By the late twentieth century, the American university had emerged as a critical and powerful site of research and learning on the broader world. Global engagement promised a new kind of intellectual space in which the national grounding of the university would be superseded by a new worldly resonance. Through the international circulation of scholars and students, the global flow of ideas and circuit of scholarly collaborations, and the redefinition of academic missions themselves, the university's commitment to academic freedom implied a new sacred space in which scholarship would know no national boundary. Knowledge of and from the wider world brought into the American university through research, reproduced in scholarship, and disseminated through training, seemed without limit or constraint. After September 11, 2001, however, the precious qualities that had affirmed the university as a space that could be both of and in the world were marked as heretical ... now thePage  20 openness and worldliness of the university, and the values associated with the cultivation of broadly shared communities of learning, had become heresies. The sacred space of the American university is threatened ... and it perhaps is only in these circumstances in which the sacred space of the university is recognized as something extremely fragile, and possibly even also a conceit, that we can recognize the importance of the possibility of the university. By marking the heresies essential to global learning, and the conditions of their danger and importance, we hope with this collective enterprise to contribute to the making of global public cultures that extend and value the principles for which universities stand in their highest ideals: open inquiry, reasoned engagement, intellectual rigor, and responsibility to the world beyond the university itself.

We offer this position paper as a provocation to further reflection on the fates of these ideals under present and future conditions. We do so to open to challenge and reformulation the views presented here. And we do so toward sustaining the university's openness to the learning of the world, as a space capable of protecting the powers not only of the sacred but also of the heretical.

The growth of university-seated expertise on the world reflected remarkable national, institutional, and private investments in faculties, libraries, research programs, and curriculum.1 This growth also reflected the play of national security interests on the priorities and capacities of the university. And, especially in the 1990s, this growth reflected an engagement with the idea of globalization and its anticipated effect on every area of life. Not only were the academic disciplines involved in the productions of knowledge on the broader world but training, research, and practice in virtually every profession represented in the university became engaged with the world beyond the United States. The "international" became an essential and well-supported life-stream within the institutions of American higher education. Institutions elsewhere sought to draw on that model and to develop collaborations. These collaborations would, in turn, tie the success of universities and other constituencies from across the world together with the fates of American universities. The meanings of these ties for different national universities, and for the articulation of publics in different nations and across them, are yet to be measured, but evidence of thisPage  21 globalization of knowledge is wholly visible across the American university.2_/2a

The opportunities presented to the American academy by new and well resourced openings to the world, the recognition of enlarging fields of practice and research, the challenges of remaking curricula to account for dramatic changes across the globe ... these assured—within American higher education—a heightened level of attention to the broader world, the world beyond the United States. As well, schools have in more formal ways even redefined their mission in international or global terms. For example, the University of Michigan Business School recently redefined itself around a global mission:

Universities elsewhere in the world have also sought to reach beyond their own national terrains. Whether in the expression of consortia such as Universitas 21 [2] or in the making of specific bilateral linkages, the creation of relationships among institutions across national boundaries has become integral to the ideals of globalization of higher education. For example, the University of Michigan College of Engineering and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) signed an agreement on August 21, 2000, to restructure the School of Mechanical Engineering at SJTU with the following jointly evolved justification:

Today these partnerships may seem to arise from a general process of globalization, but, when viewed closely, many such partnerships have developed as extensions of the particular research interests of individual faculty members (to assure continued access to research fields and laboratories for themselves and their students). And they have, as well, been constructed around the ambitions of smaller institutions to build connections to specializations beyond their means. The narratives of globalization of higher education have overwhelmed the diverse and situational developments through which many of these international partnerships have been constituted. Yet they have been drawn into the strong narrative of globalization and, in turn, underwritten heightened attention to the values of the international within higher education.3

These global ties and international partnerships may, in the language of globalization, represent a new stage in the development of the flow of ideas and practices across nations, but they also bring new and enlarged debate about the character of international scholarship, and the implicit relationship of the United States to the broader world. The moves toward the globalization of higher education have placed American-seated initiatives in a paradoxical and potentially irreconcilable position. On the one hand, the initiatives developing from within American institutions have been predicated on values of sharing knowledge globally, creating knowledge institutions of the world. On the other hand, the centering and self-centering of American institutions—themselves promoting international values within a competitive North American institutional environment—have tended to fashion the internationalizing and globalizing American institution as even more distinctively American. Within the United States, these debates over the terms and structures, the priorities and interests, through which the academy would address the wider world, have often reflected the particular institutional histories of the academy within the United States more than any direct comment on the place of America in thePage  23 world. There have been rigorous debates over the relative virtues of area studies and comparative social science models. There have been debates over the place of national security investments in the training of graduate and professional students. There have been debates over the integration of professional schools into humanities and social science-seated area and international studies. There have been debates over the degree of centrality of international relations within the ranges of disciplines, approaches, and interests. There have been debates over the relative importance of more or less applied and more or less theoretical fields of scholarship, research, and training. And there have been debates over the values of engagements and linkages with "the private sector" in the recasting of global and international studies in the university.4_/5_/5a

For many scholars and university administrators outside the United States, these contests and debates over what constituted the more appropriate and powerful addresses to the world seemed peculiarly American, and without seeming value, as they unfolded in one American institution after another. And some, both within and outside the United States, could reflect that these contests sometimes seemed to be much more about competition for scarce resources than about the relationship of American scholarship to the world. Nevertheless, and quite paradoxically, these variably parochial debates have strongly embedded the "international" into the American university ... if not quite yet embedding America into the international.6

