our decisions on what to study, how to study it or who to hire for faculty.”

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Controversy at UCLA Over Endowment

The Turkish government has offered UCLA $1 million for a chair in Turkish and Ottoman history. But the proposed gift is being reviewed because of complaints that language in the gift agreement would impair the objectivity of the selected professor by, in effect, requiring the scholar to take the Turkish position on controversial issues. Here is a look at the controversy:

“The Holder of the Chair shall be selected. . .upon the basis of a worldwide search for the most eminent and able scholar available in the field, with a direct knowledge of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies and whose published works are based upon extensive utilization or archives and libraries in Turkey. The holder of this Chair shall possess excellent communications and interpersonal skills to enable him or her to attract students, to stimulate interest in the broader public, to maintain close and cordial relations with academic circles in Turkey. . .”

-- Excerpt from the proposed agreement to establish “The Chair in Ottoman and Turkish History.”

*

“Certainly there’s nothing wrong with the idea of having an Ottoman/Turkish studies chair at UCLA. But the way this particular one is being established raises serious questions of propriety; because it is funded by a foreign government with one of the worst human rights records in the world, a government which persecutes writers and journalists and oppresses millions of its Kurdish citizens, a government which promotes official history through its state-sponsored Turkish Historical Society. The push to establish this chair is part of a campaign to deny the Armenian Genocide and distort the role of subject peoples in the Ottoman Empire.”

-- Protest letter from Levon Marashlian, history professor at Glendale Community College

*

“As you are aware, we have finally been able to establish an endowment chair at your university in the field of Turkish History. We hope this development will encourage students to develop an interest in our land, and inform not only them, but through them, a wide community about a country so far away. It is our guiding principle that knowledge of other countries and cultures leads to international peace, understanding and cooperation. We are strengthened by the fact that your institution, as do many others, shares this approach.”

-- Letter from Turkish Consul General H. Hayret Yalav to UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale