In Mallon’s new historical novel, “Two Moons,” the setting is again Washington, but the action is compressed into a single year, 1877. The forgotten corner of history he illuminates this time is the world of the astronomers at the Naval Observatory, then in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood. 1877, it turns out, is the year that the “scientifics,” as the chronologically correct Mallon calls them, discovered the two
satellites of Mars, convulsing the city with wonder. Washington’s older residents are “walking through an eternal aftermath,” their lives still uprooted by the Civil War. A rising
generation, meanwhile, knows the carnage and chaos only as a distant childhood distraction, and, for them, a lustrous science- and technology-driven future beckons.

Two fictional characters give us entree into this world. Cynthia
May, a Civil War widow blessed with a freakish talent for numbers, joins the
observatory as a “human computer.” She begins to fall for Hugh Allison, a
clever but underachieving astronomer. As the pair’s relationship deepens, Asaph Hall (the man who discovered Mars’ moons) and other historical figures flit in and out of the
scene. Cynthia and Hugh’s affair –and, in fact, all the work at the research
center — takes place under an almost literal dark cloud: The fetid Foggy
Bottom swamps are thought to carry malaria, and the observatory has a
mortality rate fit for a combat unit.

For Cynthia, who suffered through years of melancholic listlessness after the
death of her soldier husband, the observatory job is a step toward
self-assertion. At first, it’s simply the effortless toying with figures that
brings her peace, but “the astral purpose of all the numbers soon began to
paint her imagination … Her mind soon began sliding upon the tangents she
was only supposed to be measuring.” Hugh’s mind, meanwhile, is sliding in
directions that threaten his career. The planets bore him. He begins to speak
in gnomic, vaguely messianic terms about a grand, mad project: somehow
projecting something — energy? himself? — outward, into the heavens.
“Cynthia,” he tells her, “I have immortal longings.”

During a halfhearted visit to an astrologer, Cynthia runs across Roscoe Conkling, the strutting, rakish Republican senator who has just helped place Rutherford B. Hayes into the White House after a disputed election. Now Conkling is using the stars to chart his battle against reformers who want to wrest government jobs from the party machines.
Mallon must have had a blast sketching this “law-making satyr,” with his disdain for alcohol and tobacco, his sonorous speechifying and his “well-tended torso.” Cynthia has a hunch that Conkling might be useful in nudging Hugh’s project along. For his part, the high-minded Conkling gets a hard-on when Cynthia squares big numbers in her head. She strings along this elemental man for a time, but when he catches on to her game, all his egomaniacal energy is directed against her.

Mallon is effective at evoking a time — not so unlike ours — when rationalism and mystical thought overlapped in unpredictable, personal ways. (Cynthia views astrology as “a gaudy grease that makes the heavens move faster.”) Artful scientific metaphors dot the
book, as when Mallon notes that Cynthia’s “once mad grief hardened, like gas into solid.” As the plot heats up, however, and Cynthia and Hugh race to pull off their scheme, incident supplants atmosphere and psychology, and the spell breaks a bit. Maybe it depends on your own views about the significance of the cosmos’ vastness, but Hugh’s hunger to literally send a signal to the stars left me cold.

Toward the end, too, the reader senses the author’s hand moving his characters a little too purposefully through the well-researched city scenes, aligning his astral figures of speech just so. The effect is a bit like when you’re sitting in a planetarium, watching the stars, and you look down for a minute and catch sight of the projector. After that, you can’t help noticing the seams in the ceiling. But the show can still be beautiful.

A poll by the nonprofit Pew Research Center, released in September, gently touched on this issue. The poll showed that 56 percent of Americans could not name a single Democratic candidate for president. Things weren’t better for the Republicans: Only 63 percent could recall the name “Bush.” (It’s a fair bet, moreover, that some of the people who came up with George W.’s name were thinking of his father.)

Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post media critic, declared the Pew results “stunning.” He and others suggested, however, that there was something special about this year’s race that was boring voters. (Insert your own Gore joke here.)

