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| | Washington and the Ivory Tower: How Government Can Engage Academe in the Service of U.S. Middle East Policy | |
Featuring Martin Kramer and Mark Clark
November 24, 2009
"Engagement" may be a running foreign policy theme of the Obama administration, but it is also an emerging trend in official outreach to the American academy. For decades, widespread criticism of U.S. policy by many Middle East area scholars was met with cool indifference by Washington. But more recently, the need to inject regional expertise and language skills into the toolkit of U.S. national security policymaking has propelled government to reach out to academe in new and unfamiliar ways.
As new initiatives by the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense suggest, America's deepened connection to the broader Middle East -- from the contest with al-Qaeda and other radical groups, to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- is drawing government and the academy closer together. But does Washington know how to engage the "ivory tower" effectively?
To discuss this important question, The Washington Institute invited Martin Kramer and Mark Clark to address a special Policy Forum luncheon.
Martin Kramer is author of the forthcoming Washington Institute Policy Focus The Other Engagement: Government and Academe, written as a "field manual" for U.S. government outreach to area scholars and language experts. Author of the widely acclaimed Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (The Washington Institute, 2001), he is The Washington Institute's Wexler-Fromer fellow and president-designate of Shalem College in Jerusalem.
Mark Clark is director of the National Security Studies Program at the California State University at San Bernardino and president of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. In 2006, he received a multiyear grant from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to establish a California State University (CSU) Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence, a consortium of seven campuses in the CSU system.
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