Who's Bizarre?

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Although he calls my arguments "bizarre and diversionary," in his response to my letter to The Crimson (May 5) Professor Stanley Hoffman agrees with many of them. Scholarship should be based on sources that are accessible to all scholars who are competent to evaluate the evidence. As a rule, scholars should not work on classified materials (as Professor Nadav Safran did not in this case). The offer of privileged access of scholars to personal papers no less the privileged access of scholars to the archives of closed societies raise serious problems for scholarship aiming at truths about such persons or societies and arouses suspicion as to why some scholars, and not others, are allowed to see the evidence. We also agree that scholars indicate openly what sources they have used.

We disagree about the relative importance of openness concerning funding compared to openness of sources and other sources of corruption of scholarship. I repeat that the focus on sources of funding and the relative neglect of the issue of openness reflects a broader erosion of principles that all scholars as scholars share with one another concerning intersubjectively valid ideas of evidence and its assessment. The work itself, its arguments and evidence, is the thing, a more important thing, in my opinion, than knowing who paid for it. Openness is a value. So is my right to privacy. I always have been "open" about the sources of funding for my research, though I can imagine situations in which others would have good, not sinister or corrupt, reasons for not wanting to do so.

Perhaps scholars ought to reveal sources of funding for the reasons Professor Hoffmann offers. But I disagree with Professor Hoffmann that "concealment (of sources of funding) deprives them (readers and students) of an important element in evaluating research." Quite the contrary, the source of funding is not important in evaluating research. Again it is the work itself that matters. If we should reveal sources of funding, why not also membership in any political organization that has an interest in a particular issue? Or should we make obligatory an ideological autobiography to inform the reader about the axes about to be ground in the guise of scholarship? There are many sources of bias, and funding is by no means always or even usually the most important.

I doubt that, as Professor Hoffmann suggests, anyone was drafted to work for the OSS in World War II. In my letter, I clearly stated that scholars are under no obligation to assist the CIA. To say that American intelligence would be improved if scholars offered help if they as individuals so desire, is hardly comparable, as Professor Hoffmann implied, to advocating state sponsored propaganda. While I have no objections to being labeled a neo-conservative--though my political views, no less than Professor Hoffmann's, deny such easy categorization--references to unnamed "ideologues" who are willing to justify any means in a crusade against the Soviet Union are not helpful in illuminating the issues at hand. Like Professor Hoffmann, I dislike fanatics and ideologues of all stripes and hues. As he has taught me and several generations of students and colleagues, the world is very complex. Recognizing that there are more ways to write a bad and dishonest book than being paid to do so hardly takes us down the path of obliterating the differences between liberal societies and their enemies. Liberal societies rest, in part, on the skeptical, conservative, very Tocquevillian, and Hoffmannesque awareness, that human nature finds many ways to fall short of the norms we would all like to realize. Jeffrey Herf   Center for International Affairs