In certain ways that are difficult to evaluate, the research university's early investments in broad computerization, in the development of the Internet and especially electronic mail, but also engagement with new knowledge management networks such as LexisNexis and digital public libraries, new dissemination models in electronic books and journals, and new instructional developments such as long-distance learning and Internet conferencing, reinforced the university's new relationship with the world beyond the campus, the world beyond the nation, intensifying the processes, at least the appearances, of internationalization. New technologies of communication were being constructed out of traditional university infrastructures; and they were promising opportunities for sharing and building knowledge at unprecedented speed and across networks unlimited by ideology, nation, language, region, or position in the world economy. [4] Such investments in technologies and communications inevitably repositioned university-based knowledgePage  24 production within, or accessible to, for-profit ventures, and to a certain extent this has, in turn, rendered the university's productions of knowledge within a commodity system in which questions are asked—even in public and non-profit institutions—concerning "the returns on investment." [5] These rationales have encouraged new pressures toward internationalization, toward reaching "broader markets," toward offering more and more valuable goods to the wider world.

In university after university, "comprehensive internationalization" has come to be seen as a benchmark of success in the race to become global leaders in higher education. And with that effort to realize a new level in the globalization of knowledge, an extraordinary range of practices and programs, sometimes cumulative, sometimes contradictory, have come to constitute "the international." The settlements of contests most commonly turned the university's international arrangements toward greater inclusiveness, giving more and more parties and units stakes in the process of internationalization. Comprehensive internationalization, seated in part in a situational and opportunistic inclusiveness, unfolded in tandem with an idea, or an ideal,of the North American university as a rather special, or unique, place in which conversations about the world, about the representations of others, about the appropriate role of knowledge institutions and expertise in the fate of the world, could be carried on as if outside the conventions and parochialisms of particular nations or regional interests.

The American university could be seen as a place illuminated and protected as a sphere of universal values, of unfolding protocols of research, learning, and practice that transcended national and secular interests. [6] This universal standing of the institution—an institution of the world as well as in the world—even encompassed recognition of the weight, the importance of, pluriversal (or multiversal) values. [7] American debates about multiculturalism, and the pressing forward of the values of diversity within America, seemed to resonate and reinforce the importance of transcending limitations of the nation. [8] This, paradoxically, seemed only to underwrite still more strongly the claims to, and the promotion of, universalism within the university, for only via the work of universal values could there emerge a recognition and appreciation of difference and of the values and meanings that others placed upon their worlds, their knowledge, and their perspectives.7_/8

Page  25

Whether experienced as ideal or delusion, for many across the globe from the middle of the twentieth century, the American university came to be viewed as a microcosm of a future universe within which diverse experience could be respected and virtually any idea whatever its source could be expressed. [9] With its link to technological dynamism and claim to intellectual authority, the American university could be taken not only as an especially privileged and uniquely open site of learning but also as a model for institutions of higher learning anywhere in the world. Moreover, the university's openness, its freedoms, its diversity, could be taken as critical markers, or models, of a stronger future for the world's peoples. The research university, in its approach to the international, was hinged to two relatively distinct, and in certain ways irreconcilable, modalities: (1) the pursuit of values to extend "the rights of man" through knowledge construction, translation, and transfer; and (2) the pursuit of means—one could say the "modern"—to improve "the lot of man," to serve the world, and to rationalize that service to the world. Skeptics could argue that in the heady competition with for-profit organizations in pursuit of the latter, the university came to understand more clearly that its edge would increasingly be mainly in respect to the former.9_/9a Links might be realized through consultations, partnerships in technology transfer, and the exchange of faculty and students, yet the implicit hope embodied in globalizing higher education rested on the assumption that openness, tolerance, and innovation simply, unproblematically, worked together, within America and across the world. [10]

These positive attributions from outside were also mirrored in the self-reflections of academic leaders within the American university, and within the networks and consortia that constantly brought together leaders, faculty, and students into common conversations. Not only did these parties believe these attributions to be correct, they also recognized that critical resources, monies—from government, foundations, and university administrators—were closely bound with discourses regarding the values of internationalization and globalization of higher education. The American future of higher education could represent, in these presumptions, the global future of innovation, openness, and the capacity for improvement through academic freedom, embodied within the American university but with an anticipation of the university of the world. Recently, major new investments in the internationalization of American higherPage  26 education by foundations such as Rockefeller, Mellon, and Ford tended to support scholarly openings to international engagements. Competitive grant programs encouraged relationships among scholars internationally and between American and overseas institutions as ways of further encouraging such connections and simultaneously seeding values of the international within American institutions in fresh ways ... that is, beyond the frameworks of older investments in the development of area-specific American expertise. The larger point seemed to be to move American universities and colleges beyond their American anchorages, towards a new station of the world. On September 10, 2001, there appeared to be little doubt that the great North American university was an institution of the world, something beyond the nation, something reflecting a future ... a future shaped by the increasingly sophisticated recognition of plural as well as universal values, a future in which such learning institutions as the North American university were beacons of a new and open order. One recognized the depths and complexities of the broader world, and one acknowledged that the university must adjust its facilities, faculties, and programs to attend to these depths and complexities. If something was sufficiently important, the university could address it. If something was sufficiently wrong, the university could say it. If funding could be found, the university could research it. Perhaps the priorities of legislatures, foundations, and donors would not match the integrity and ideals of the university's global ambition, but that was something that might be fixed by the increasing power of international learning among those who preside over allocations.