Yet one of the most consistent findings of public-opinion research is that the majority of Americans have long found politics about as exciting as a PBS documentary on the great crested grebe — and they pay a corresponding amount of attention to it. Consider the following, drawn from an almost endless number of examples that political scientists have turned up over the years: One month after the Republican revolution in 1994, in which conservatives, led by Newt Gingrich, finally took control of the House of Representatives, 57 percent of the electorate did not know who Gingrich was. Despite massive coverage in every newspaper in the country, and on every news program, the vast majority had never heard of the Contract with America. On a typical election day, 56 percent of Americans can’t name a single candidate in their own district, for any office.

Nor is this a new development or the product of young minds warped by MTV. In 1964, at the height of the Cold War, only 38 percent of Americans could say for sure whether the Soviet Union was a member of NATO. Most had no idea that the United States was pledged to go to war if West Germany was invaded. It’s not just the people who don’t vote who are uninformed, either — not that that would exactly be reassuring. Only a tiny sliver of active voters show even passing familiarity with the kinds of policy debates that elites take for granted.

When the public does have “opinions,” moreover, they are often self-contradictory. It’s well known, for example, that Americans hate Big Government. But, at the same time, most Americans also think the state should spend more on just about every public program you can name, except for welfare. Lest you think it is only ugly Americans who can’t think straight, polls show that the sophisticated, government-fetishizing French are just as out of it.

The subject of voter ignorance was first explored in depth by political scientists in the 1950s and 1960s, but it has inspired a fresh wave of scholarship in the past decade. The scholarly journal Critical Review, in fact, devoted its entire fall 1998 issue to it — a nice kickoff to the current presidential race. The topic of voter ignorance “is so important,” wrote the journal’s editor, Jeffrey Friedman, in an introductory essay, “that if we were to focus on it intently, it would overturn our understanding of politics.”

Friedman points out that almost all talk about public affairs assumes that citizens follow politics closely. When Ronald Reagan was elected, most pundits saw it as an across-the-board mandate for the conservative agenda, a massive lurch rightward. Clinton’s victory was then characterized as a shift back to the center. Clinton’s surviving the impeachment was a sign to many that the American public had lost its moral compass. In fact, however, most people base their votes, and their answers to polls, on only the vaguest feelings about how the economy, or life, is treating them.

Clearly, voter ignorance poses problems for democratic theory: Politicians, the representatives of the people, are being elected by people who do not know their names or their platforms. Elites are committing the nation to major treaties and sweeping policies that most voters don’t even know exist.

One side product of voter ignorance is a gap between what the press writes about campaigns and what people want, or need, to know. Political journalists travel on buses and planes with candidates and shmooze all day with their staffs. The nose-to-the-glass perspective leads to lots of front page stories about which campaign aide is up or down in his boss’s eye, who among the staff are feuding, and who dresses the candidate. “The stuff that never filters down to voters is the inside-the-campaign stuff — stories about why they are running one kind of ad, as opposed to another,” says Larry Bartels, a professor at Princeton University who has studied uninformed voters. He has found that incumbents get a 5-percentage-point boost from voter ignorance, because the fallback position of uninformed voters is to pull the lever for a name they’ve at least heard of.

Awareness of just how uninformed voters are should lead us to take polls with a grain of salt, Bartels notes. At this early point, the opinions on which they are based are so thin that the results are close to meaningless. (The polls can, however, assume a life of their own: People will start to form real opinions based on the dubious early polls — and will jump on the Bush bandwagon, for instance.)

Some scholars say their own views of campaigns changed when they started studying voter ignorance. “You often see the press and pundits saying that some small statement by a candidate will have a profound effect on how people perceive him,” says Ilya Somin, a graduate student in government at Harvard University, who contributed an essay to the Critical Review forum. “I’m not saying that never happens, but I’m more skeptical. Most statements candidates make are not noticed by most voters. The candidates and their staffs may understand that, but the press may not.”

In an attempt to avoid the elitist overtones of voter-ignorance theory, a number of political scientists have labored to show how democracy manages to limp along despite rampant cluelessness. They have offered several “solutions.” It may be, some have said, that people use rough rules of thumb to guide their decisions. Workers might not understand debates over interest rates or monetary policy, but they vote for incumbents whenever their bank balance is high. Or it’s been years since they followed politics, but they’ve trusted the Democrats since Truman’s day, and always vote for them. Or they might follow the lead of the handful of people in their circle who do monitor politics — that loudmouth at the country club, say, or the union foreman. These might not actually be terrible ways of making decisions that line up with your own self-interest, some researchers assert.

