THE OTHER SIDE OF GENOCIDE: Covering up genocide is a tricky business. Probably the best place to start is with the word itself. Coined in 1944 to describe Nazi Germany’s systematic murder of millions, it’s since been disputed in nearly every other usage, from the U.S. government’s early waffling on whether Rwanda’s Hutu annihilation of the Tutsis qualified, to the Turkish government’s continuing campaign to convince the world that several hundred thousand starved Armenians does not a genocide make.
That’s where Microsoft’s Encarta comes in.
Helen Fein, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Genocide, says the online encyclopedia almost helped deny the genocide.
In 1996, Encarta asked Ms. Fein to write an entry on genocide. Her short essay, which included a brief mention of the murder or deportation of at least 1.1 million Armenians by the Turkish Ottoman government during World War I, was accepted and published.
But this past June, Encarta called Ms. Fein and asked her to revise her entry, in response to “customer complaints.” She learned that Ronald Grigor Suny, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, had been asked to revise his entry on Armenia as well.
Ms. Fein says Encarta wanted her to include a few lines on the “other side of the story” -- the Turkish government’s side, that is. Mr. Suny says an Encarta editor named Frank Manning explained to him that the revision would leave the facts in place, but remove the word “genocide.”
“Their proposed changes suggested that all narratives are equal, that we can’t know for sure whether or not the Armenians brought the massacres on themselves,” says Ms. Fein.
According to Mr. Suny, Mr. Manning told him that the Turkish government had threatened to arrest local Microsoft officials and ban Microsoft products unless the who, what, and why of the massacres were presented as topics open to debate. Microsoft representatives would neither confirm nor deny the threats, but Namik Tan, a spokesman for the Turkish Embassy, calls the charge “so ridiculous I cannot speak.” He acknowledges that the embassy wrote at least two letters to Microsoft urging it to remove the term “genocide” from the two entries, and to cite Armenian rebellion as the cause of any suffering, but he insists that the Turkish government “does not make threats.”
Ms. Fein threatened to remove her name from her article. Mr. Suny threatened to do the same with his -- and to publicize Microsoft’s censorship. In response, Encarta editors backed down. Ms. Fein and Mr. Suny agreed to add that the Turkish government denies the genocide, but held firm on the facts of its occurrence.
When The Chronicle attempted to reach Encarta’s editors, a publicist for the company said they were all on vacation. A second publicist added that every story has two sides, even one about genocide.
Indeed. Ms. Fein notes that the Encarta entry on Turkey, which is unsigned, still doesn’t mention the Armenian genocide at all.
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ENOUGH IS ENOUGH: Lisa Ruddick, an associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, despairs when she looks at her discipline. She sees senior scholars making outrageous claims, junior professors afraid to challenge them, and graduate students mimicking the radical poses of famous figures in the field.
“I’m tired of a profession in which high status goes to a kind of thinking in which one’s ethical concerns are suppressed,” says Ms. Ruddick. To become an academic today is to undergo an intellectual hazing, she argues, a process in which good professionals lose touch with their core beliefs. It’s the sure-to-be controversial point of the book she’s writing, Intuition and Brutality in Academic Life.
Thanks to friends at Chicago, the professor recently attended a meeting of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives in Learning, a group of educators who want to reconnect the heart and the mind. “She mentioned the title of the book and there was a collective gasp,” reports Bruce Novak, a Ph.D. student in education at Chicago. “The concerns of her book were the reason why so many people make a journey to this conference every year.”
There’s no manuscript yet, but Ms. Ruddick says she’s already encouraged by the reaction to her ideas. She unveiled a small piece in the spring issue of Critical Inquiry, joining several other scholars in responding to earlier articles in the journal on university sexual-harassment policies, including a piece on sex between teachers and students by Jane Gallop, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Ms. Ruddick felt compelled to respond to Ms. Gallop’s essay, which she calls an example of “irresponsible and narcissistic” thinking.
Her own Critical Inquiry piece challenges, on psychoanalytic grounds, Ms. Gallop’s contention that an eroticized relationship can be healthy for the student and the teacher. But in her conclusion, she sees the Gallop essay as symptomatic of the humanities today. “There is a lot of disavowed sadism around here,” Ms. Ruddick writes. A healthier profession would care less about fine-tuning its theories and more about “the humbling and actually painful work of building up compassionate self-awareness in our day-to-day dealings with one another and in our published conversations.”
Though she expects to be labeled neoconservative in some circles, Ms. Ruddick instead cites the writers Jane Tompkins and Gloria Anzaldua as role models. And she finds other academics ready to listen. “I want to write the book,” Ms. Ruddick says, “before the moment has passed.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Page: A20