Utopian, naïve, or merely optimistic, such an academic presumption animated the vision of a university of the world located within North America, a university identified with global values and global futures. The university had positioned itself, or become positioned, as a "sacred space," a space that seemed far from confined by national or parochial interest. Rather, the university was defined by its commitment to learning through open and reasoned dialogue, teaching, and research.10 We develop this provisional formulation—"sacred space"—to mark the ways in which attributions of the unique standing of the institution, along with self-reflections of this standing, were held to be beyond contest. Academic freedom, the hallmark of the American university's distinction, was unlike other freedoms associated with the democracy or independence of the nation state. This freedom was supposed to stand beyondPage  27 question—and certainly beyond national interest—as it engaged the world and enabled the American university to realize its universality through its own comprehensive internationalization. But this comprehensive internationalization hardly questioned the grounds, translations, and expertise that underlay these ambitions.11_/12_/13_/14

In 1998 and 1999, the International Institute of the University of Michigan was engaged in a regular internal and external review process. Founded in 1993, the new International Institute brought together most of the international academic programs and centers at the University, as well as a range of pre-existing and new resources including some forty-two faculty positions (some filled, some open, some new). On the one hand, the Institute was founded with a generously open and ambitious mandate "to internationalize" the University; on the other, its strengths lay with pre-existing resources (centers, programs, grants, faculty) dedicated to context-grounded ("area studies") international scholarship and training.15

By early 1999, the Institute was well positioned strategically and intellectually to interrogate both long-standing and newly evolving claims to authority in the international address of the North American university (specifically exemplified by the University of Michigan) in the pursuit of research, training, and practice in and on the world. In response to a request for a proposal from the Ford Foundation,16 the Institute identified three elements at the core of claims to the university's authority in respect to "the international": grounding, expertise, and translation.

We argued that the "work" of university-based area studies in North America rested on three foundational claims to authority: the virtues of groundedness, or grounding; the capacity to translate knowledge; and the transferability of knowledge through expertise into practice. These elements had long served as banners for international and area programs within the North American university. With Ford Foundation support, we have sought to foreground these presumptions, to understand how these elements function in scholarship and practice. We also have tried to identify weaknesses in these foundational claims. And we have tried to see how university-based international and area studies scholarship may create new strength through critical reflectionPage  28 on its own practice.

With "grounding," we referred to the deep engagement in knowledge of a region and period as well as in the methods of the disciplines. We sought to understand how "grounding" in a region is situated in processes beyond the local and how "grounding" in the disciplines is peculiarly embedded in the historical development of the disciplines and professions. As one becomes more grounded in place ... and as one becomes more grounded at a point on a trajectory of unfolding of a discipline, the complexities of these conjunctures become more apparent and challenging. We were intrigued by the epistemological contingencies and ambiguities inherent in the claims to "grounding." We sought to move our attentions from a topical approach to international and area studies in which the status of claims of "grounding" was withheld toward a focus on the facilities of "grounding" that have given a certain authority to area studies and international scholarship and training.

With "translation," we referred to the capacities (or claims to capacity) to move findings, methods, and theories back and forth among different frames of grounded knowledge and into conversation with trans-local and global processes. We sought to move attention from the vexed circumstances of specific translation to the institutional and epistemological grounds that constrain, and may yet facilitate, translation.

By "expertise," we referred to the emergence of new constituencies, and to the constitution of arrays of different sites and modes of intellectual authority, in the international field, as claims to know-how were remade into practice ... more particularly into professional claims to competence. Here, claims to expertise from within the university stood among competing claimants, raising questions of the relative standing of different sites and modes of expertise and different circuits of practice. We sought to reconsider the claims of international expertise within the university amidst these broader economies of expertise operating across the globe.

In an important way, the International Institute's readiness, in 1998 and 1999, to draw questions towards its own practice, and towards its own claims to competency, could only have developed within the "sacred space" of the American university of the late 1990s. It is difficult to imagine that such a program of critique and self-critique could have been imagined ten years earlier. The opening might in part be attributable to a distance from the ColdPage  29 War, from the primacy that national security interests had within American higher education's approach to "the international." But this readiness to engage in self-critique almost certainly draws as well on the new vocabularies of transparency and self-critique that were reconstituting public and for-profit sectors throughout the world.

The "sacred space" of the American university permitted a range of reflective and critical conversations that were seen as potentially strengthening the university's address to the wider world, rather than questioning that project or the core assumptions on which it was based. With each of these competencies—grounding, translation, and expertise—we identified facilities that could be both questioned and strengthened. We recognized that such critical work could only develop in a setting that allowed relatively open conversation and debate among ranges of scholars and practitioners both within and outside the academy, and from within and outside North America, and among American-based institutions and institutions outside North America. From August, 1999 through June, 2001, via a series of conferences, workshops, special programs, and other engagements, we came to understand more clearly the historical locations of specific practices that had long underwritten international and area studies in the research university and to see ways to introduce and engage more explicitly a range of different standpoints beyond this nation and the epistemes this nation privileges. In some ways, September 11 magnified the value of this project more than we could have anticipated.

