Another dimension of the problem of global competition for academic talent relates to the impact of benign global fluctuations on small countries such as Israel. The law of large numbers protects American or European academic communities from randomly losing a critical mass in one or another discipline. As Jewish studies or cryptology weakens in one institution, it grows elsewhere on the continent. But a tiny reservoir like Israel, when linked frictionlessly to a huge one—the world—can quickly lose critical elements of its intellectual community. Management paradigms which work stably for large systems do not necessarily work for small systems. Tiny systems are vulnerable to fluctuations and must be all the more robust against surprises.

In another vein, Braverman writes:

This assessment is harsh, and though it has an element of truth, it matches only part of my personal experience of Israeli academia over the past three decades. Israeli academics are extraordinarily cosmopolitan in their scholarly pursuits, but they tend to be far more faithful in institutional allegiance than their European or, especially, their American colleagues. A market-based model for university funding would certainly change this and exacerbate the malaise to which Braverman refers. If each professor must periodically face his or her chairman and individually bargain for salary, that individual’s institutional allegiance will tend to diminish, regardless of the outcome. Friction among colleagues—not rare in academia—will be exacerbated. Commitment to one’s immediate community of scholars will erode as individual academics feel exploited by university management. If Israeli academics are forced to solicit counteroffers from foreign institutions in order to maintain their financial position in Israel, the erosion will be even greater. When you force people to hunt for foreign jobs, guess what? They will find them even more frequently than today, when collective bargaining insulates the individual academic from the bargaining process.

In conclusion, the Israeli economy has emerged as a “tiger” since 1985, when neoliberal and Washington-consensus policies took the upper hand. Without for a moment forgetting the challenges which remain—huge inequalities and global vulnerabilities, to name just two—liberal market-based policies have positioned Israel comfortably in the community of advanced industrial economies. But the Washington consensus of twenty years ago is nothing like a consensus today, even in such eligible fields as capital market liberalization. Not surprisingly, things are far more complex than simple slogans suggest. Many questions remain, such as the impact of differential salary according to discipline or achievement. But university education, like primary and secondary education and national defense, cannot thrive if left to market forces alone. Large-scale public support for universities is essential. We may be losing our minds, but we’re not so far gone that we can’t understand that.

Yakov Ben-Haim

Technion—Israel Institute of Technology

Haifa

 

TO THE EDITORS:

As Poe stresses, and I admit in Vixi, I have been a lifelong non-conformist. Many in the academic profession do not welcome non-conformism, and this is one aspect of university teaching that I particularly dislike. I have always hated “groupthink.” I write and teach history as it appears to me. I do not mind if others do not accept my views, so long as they respect my right to hold them.

I welcome the fact that in his review, Poe went below the surface to explain the reasons for my positions. He is right about the influence on me of my experiences as a Jewish youth in Poland, especially after its conquest by the Germans, and of the “philosophical history” of FranÇois Guizot. He understands the reasons for my emphasis on the autocratic tradition in Russia and approves of them (something rare in my experience). I appreciate his rejecting the charge of “Russophobia” occasionally leveled at me. And I am especially cheered by his closing sentence: “today we are all non-belongers.” For me, his review was a richly rewarding experience.

Richard Pipes

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

 

In his praiseworthy review of Richard Pipes’ memoir Vixi and his new study Russian Conservatism and Its Critics, Marshall Poe writes that “Pipes has never stopped trying to explain ‘them’ to ‘us.’” One assumes that “them” are the Russians, but the “us” is less clear. Is it Americans in general? Or the “non-belongers,” an unidentified group of rebels and detractors that makes an appearance at the conclusion of Poe’s article? Such vagueness, coupled with an “us versus them” framework, does not bode well for serious intellectual discussion and analysis.

Pipes himself, who is a noteworthy historian of the Russian revolution, needs no defenders. However, it is the task of a reviewer to raise questions about the subject at hand and to challenge the assumptions and conclusions of the author under review. Unfortunately, Poe accomplishes neither of these tasks. The reason for this appears to be Poe’s acceptance of Pipes’, or what he presents as Pipes’, basic methodology. Poe writes, “Indeed, the question central to all of Pipes’ future scholarship—what is the spirit of Russian civilization?—and the method by which he sought to answer it... were quintessentially philosophical.” As a student of both Russian and Jewish intellectual history and literature, I would agree that a philosophical scrutiny of history is a necessary and productive task, but to ask such a romanticized question as “what is the spirit of Russian civilization?”—or, for that matter, of any civilization—is a completely different matter. It is not at all radical or new to say that civilizations have no “spirit.” Recognizing this is not a matter of passing academic fashion or intellectual trends. While there are ideas put forth by certain intellectual groups at various points in history that purport to represent the spirit of a people or an era, it is precisely the job of the historian to recognize these ideas for what they are: ideological constructs, often put into political practice. The claim that any one of these ideas embodies the “organic” spirit of a civilization smacks of the worst kind of essentialism. Who defines the Russian spirit? Pushkin or Dostoevsky? Who defines the Jewish spirit? Maimonides or Isaac Luria? Such questions are unproductive. They cannot explain the complex, polyphonic conversation that occurs within each civilization.