On a more technical note, some academics argue that a phenomenon called the “miracle of aggregation” sweeps in at the end of the day to save democracy. Many voters are ignorant, this line of thinking goes, but the ignorance is distributed randomly across the political spectrum. Therefore — here’s the miracle — only the votes of the informed end up making a difference. Plenty of questions remain about this theory, such as: Why assume that ignorance leads to random decision-making? Maybe elites, demagogues or the press can sway uninformed voters in one direction, thereby drowning out the votes of the informed minority.

Scholars diverge on how significant voter ignorance is, but few take as apocalyptic a view as Harvard’s Somin. He argues, in his Critical Review essay, that the combination of uninformed voters and — this is his own twist on the debate — the sheer size of government is proving fatal for democracy. Voters have a hard enough time remembering the candidates’ names and their parties, in his view; they simply have no idea what’s going on in the government’s 14 cabinet-level departments and 57 regulatory agencies — or how the trillions of dollars in the budget are being spent.

Since people can’t expand their brains, Somin proposes shrinking the state — turning back the clock, in effect, to the 19th century. In the 1800s, he argues, the American government handled only a few key issues, including war and peace, slavery, territorial expansion and federal banking policies. Typically, only one of these issues moved to the front burner at any given time. The public, therefore, was able to wrap its collective mind around each one as it came along, processing extremely complicated arguments. Witness, he says, the Lincoln-Douglas debates on slavery. (A skeptic might point out, however, that we don’t have any evidence that the public understood Lincoln’s and Douglas’ arguments any better than it does NAFTA.)

It may be that asking whether democracy works well is the wrong question. A better one is whether democracy prevents the worst sort of governmental abuse and oppression. Here the political scientists’ view is more hopeful: Politicians’ knowledge that the many-headed monster can be roused if the state steps too far out of line may be enough to keep the leaders in check.

This isn’t exactly a civics-textbook view of democracy. But thinking along these lines might bring us closer to understanding how our democracy actually functions — how it works in the real world, not in Rousseau or Locke. That people feel free to follow football instead of Bill Bradley’s health-care proposals may be a sign that things could be a lot worse than they are. That the press writes about Gore’s earth tones and Bradley’s spare tire shows that it, too, doesn’t think there’s all that much to worry about. (That’s a whole lot less excusable, given that so much of the press’s self-definition involves fostering an engaged citizenry.) Of course, such sunny hypotheses elide the other darker possibility.

Smug complacency could also be a sign that the public and the press are being duped into thinking things are swell when they aren’t. For activists and politicos, the lesson is probably that you can make all the careful, lucid arguments you want, but you have to catch people’s attention first. And that, to say the least, is an uphill battle.

Having set the faith-based organizations’ ball in motion, Gore must now attempt to
maintain the distinction between religious drug counseling groups and religious
educational programs. That distinction won’t be easy. He could make a narrow,
legalistic argument — that schools are a unique government responsibility, for
example — but that isn’t going to cut it with the true believers. Just as
with Clinton and welfare, Gore could be steering the Democratic Party toward
defeat on vouchers through short-sighted rhetoric meant to score
political points in the here and now.

But that possibility has done little to slow the vice president as he
attempts to make an impression amid the white noise on the campaign trail. Gore
elicited amens from a gathering of Salvation Army members in Atlanta last month
when he called for a “new partnership” between the government and religious
groups that run drug-treatment and job-placement programs. Basically, he
proposed splitting the difference between an over-reliance on private volunteerism
(President Bush’s “thousand points of light” route) and the public bankrolling of
the Great Society. If faith-based organizations can help addicts kick on a
shoestring budget, why not have Washington lend them a hand? Republicans,
including George W. Bush, were pushing this idea long before Gore, but the vice
president set it squarely before the electorate as no one else has.