The idea of the American university both in and of the world seemed almost suddenly to be a conceit. On the one hand, some would claim that America was attacked for those very values that universities elevated—openness, freedom, and democracy. [11]17_/18_/19 At the same time, with the circumstances of the pronounced/unpronounced war of the United States, and its proclaimed values, on those of the world who would not share or recognize these values, the American university appeared to lose its transcendent global resonance. Expertise about the world became, once again, explicitly associated with national security rather than global engagement while faculty and students from abroad, once providing evidence of American openness, became newly vulnerable to detentions and interrogations if they happened to be male andPage  30 from a nation marked as responsible for harboring terrorists. Some clearly attacked the idea of the university's willingness to consider multiple standpoints; in this cast, political resolve, rather than critical doubt, should now be the university's common ground in its dedication to freedom. In these conditions, the university could be open to the world only so long as the world did not threaten American security.

A new and strong standpoint entered the academy. It may have needed little explicit external direction. Nevertheless, external direction was indeed generously offered, sometimes without subtlety, including the production and circulation of lists of faculty or courses that questioned America's new posture; the lobbying of university trustees, regents, and administrators regarding the proper role of the university in "war-time"; and the marshalling of new regulations regarding the surveillance of international students and the protection of security-implicated labs, libraries, and technologies. More provocatively, national leaders engaged and attacked the intellectual foundations of American-based international scholarship, as for example New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani did in a speech to the UN General Assembly on October 1, in which he presumably sought to answer the few American scholars or commentators who attempted to explain, in historical, political, and economic terms, the 9/11 attacks:

Under these conditions, how can the pluralism and contentions characteristic of the idealized scholarly community work? How are thesePage  31 "sacred spaces" of open and reasoned intellectual engagement to be defended within the university after years of evolution in which defense seemed hardly necessary?21_/21a_/22 What would now be the fates of conversations and of collegial engagements and movements across the globe which days before seemed both essential and largely unproblematic? And what would be the fates of scholars who had come to accept the North American university as a space apart, a space where conversations were possible that were not possible elsewhere? [13] With this association, how can one engage publics beyond America, and beyond the scholarly communities already tied to universities?23 In this atmosphere, where security and belligerence, rather than globalization and collaboration, become the terms of international engagement, has a vision of identification with publics across the world in addition to those of one's national polities, become not only naïve, but dangerous? Are there now things of importance that cannot be said, that cannot enjoy the regime of unfettered conversation? What are the new risks of ideas that had enjoyed important standing and productive power within the university? And what are the new risks of dissent?24

To turn these questions toward our core formulations of the sacred and the heretical, does the sanctity of university space promise even more when heretical knowledge about others can be so readily marked as threatening or dangerous?25 Does this new cast of the world defined in a contest over global terrorism promise to make other heretical knowledge grounded in exclusion and ignorance, rather than apostasy itself, even more invisible in the claims to global relevance and recognition of difference? Would certain spheres now be rendered irrelevant or invisible because they appeared to be located on the margins, or the sidelines? Would fresh claims to "the universal" now be used to eliminate rather than nurture openings to "the pluriversal"?

We may now see more clearly the fragilities and transience of the sacred space of the American university as a space in which conversations about the world, about the representations of others, about the appropriate role of knowledge institutions and expertise in the fate of the world, could be carried on as if outside the conventions and parochialisms of particular nations or regional interests. At a moment of heightened valuation of belligerence, we may now see more of the ways in which such a unique space as the university at the beginning of the third millennium was highly privileged. We might also consider the kinds of scholarly engagements best designed to preserve, and extend this Page  32unique space ... to find fresh openings to an understanding not only of terror but also pain, sorrow... to consider the opening of a new era of belligerence, to understand the hard work of tolerance, to attend to the complex stories of "unfinished nations," to find ways to think about the trenchant powers of race, to reconsider our address to the subject of faith, and to recenter the challenges of remembrance and representation.

The violence of September 11 and of its aftermath suggests the potential for a world transformed, but the shapes and trajectories of such an unfolding world are not self-evident. [14] At the very least, our anticipations (however nuanced) of that transformation are to be understood now more clearly as shaped by our location in the world and of our variable and multiplex associations with the social, economic, political, and cultural forces that affect these transformations and condition our interpretations of them. As a start, both for the value of a university open to the world and as a place where heretical knowledge can find intellectually rigorous scholarly interrogation, one needs to bring to these events a sense of their varied readings, implications, and importance. Above all, one needs to cultivate that critical doubt regarding any single, or alternative, master narrative. What is the standing of these various readings of these events? What are the shapes of their audiences? In what ways are new histories ready to attend to the diversity and multiplicity of the readings of these events surrounding, preceding, following September 11? And, now, what are the risks of advancing readings and interpretations and histories that stand outside particular master narratives?

Both now and in the long term, part of the challenge of "reading 9/11" lies in addressing the representations of these events as unique events. Ways of speaking of 9/11 in their first incarnations after September 11 lamented that the world would never be the same" ... "our lives have changed forever" ... "we will never feel secure again." "Pearl Harbor" was presented as an apt, prior "unique event." These expressions of uniqueness inevitably, and probably unknowingly, stood against views elsewhere that events of this order were quite commonplace in the world (even that America had played parts in devastation on this scale elsewhere).26_/27

The claims to uniqueness, opening perhaps to asymmetrical and as yetPage  33 largely unwaged debates regarding such claims to uniqueness, made proximate other debates. It may be especially important to recall discussions from the 1980s on the Holocaust as a unique event in human history. Such debates invite digressions into the adjudication of numbers of victims, as if collective pain, large tragedies, and genocide can only be evaluated by reference to the numbers of the dead. [15] This kind of empirical work helps to turn attention away from empirical investigation of an even more challenging nature: how can we explain the ways in which certain events come to be seen as exceptional and beyond comparison?

