Turkish studies? Most colleges don't even offer courses in the subject. Where it is taught, it draws a handful of majors and graduate students. Yet several Turkish-studies programs, and the universities that sponsor them, have plunged into a century-old blood feud. Obscure lectures by historians of Turkey can spur nationwide letter-writing campaigns. Efforts to hire Turkish-studies professors have inspired petitions, protests from the likes of Susan Sontag and Arthur Miller and even threats of violence.

The crux of the dispute is the deep distrust many Armenian-Americans and human-rights activists have of scholars who study Turkish history. The central Armenian experience of the 20th century, after all, was the death of as many as 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, in Eastern Turkey, during brutal deportations by the Young Turk government. This catastrophe is often called the first genocide in a genocide-ridden century.

Yet Turkey has always scoffed at that interpretation, claiming that the Armenian dead were casualties in a scorched-earth civil war, in the midst of a world war in which Turkey was besieged on several fronts -- a world war in which as many as 3 million Turks died.

Every neutral scholar agrees that the Turkish position is propaganda. (Preposterously, Turkey has claimed it was the Armenians who tried to commit genocide against the Turks.) But many American Turkish-studies scholars believe that the Armenian tragedy was far more complicated than people with a casual knowledge of Near Eastern history may think. They argue that the often-cited analogy with the Jewish Holocaust is misleading. They don't deny that there were unspeakable horrors. Men were taken from women and children to be slaughtered and refugees were attacked by soldiers. In some cases only 100-200 refugees survived from a group of 20,000. What Turkish studies scholars do question is whether all these atrocities resulted from a centralized plan to systematically destroy the Armenian people. Unsurprisingly, this view earns them the enmity of the Armenian community.

The latest flash point in this long-simmering dispute is an attempt by several major universities in recent years to establish professorships in Turkish studies, with the help of funds donated by the Turkish government. When word leaked out last fall, for example, that the University of Michigan was soliciting money for such a chair, Armenian activists deluged university officials with angry e-mail messages. "We were catching all kinds of hell," says Michael Bonner, director of the university's center for Middle Eastern studies. The protests grew to the point where state legislators were talking about forbidding state colleges from accepting any money at all from foreign governments. Such a move, professors observed, could have crippled the university's area-studies programs, which commonly depend on foreign funds. Michigan finally placed the proposal on hold -- not because of the protests, it claims, but because Turkey didn't seem all that receptive to the idea. The school now plans to go cap in hand to private donors in Turkey.

Meanwhile, UCLA's History Department is still nursing bruises from an 18-17 vote, in December 1997, to reject a $1 million donation from Turkey that would have helped create a professorship in Turkish history. Los Angeles is home to America's largest Armenian population, and the community mobilized against the donation. During the run-up to the vote, vague threats of violent retaliation, should the chair be approved, poured into the department.

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