But in the process of defending his proposal, Gore is treading into murky waters
for Constitutional purists who insist upon a clear separation of church and
state. Whereas Republicans see a seamless connection between using federal
dollars for faith-based groups and federally-funded school vouchers, Gore is a
staunch opponent of vouchers. Last July, Gore told cheering members of the
National Educational Association that vouchers were “fraudulent” and
“dangerous” — a threat to public education.

In his search for a political “third way,” Gore might have broken with the
Democratic tradition completely and argued that public money ought to go to
private and religious organizations of every stripe — schools as well as church
charities. Instead, he has gone for a Clintonian compromise, endorsing Republican
principles yet deploying them in pursuit of slightly more centrist policies.
Even if you assume that his argument is heartfelt (Republicans have accused him
of simply trying to co-opt one of “their issues”), Gore is playing a dangerous
game.

With his new policy statement, Gore is engaging in a standard political practice - taking jabs at the safest punching bag imaginable for an American politician: non-believers. He decried “the allergy to faith that is such a curious factor in much of modern society.”

This is a truly bizarre complaint. As Gore pointed out earlier in the same speech, America has a higher proportion of citizens who believe in God than any other Western country, a staggering 94 percent.

Gore also asserted that the religiously inclined need assurance that they can take part in policy debates “without feeling that they must hide their religious beliefs.” One might want to ask the stream of Republican presidential wannabes currently pandering to the Christian Coalition whether churchgoers are the shrinking violets Gore describes.

In an interview with Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr., Gore added a historical gloss to his culture-of-disbelief thesis. “What we’re really seeing,” he told Dionne, “is the end of a 400-year period of allergy to faith, where some over-read the implications of the Enlightenment to exclude belief in God, and adopted an easy and sometimes seemingly arrogant assumption that whoever believed in God is a little weak-minded, logically lazy, self delusional and insufficiently curious about the way the universe works.”

“I respect those who hold that view,” Gore said (“with a chuckle,” Dionne notes). Then the utterly uncritical columnist adds: “But he’s scored his point for God.”

Surely, God is grateful for the plug.

Some scholars say there really is evidence that faith-based programs can help drug addicts and the homeless better than secular programs do — provided, of course, that the participants want to embrace religion.

John DiIulio, a Princeton professor of public policy, has suggested that faith-based groups are “leveraging 10 times their own weight and solving social problems for us.” A 1996 U.S. News & World Report cover story described the success of a job-counseling group in Detroit called Joy of Jesus, which claimed an 80 percent placement rate, even though its clients were indigent and unskilled. Michigan was so impressed with the results that it offered to subsidize Joy of Jesus — provided that the group drop its emphasis on prayer, to keep the relationship constitutionally sound. But after the change, clients weren’t gripped by the program in nearly the same way as their predecessors, and success rates dropped precipitously.

While it may earn him political chits, Gore’s proposal may not be the silver bullet for helping America’s poor. Even so, it would represent a simple evolution in policy — albeit a rather big step — rather than a revolution. National faith-based groups like the Salvation Army have long received public money, on the condition that the funds pay for food, counseling and beds, not proselytizing. In the past, some Salvation Army chapters have been asked to remove crucifixes from their walls or to delete the word “salvation” from stationery; those fights are rare now.

Through the efforts of Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Mo., the 1996 welfare bill included a provision that opened the door for smaller, local groups to bid on social-service contracts. The Gore plan would make government money available to hundreds more. It would also make clear, once and for all, that faith can be a central part of the programs.

Lt. Col. Paul Bollwahn, the national social-services consultant for the Salvation Army, says the Gore-Ashcroft plan would do no more than “level the playing field.” As he sees it, the government now discriminates when it shells out money for social services. When it does give religious groups money, it asks them to jump through hoops “to deny who they are.” He says the Gore plan would end the quibbling over crucifixes and let religious groups get down to the business of helping the poor.

Critics like Americans United for Separation of Church and State, on the other hand, think the Gore plan would open a Pandora’s box of problems. Taxpayers, in effect, would be required to contribute to religious groups they disagree with — or even despise. Atheists would be financing fundamentalists. Fundamentalists would be financing Muslims. Homosexuals would be subsidizing anti-gay churches. Money is fungible, after all, and so subsidies earmarked for soup kitchens inevitably free up money for other purposes.