In the case of 9/11, the assertions of uniqueness gain conviction and influence through their performance, through their repetition, and through the exceptional means of media and the state in America to impress its discourses onto the broader world. They then recycle back into American-seated notions that its own particular experience must be read as events of the world and must be read within one frame without qualification. The complex authoring facilities of a diverse world are displaced, or partly overpowered, by the powerful authoring capacity of one nation in the world as part of its exercise of power and of its elaboration of its unique national security imperative.

Are there scholarly addresses to this question of uniqueness, beyond saturating the claims to uniqueness with a multitude of not-so-unique comparisons or invading these claims with questions about relative numbers? We do not propose to know how to address the uniqueness of 9/11, except to invite its scholarly engagement. One might focus on how discourses on uniqueness work, but we also suspect that this will leave much undone, and most particularly will risk missing the ways in which pain and loss are felt and unfold through broad communities and even distant ones that find some affinity with victims and their survivors. We need to recognize and appreciate both the poetics and the powers associated with felt pain and loss.

There is also opportunity to consider how, more generally, claims to "the exceptional" can ossify, how they can disengage people from critical thought, how they can push further away complex understandings that might not only be empirically sound but, in the long-term, healing and confirming.

Time is itself an issue. Scholars, as others, are caught within the temporalities and temporicities of memory: when is it possible to extend, or intensify, reflection on and analysis of the experience of trauma and loss? SomePage  34 scholars may distance themselves from the challenge of 9/11 in hopes that the passing of time might enable more dispassionate analysis. However, waiting to reflect also means that retribution, revenge, and justice take over the address of pain, loss, and death. Remembrance and vengeance work on different schedules, but the fulfillment of scholarly responsibility might demand more immediate focus on the first, in order that the latter finds greater reason and possibility for justice.28 For that to happen, heretical knowledge must find its sacred space, especially when belligerence rules and tolerance looks to find its place.

Before September 11, 2001, conversation and negotiation were privileged frames of reference across a range of international issues. These frames of reference reflected growing understanding among nations and regions in the world-system. They reflected the values of shared, commensurate information in international negotiations. And these frames of reference reflected agreements on the possibilities of moving through conversations (as in the work of international conferences in a range of fields) and negotiation to arrive at goals shared, or evinced, among multiple international partners. International scholarship, training, and practice based in the American research university found affinity with these frames of reference ... frames of reference that attended to tolerance, appreciation for diversity and universal standards that were being ever more strongly constituted in the open flow of information, knowledge, and ideas. Even the apparent retreat of the White House from such conversation and negotiation in several arenas across the first eight months of 2001—for example in relation to the Durban Conference on Racism, the Vieques negotiations, the Kyoto talks—did not suggest the collapse of these frames of reference; rather, the importance of such flows and sharing of knowledge was marked and reinforced.

After September 11, 2001, the paradigm of aggressiveness, of power made more raw and visible, almost instantly displaced the frame of reference based in conversation, negotiation, and open sharing of information [16] and knowledge across the globe.29 Within three days following the attack on the World Trade Center, Mayor Giuliani offered a remarkably explicit assault on relativism (produced in a more studied address at the UN two weeks later—and quoted here above), one that under the circumstances was and to some extentPage  35 is still difficult to answer. The language of aggressiveness and belligerence was newly privileged in America and in many other settings around the world. Familiar and obvious ways of working in our scholarly fields, in our training, and in our practice became dangerous exercises for us; [17] they became still more dangerous for our partners in scholarship and practice around the world, as well as for our students coming from other countries.29_/30

The disposition that privileged the tolerance and recognition of difference finds a new and peculiar space when violence is centered in the American global imaginary. First, some kinds of knowledge and expertise about the world become newly valorized or revalorized. The American government has stepped into the academic debate about area studies and established anew its mark of relevance and importance with significant increases in funding research and teaching about parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Global security, and not global business, becomes the dominant theme of international discussions. Religious studies, and Islam in particular, become newly significant as well to American universities, but in a new and awkward fashion, now to be reckoned as a challenge to national security rather than as an opening to the world's knowledge.31

American multiculturalism and commitments to diversity rested upon a kind of secular assumption; they rested, moreover, on the belief that a free flow of ideas was not only the future, but also a force that would ultimately reshape the contours of the world.32 Now, this recognition of difference and this search for knowledge about unfamiliar others are tinged with an anxiety marked by uncertainty about global futures. Or perhaps thought of differently, it is marked by the certainty of violence.33 Tolerance becomes an even more important value to celebrate and to find in sensibilities and practices elsewhere precisely because America is no longer so confident that its own sensibilities of its multicultural self will be extended elsewhere. But tolerance is not something only to celebrate. It is not a uniform that some wear and some do not. It is, as can be seen so clearly since 9/11, a field of hard and never-ending work and struggle.34

But in these "war-time" circumstances, where tolerance becomes less a search for mutual understanding and more one side in a war against intolerance, the marks of an American nation simultaneously parochial and universal becomePage  36 apparent. American power and interests produce presumptions about the world (and about America) more consequential than those produced by other nations. At the same time, America's limitations also become more visible on the world stage; these limitations make the nation's action, or inaction, readily accessible. Whether in the unacknowledged conditions of its action or in its unintended consequences, the effects of America's presumptions and interventions into the world are inevitably being read from a variety of standpoints. Is recognition of such various standpoints heresy or a means to competency or is it simply a matter of responsibility?35

The appreciation of different interpretations of the world during a war against terrorism is one kind of recognition. It is also important to mark differences that go unnoticed as a new master narrative around the fight against terrorism succeeds and in part displaces the debate about globalization's promise and problems. While economic crises in Southeast Asia in the late 1990s animated debates about globalization, the economic crisis in Argentina over the last year is rendered, at least within the vision of America, as nothing more than a distraction from the new problem of global terrorism, if that. Poverty abides, and perhaps acquires a new significance as the seedbed for terrorism, but when that poverty is linked to devastating health conditions whether around AIDS or less recognized plagues, its importance is less clear for the battle against terrorism.

