The challenge to Brandeis's new Crown Center for Middle East Studies is how to keep ideology from driving scholarship. That's why the late Oxford Orientalist, Albert Hourani, confessed, "I gave up political history [because] it is very difficult not to direct it towards the future, towards your idea of what ought to happen. And that somehow distorts your view of what has happened." Such potential "distortion" is evident in recent expressions of University priorities: University President Jehuda Reinharz tells the Boston Jewish Advocate that Brandeis is "the think tank and action center of the Jewish community"; Haaretz that Brandeis' responsibility is "to promote the Jewish agenda in the world" and create research centers filling "a certain void which was created within the Jewish people"; and the Board of Trustees that the University mission includes "service to the Jewish community." What happens, then, to our academic mission and intellectual objectivity?

The Crown Center's inaugural conference began with discussion of the academic politics of Middle Eastern studies-a miniature of Middle Eastern politics. Martin Kramer from Tel Aviv University spoke first: a charming, articulate man, and an early candidate to direct the Crown. Kramer's blueprint, his book, Ivory Towers on Sand criticized most Middle East research centers. President Reinharz endorses his analysis. In "Israel in the Eyes of Americans, A Call to Action," presented in 2003 at the United Jewish Appeal/Federation, Reinharz condemned Middle East studies in America as "in sorry shape," "controlled by ideologically motivated forces" which have produced "biased and shoddy scholarship." As he told Haaretz, it's "enemy-occupied territory."

But ideology seduces us into endorsing shoddiness that we'd otherwise reject. And the inclusion at the Crown inaugural of speaker Israel Harel, an ex-Israel Defense Forces paratrooper and former chairman of the Council of Settlements-an authentic voice of the right, but surely no scholar-shows that control remains in the hands of "ideologically motivated forces," just different ones. Neither Kramer nor Harel were matched by significant political counterpoints.

Kramer's book, as he privately acknowledged, is very funny. It's not only an accusation of academic tragedy, but also a depiction of farce. My remarks on academic foibles during the comment period at the opening session emphasized this benign, human venality and mendacity which is, quite comically, pervasive in academic politics. Middle East studies is no exception. "Unlike computer science," the President responded during a dinner speech that evening, "Middle East studies isn't comedy-it's a matter of life and death." But science is also a matter of life and death: It has brought us the Internet, the Bomb, and the electronic battlefield.

If you take some of President Reinharz's and Martin Kramer's comments on Middle East studies, and substitute "Jews" for "Arabs," the result appears like a variation on the Czarist conspiratorial forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As is, these comments read like "Protocols of the Juniors of Islam." Kramer's book reminded me, instead, of comic academic novels like Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim.

Another challenge for the Crown Center is how to complement the University's fund-raising and development. Academic events, where difficult questions should be asked, can also have a significant developmental component. For example, Professor Deborah Lipstadt's recent lecture, "Truth at Stake," recounted her successful defense in the Holocaust denial libel suit brought by David Irving, an English not-so-crypto Nazi.

I wanted to ask: What distinguishes fact from interpretation in Holocaust memory? How are such memories manipulated for political gain? What necessitated assembling a $2 million legal team to defeat a clever, single-handed sociopath? I had lots of other questions, but at an event where potential donors to the University are being courted, I didn't want to mess it up. Can we invite so-called Israeli "New Historians"-Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Benny Morris-or Tom Segev, or Rashid Khalidi, or Norman Finkelstein, without blowing the roof off? After all, we survived neo-conservative Daniel Pipes.

Martin Kramer wants to keep all those guys out, since neither he nor his colleagues, he says, are ever invited to Columbia's pro-Palestinian center-an eye for an eye and a truth for a truth. The Crown Center could then be as an ideological counterweight to other Middle East research centers. This does our students no good: we need to listen to people, even those whose opinion we don't share, and who may discourage dissent at their home institutions. Every speaker deserves tough questioning. That's what distinguishes education from indoctrination.
The inevitable struggle with "truth unto its innermost parts" is not that truth is Edward Said-contaminated postmodernist putty, but that "whose truth?" has competing answers. Just ask Jews and Palestinians, or their single combat academic warriors.

Harry Mairson is a professor of computer science.