Moreover, although Gore didn’t stress this point, his proposal would also release faith-based groups that take federal money from the grip of anti-discrimination laws — a concession they have long pushed for. On one level this seems reasonable: Methodists would hire Methodist counselors, for example. But consider the implications: Federal money would underwrite positions for which, in various circumstances, Catholics, Jews, Muslims or homosexuals could not apply.

Gore insists that no one would be forced to use a faith-based programs. Every community would have a “secular alternative.”

Given tight budgets, it is likely that large outlays of cash to religious charities would mean a corresponding reduction in spending on the secular programs that Gore comes so close to ridiculing. That’s exactly what teachers — and Democrats — have been arguing would happen to schools if vouchers were approved: Public schools would get asphyxiated.

Gore now faces the prospect of arguing that Republican voucher plans would siphon off desperately needed money from public schools, while simultaneously making the case that his own faith-based organizations plan will not hurt secular programs. Dancing that dance is going to require near-Clintonian flexibility.

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.

Among Armenian-Americans, the bitterest feelings are reserved for Princeton University, whose distinguished Near Eastern Studies Department is viewed with the sort of distaste normally inspired by off-the-grid militias that celebrate Hitler’s birthday. Unlike UCLA, Princeton took the money that Turkey offered, in the early ’90s. What’s more, it then hired a scholar, Heath Lowry, who, during a long stint at the Institute of Turkish Studies in Washington, had advised Turkish diplomats on how to respond to Armenian criticism of Turkey. Two other Princeton professors, Bernard Lewis and Norman Itzkowitz — among the most prominent in their field — have also been the target of letter-writing campaigns for “denying” the genocide. (With less fanfare and fireworks, Portland State, Georgetown, Indiana University, the University of Washington and Harvard have also installed Turkish chairs with the help of funding from the Turkish government.)

The Turkish-chair debate hits just about every academic hot-button imaginable. Armenian-Americans claim that the chairs — and, more generally, what they see as the biases of scholarship on Turkey — demonstrate how a foreign power can skew American research to its own ends.

Mutual charges of ethnic intolerance further inflame the issue. The Armenians say that a refusal to term the 1915 catastrophe a genocide amounts to a direct assault on their diasporic community. “There is frustration among the survivors of the genocide that there tends to be a double standard,” says Richard Hovannisian, who holds a chair in Armenian studies at UCLA. “We won’t tolerate denial of the Jewish Holocaust, but when it comes to the Armenian genocide, there is a lot of hedging, a lot of references to ‘what the Armenians call a genocide.’” The Turkish-studies professors, meanwhile, say that it is Western ignorance of the Near East, combined with long-cherished stereotypes about Turkish brutality, that has led to blind acceptance of an entirely one-sided view of the events of 1915.

Given the moral and intellectual issues at stake, it’s not surprising that the rhetoric is as extreme as it is. Accepting financial assistance from Turkey, says Dennis Papazian, director of the Armenian Research Center at the University of Michigan at Dearborn, is “like a partnership with Hitler or Stalin.”

“The last stage of genocide is to erase memory,” he adds, “and it is pretty apparent that that is what the Turkish government is trying to do. It wants to instill its point of view in the major universities, where it can influence the next generation of leaders.”

Peter Balakian, a professor of English at Colgate University who has spearheaded a campaign against the endowed chairs, speaks of the “corruption of Turkish studies worldwide.”

“Even people inside Turkish studies acknowledge it is not a real discipline,” he says. “You cannot have a career in that field unless you accept the state’s version of history. I’ve never heard of anything this bad in higher education.”

Absurd and offensive charges, say the Turkish-studies specialists. The Turkish government may have a history of sweeping dark periods in Turkey’s past under the rug, but American professors are hardly Turkish agents, they point out. “This is an organized tactic of suppression,” says Stanford Shaw, an emeritus professor of Turkish history at UCLA. “This is not simply the story of a chair,” he adds. “It is part of a longstanding harassment of people who work on Turkish studies.”

Shaw has seen that harassment firsthand. In 1978, during an outbreak of anti-Turk Armenian terrorism worldwide (reportedly stemming from Beirut), his house was bombed. He and his family were inside, but escaped unharmed. For his family’s safety, he stopped writing and lecturing about the events of 1915. “People are afraid to write anything about this subject,” he says. “It’s a brutal suppression of academic freedom.”