The American university is deeply caught up in the political economy of its global engagements. Whether as a source of funding or a search for relevance, the sacred space of open discourse is itself shaped by the power of those narratives seeking to influence it. In some ways, the tolerance for difference finds a new and difficult space when readings of American power prove inconsistent with the search for dialogue. Perhaps certain heresies that sustain value in our work—the attention to pain, sorrow, want on their own terms—are at risk as they are reconstituted as critical issues within national security and foreign policy discourses.

We might also recognize that this attention to tolerance is situational and short-term. Tolerance has another life, in the cautious, continuing, and courageous support of acceptance of others in everyday life. Tolerance may not be advanced by national or trans-national dictates but rather through the almost invisible little acts of accepting and allowing difference at a work-Page  37site, in a market-place, at a border, in a government office, in a school, in a neighborhood, within families, among friends, in policing, in the handling of news, in rituals and ceremonies, and in activities of leisure and pleasure. What are the fates of such critical civilities under the weight of languages and acts of belligerence spanning the globe and engrossing global media?

Perhaps this is the heretical knowledge we seek, these critical civilities that go unmarked by those new efforts to redefine the world in the light of unique tragedy threatening an even more barbaric future. Or perhaps the tolerance we need to define is one that stands in the glare of belligerence itself. That, however, suggests the need to mark forms of identification and layers of difference that organize visions of dialogue and violence.

"Unfinished nations" have enjoyed a long and tumultuous career, from failed attempts at modernization to the often unsuccessful releases from imperial entrapments, from the submerged "nationalities" of the Cold War era to the perpetuations of invented countries within the modern world system, from authentic developments aspiring to a reborn or new born collective formulation to fake or confabulated efforts to use the nation-form as a means to claim rich resources, from long and almost finished processes of unfolding of new identities and new states to processes of emergence of identities and states that seem, arguably, never to be completed. We are aware that nation-making has almost invariably involved extraordinary violence, whether through imperial and colonial and liberation wars, through the severance of once united populations and the production of stateless and refugee populations in the wake of nation formation, through Cold War strategies of claiming and undermining respective surrogates. But we have also been ready to suspend that awareness.

Before 9/11, the "unfinished nation" had become a global project, at least provisionally reformulated as such. The "unfinished nation" had become a project jointly enacted among communities of experts and communities of subjects aspiring to some better position in the world. New ranges of expertise suggested that nations could be finished without violence, that the violence associated with the "unfinished nation" was not inherent. Moreover, such expertise operating on a global scale tended toward a narrow range of scripts, such as meeting popular aspirations and assuring good governance. ThePage  38 "unfinished nation" was, before 9/11, a project that could be thoroughly mined and solved through the effective application of expertise.

In an era of belligerence post-9/11, the "unfinished nation" is represented now as a threat to national and international security, to be dealt with not so much through the recognition of popular aspirations and the expert practice of consultants but rather through the application of new forms of power and control organized from an American center.36 "Unfinished nations" now have come to be defined less in terms of national fulfillments and more in terms of a nation's articulation with an international security system structured around America's definitions of its needs, its appropriate influence. The deeper and surviving histories of imperial constructions of nations are forced back to the surface in all their interestedness and banality. Past imperial nation-making, porous and unsettled and open for a purpose, becomes newly recognizable, inviting us to consider, once again, whose security is sought, and what definitions of security motivate the articulation of empires and nations after 9/11.37_/38

What approaches to the study and comprehensive representation of the histories of these "unfinished nations" are possible, viable, potentially productive, in the present circumstances? Are all nations in a sense "unfinished" in the present context, or at least frozen at some moment in which various complicated and contradictory vectors of change are overwhelmed? What constitutes a "nation" under the circumstances of the present "global war on terrorism"? Might one say that it is increasingly less possible for people to extricate, liberate, themselves from the nation that has chosen them? Might one find illumination in contemporary struggles by considering the movements of new nations in their liberation-from over the past 250 years?

America has played a central role around the issue of race, not only in the enactments of race across its history, and in the allowances of race and racism to invade every seam of the nation, but also in the efforts to achieve understanding of the nature and power of race and racism, present and historical, and to move toward some different and better future. The "debate" about race has for the most part presumed a common American "citizenship" and secular identification even as it reaches out beyond national boundaries.39 And, thePage  39 American university has come to play a critical role in this doubled sense, in which the felt experience of race and racism are everyday present and in which there is, in the institution of higher education, the will and the means to move toward a different future and better future.

But the events of 9/11 and their aftermath have brought to the fore a range of questions freshly drawn or newly important, especially as the representation of an adversary, and the animation of a nation, reaches into the treasure-box of already evolved racial stereotypes. For America, the verge between race and racism, on the one hand, and the demonization of the beliefs of others, on the other hand, has grown especially close and frightening.