“None of the scholars who are pummeled as genocide deniers deny that large numbers of the Armenian population were destroyed,” explains Christopher Murphy, a specialist on Turkey at the Smithsonian and president of the Turkish Studies Association. (As a scholar of 15th and 16th century literature, he has some distance from the fight.) “What exactly happened is a question of scholarly disagreement. But to a large number of Armenians, if you investigate the cause of the destruction you are a denier. There is so much bad feeling that it is almost impossible to have a scholarly dialogue, or a civil dialogue.”

As Murphy’s comments suggest, lurking behind the dispute is the politics of “genocide.” Coined in 1944 to capture the enormity of the Holocaust, the word has since bred some of the ugliest fights in academia. Some scholars consider it a “God term” that shuts off important historical discussion, lumps together disparate atrocities and serves chiefly as a moral trump card. Others consider its selective use crucial to a morally nuanced understanding of the past. (As well as the understanding of the present — witness the debate over whether the Serbs have committed genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo.)

Given the hardened feelings on both sides, it may be fruitless to try to give an “objective” account of the massacres of Armenians, but “Unveiling Turkey” (Overlook Press), a new book by the Wall Street Journal’s Istanbul bureau chief, Hugh Pope, and his wife, Nicole, who reports for the French newspaper Le Monde, offers a carefully weighed version. Contrary to Turkish claims, the Popes point out that the Armenians had a distinct national identity for 1,000 years in eastern Turkey. Contrary to current Armenian assertions, however, they also describe Armenians as aggressive nationalists in the period after 1890.

As Turkey, which had sided with Germany, came under assault from France and England in the west and Russia in the east, the Young Turks — who seized power from the Ottomans in 1908 — came to view the Armenians as the enemy within. In fact, Armenians did begin to desert the Turkish army and attack Turkish towns and outposts.

When Turkey’s efforts to quell the skirmishes failed, the government ordered the expulsion of every Armenian man, woman and child from Anatolia — sending them on a forced march toward Syria, allowing them to take only what they could carry. The result was “horrors,” the authors say, that were “some of the worst of any war” — sporadic massacres, starvation and death by exposure. Whether the Turkish government intended to annihilate — as opposed to brutally uproot — the Armenians is “still being debated,” the Popes write, but they do say that “it is hard to escape the conclusion that there was some central involvement.” Conspicuously, however, they decline to use the word genocide.

The Turkish government’s treatment of this history has been obscene. In a 1995 book, “Armenian Violence and Massacre in the Caucasus and Anatolia,” published under the auspices of the state archives, the archives’ director, Ismet Binark, argues that “the Armenian question” has been invented as part of a scheme to undermine Turkey in the world’s eyes. “The Turks have always been fair and just and tender against the people and minorities under their patronage,” Binark writes in the egregiously translated English edition. The Armenians, however, were guilty of “ingratitude and betrayal” during World War I. The book then offers page after page of examples of Armenian atrocities against Muslims. It’s the kind of creepy garbage, in other words, that gives fascist propaganda a bad name.

What does the Turkish mangling of history have to do with American scholars? Armenian-American activists point to what they say are strings attached to the chairs. The deeds for several of them say that the scholars chosen must “maintain cordial relations” with professors in Turkey and do research in Turkish archives. Defenders say that this is the sort of boilerplate language you will find in the case of any donation. The critics beg to differ. “Imagine if, in the years when there was a Soviet Union, American scholars had to maintain ‘cordial relations’ with Soviets in order to keep a position,” suggests UCLA’s Hovannisian.

The stipulation that a historian of Turkey must do work in Turkish archives might seem to fall somewhat short of the bar of outrageousness. Yet Armenian-Americans say the clause is the linchpin of further censorship. The Turkish national archives, they say, discriminate against scholars whose work is critical of the state. Two researchers, one from England and one from Germany, claim they have been kicked out of the archives for working on the Armenian genocide. Bafflingly, Turkish-studies scholars cannot agree among themselves whether this sort of thing happens. “The archives are absolutely open,” says the Turkish Studies Association’s Murphy, although he says red tape can still be a problem; others have their doubts.