What were the trajectories in global discussions of racism leading into and out of the 2001 Durban conference, a pre-9/11 marker of the emergence of a more universal and a more institutionally authorized understanding of racism? What shifts in these trajectories seem evident after 9/11? What do we make of an avowedly seamless national policy on terrorism and defense that reflects parochial and transient notions of racism in its detention programs at home and stresses universalistic anti-racialist policies in its liberationist program abroad, pressing freedom irrespective of race and religion and gender?40_/41

Yet is this war also about other people's racism, other people's fashionings of notions of race? Is the racism in American racism the same racism as the racisms in other parts of the world? Is there a process by which certain understandings of racism become privileged and come to write the scripts of other "racisms" around the world? Is the American reading of racism a particularly strong reading? What are the advantages of a more consensual and universal construction of racism? What are the risks and difficulties of such a consensual or universal construction of racism? [18] What are the possibilities, and likewise the limitations and risks, of more pluriversal understandings of racism that may resist universalization?42_/43

How have university and scholarly-seated reflections and research on racism been shaped, reshaped, in the post-9/11 period, and what are the possibilities of more contextually-grounded, historically sensitive, and more thoroughly integrated understandings of racism in the post-9/11 setting? Are we able to discuss at all the tensions between more universal (or American writ-large) understandings of race and more pluriversal understandings of race—if we could get to them? Is there some risk to America "orientalizing" race and racism?

Nation and race have come to be recognized as enduring axes of identification and cultural difference for the world, overwhelming most other possibilities, but their articulation with religion has not been simple to grasp. Nation and race are often bound up with religious struggles. Secularism itself is presented as a response to the challenge of religion's intrusion into political life. Academic life and university work themselves can have religious implications and identifications, most obviously in those institutions with explicit ties to particular faiths. But even in those public universities of North America, religion is, at best, bracketed as apart from the aspirations to the globalization of knowledge anchored by secularism's assumptions. Such secular assumptions would hold the nation as constructed, perhaps heroically, yet open to deconstruction; race as constructed but almost beyond deconstruction; and faith as almost yet not quite accessible to these familiar tools of historicization and deconstruction. How can faith be brought within the domain of discussion and analysis of the felt associations with, or virtually inescapable conditions of, nation and race? There is virtually no grand contention over our efforts to grasp a workable sense of the nation, of race: such projects, long the labors of the academy, bear credibility as ways of finishing the nation or solving racism. But how are we drawn toward workable empirical and theoretical addresses to faith? How should we proceed? And, parenthetically, who are we in doing so?44_/44a_/45

Religious studies and schools of theology organize the secular academy's engagement of faith, but they have done so, at least so far, without the explicit spillover into every field that scholarship on nation, race, and gender has witnessed. There is a presence of attention to faith, of course. Certain religious complexes are unquestioned elements of a forestage in the organization of higher education's approaches to the study of faith, while others are presented as being in need of greater recognition and understanding, and still others are overlooked virtually altogether. Campaigns for the inclusion within the American academy of excluded faiths have been from the beginning openings toward the international in higher education, in reaching beyond the nation into cultural worlds beyond America. For religious minorities, these dynamics have long been familiar, but after September 11, they have becomePage  41 manifest; Islam occupies a new and peculiar space within the North American academy,46_/47_/48_/49 while other religious traditions of identification wind up being the implicit lens through which religious questions are asked, and questions about tolerance, belligerence, and openness posed.50

The challenge can be turned into a familiar one for popular American media: how do Arab American and Jewish American students coexist on the American campus when war rages in imagined, ancestral, or real homelands? Race, ethnicity, and religion commingle, finding familiar expression in the American search for mutual understanding, tolerance, and recognition. Now, however, the challenge of difference is inescapably bound up in faith. Well beyond imaginaries of left and right and of diasporas made by race or nation, religious identification occupies a new central ground in the articulation of geopolitics and of intellectual responsibilities. Approaches to race and nation might be drawn toward the study of religious identification, but the linkage of these categories might also reflect American presumption, or a particularly momentary American preoccupation, or fear. Is there a way to center religion's place in the globalization of knowledge without privileging particular faiths? Can the sacred space of the open university find a place for religion's engagement without making unproductive heresies commonplace? Or, to move in another direction altogether, is it perhaps now opportune if not also necessary to begin engagements with the international with the question of faith?

In an important way, these discussions are about the fate of learning and knowledge based institutions in the construction of comprehension of present events and their connections to the past and to the future. The challenge here may be to sustain and strengthen the capacities to remember ... in the sense of holding on to all the complexities of experience felt and understood virtually simultaneously in different quarters, to build control of ranges of information and views. And the challenge is also to represent ... to hold on to, reproduce, and enhance the capacity to represent, through analysis and narrative, events that are not only multi-sided but also multi-sited, and events around which there are powerful interests seeking to hold the world's attention to particular narratives.

Representation and remembrance are, through varieties of expertPage  42 practices, the domains of competence, indeed excellence, long built within and through the research university. The tensions unfolding between the sacred and the heretical have placed all this in at least a short-term jeopardy.

In our proposed conversations in Ann Arbor in August we wish to consider how to create spaces and forms of engagement that encourage intellectual responsibility reaching beyond conventional obligations and references ... to acknowledge both the "of the world" and "in the world" formulations as pieces of that responsibility. What pressures do the claims for relevance and for political realism place on our responsibilities to generate, organize, and disseminate knowledge that bears meaning and value? In the wake of September 11, and against the backdrop of debates over globalization that preceded it, what are the basic intellectual challenges facing a university committed to engaging and serving publics across the world? And what are the fates of such conversation, and the fates of our essential competencies of grounding, translation, and expertise, when aggression and violence—belligerence—become associated with the professions of democratic values and democratic systems?

David William Cohen, Michael D. Kennedy, and Kathleen Canning

University of Michigan International Institute, Ann Arbor

May 15, 2002

^* Superscripted numbers refer to endnotes to the original position paper completed in May 2002 and discussed at the International Institute's seminar in August 2002. Subscripted numbers refer to seminar participant interventions designed to address critical contentions and omissions in the engagement of national universities and global publics. These interventions include those produced explicitly for this volume as well as others adapted from briefs written by visiting scholars before the seminar or based on syntheses of workshop discussions.

1. See <http://www.bus.umich.edu/prostudents/mba/global.html>.

2. See <http://www.universitas21.com>.

3. See <http://www.engin.umich.edu/alumni/engineer/00FW/history.html>.

4. Of course, the same research universities that were geared to these promises have faced unanticipated difficulties: the high cost of sustaining cutting-edge technology and the challenges of dealing with hacking, spam, plagiarism, the oversight of hate speech and employment of networks to deal in illicit materials, and the pressures from states and other bodies to limit "freedoms" through filtering and controlling access to the networks. Such networks became new sites for more volatile conflicts over what constitute public and private goods within the American setting, with such conflicts moving via these very networks onto the global stage. At the same time, overseas-based initiatives have been able to devise and use new channels of access to the American academy.

5. Even the active policing of patents and copyrights, especially in the medical sciences but also in a range of new media, which would suggest a national tide against globalization, has involved the university in the active exploration of the contours of international legal debates and processes regarding the circulation of ideas and materials around the globe.

6. Of course, the unfolding of this idea of the university was more arguable with the end of the Cold War and the "forgetting" of the persecutions and the disappearances of left-wing and radical scholars from the academy. And one could bracket the attacks on "tenured radicals," the many racial incidents, the savaging of right-wing campus speakers, and the efforts of legislatures and donors to influence the shape of instruction, research, and the campus environments as not quite deforming the ideal of the university as an open and protected sphere. Indeed, the university appeared to have an inner quality quite capable of surviving a range of insults to the ideal.

7. Reflected here was the influence of the critique of orientalism. In the wake of Edward Said's powerful work, institutions, scholarship, and teaching sought distance from the orientalist traditions in the West's address to the wider world. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

8. Grant H. Cornwell and Eve W. Stoddard, "Globalizing Knowledge: Connecting International and Intercultural Studies," Association of AmericanPage  44 Colleges and Universities, 1999.

9. The notion of "microcosm" seems relevant to this idealization, the intersection between a model in the present and the desire for a more open and tolerant society in the future.

10. Of course, it was often self-evident to university administrators in the United States and overseas that such connections tended to be uneven, asymmetrical, that symmetry required quite extraordinary negotiations and contracts between and among institutions. Even in the simple equation of one-for-one international student exchange, the result was not two more identically formed students, but rather two individuals whose respective international study experience meant entirely different things for each in the respective home countries.

11. See William Bennett's Americans for Victory over Terrorism at <http://www.avot.org>.

12. See <http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/01100110.htm>.

13. And, of course, what risks did overseas colleagues now face in situations where alignments with the United States could be deadly?

14. Of course, in attending to the powers of uncertainties here we assume a position different from that of President George W. Bush, who has remarked that "The course of this conflict is not known; yet its outcome is certain. And we know that God is not neutral." As reported in The Daily Mail & Guardian, a South African newspaper.

15. The thread through genocide opens another range of questions regarding intent and the challenge of comprehending intent. The 1949 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide includes the defining stipulation of an "intent to destroy" a people (see Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, <http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/p_genoci.htm>). What are the possibilities, within public discourse, scholarly research, or available juridical resources to get at the intent of people and organizations here defined as "terrorist"? And what are the risks of examining the "intent" of those perpetrating the September 11 violence beyond the most simplistic representations and allegations? Are the long-established scholarly protocols for close examination of intent and motivation in the histories of such events now relocated into the category of "the heretical"?

16. Now, the recent U.S. renunciation of its signature to the Rome StatutePage  45 on the establishment of an International Criminal Court has been compounded by a U.S. announcement that it will refuse to cooperate in any foreseeable way with the new Court, from information sharing onwards. Neil A. Lewis, "U.S. Rejects All Support for New Court on Atrocities," New York Times, May 7, 2002.

17. See Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can be Done About It, a report issued by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in November, 2001, and revised and expanded in February 2002 (<http://www.goacta.org/publications/reports.html>). Commenting on Defending Civilization, Lewis H. Lapham writes: "Proceeding from the assumption that the nation's universities—all the nation's universities—wander in a desert of ignorance, the report sets out to show that the nation's universities—all the nation's universities—failed to respond to the provocation of September 11 with a proper degree of 'anger, patriotism, and support of military intervention.' Right-thinking people everywhere else in the country were quick to recognize evil when they saw it, prompt in their exhibition of American flags, wholehearted in their rallying to the cause of virtue. 'Not so in academe.' Most university professors succumbed to 'moral relativism'; 'Some even pointed accusatory fingers,' not at the terrorists but at their fellow Americans. So monstrous was the betrayal that 'the message of much of academe was clear: BLAME AMERICA FIRST.'" Lewis H. Lapham, "Mythography," Harper's Magazine, February 2002.

18. Such as seemed being constructed within the process of the Durban Conference of 2001.