UCLA’s Professor Shaw says the condition that holders of the chairs do work in Turkish archives is essential, given the racist history of Turkish studies. Up until World War II, he notes, it was common for Turkish “experts” to not even know the language. They relied, instead, on the bias-filled accounts of Western diplomats and sojourners.

Curiously, UCLA voted not to accept the chair even if the controversial conditions were removed. The department concluded, in other words, that taking money from Turkey was inherently corrupting. This is a far trickier issue. Many foreign governments sponsor academic programs in the United States. (Japan, through the Japan Foundation, for example.) And many corporate interests finance chairs. (Hence such marvels as Wayne State University’s “Kmart Professor of Marketing.”) All donors — including, it is safe to say, those who create chairs in Armenian studies — hope to get something in return for their largess. It has traditionally been up to university faculties to maintain a firewall between the sources of money and academic decisions.

The Turkish-studies professors say that the unusual treatment of Turkey in the UCLA case shows that it is ethnic politics, not academic standards, that determines the outcome of the Turkish-chair debates. The Armenians counter that Turkey’s unusual interest in rewriting the past is reason enough for the difference.

Some scholars are trying to kick-start a civil discourse among Armenians, Turks and academics. Ronald Suny, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who specializes in Armenian history, last year became the first Armenian scholar to lecture in Turkey on what he unflinchingly calls a genocide. He is putting together a conference in the United States that would bring together the various camps. “I’m developing the view that we Armenians have talked enough amongst ourselves,” he says.

Yet there are plenty of signs of intransigence, too. During the Michigan debate, the state’s Armenian-American community helped support an activist named Serop Nenejian, who monitored the situation full time and kept the community abreast of every twist in the story. Nenejian holds the dimmest view of Turkey imaginable. He views it as an evil empire whose tentacles of influence extend into the White House, the State Department and American big business.

Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, Washington and Portland State are guilty of nothing less than “prostitution,” he insists, for accepting Turkish money.

“The universities are corrupt,” he says, bitterly. After a moment, he adds: “They are worse than corrupt.”

None of this would have surprised H.L. Mencken, who considered it a fool’s errand to try to make a living doing intellectual work in the United States, home to boobus Americanus, but it has everyone at the Modern Language Association stymied. The graduate students demand that the professors do something about it — they plan a quasi-palace coup in San Francisco. The
professors wince and say they are sympathetic, but they can’t do anything
without the help of their universities, and the universities say they’d love
to help, but this year is financially tight.

In the long term, the answer seems simple enough: Decrease the supply until it equals the demand. Reduce the intake of new graduate students until, say, 80 or 90 percent are finding jobs in their field. Here is where we hit the crux of the matter: The system works just fine for everyone except graduate
students. Since they have no power to change the rules of the game, it will
continue to be played this way. Conservatives claim that Marxism is alive
these days only in university literary departments. There may be a reason.
Higher education is one of the few industries left that thrives on the
exploitation of a lumpenproletariat.

An October report from the Modern Language Association, published in the association’s journal, PMLA, shows how higher education’s version of three-card monte works. Tenure-track jobs — the good ones — haven’t grown at the same rate as enrollment in graduate school. As a result, those jobs have become more prestigious. As the full professors puff ever fuller with prestige, they view teaching subjects like freshman writing as beneath them. Which means more graduate students and adjuncts are required to teach those lower-level courses. This system saves the universities money. From 1970 to today, the proportion of part-time teachers grew from 22 percent of all professors to 40 percent.

The MLA leadership says it has been begging universities to end this vicious cycle, but they don’t listen (we are shocked). So the MLA has been reduced to claiming that a Ph.D. in English can be good preparation for many careers: journalism, Web design, law. The graduate students are out for blood. You’re telling us now? Seven years of penny-pinching, mastering the hieroglyphics of high theory, and writing a dissertation — all to prepare us to go back to school and study law? The MLA also says departments should inform students at application time about job-market trends. (Cigarette-style warnings aren’t just a joke.)

For those students still in the pipeline, and without the brilliant,
marketable insight of the moment — or the right connections — there is probably no choice but to look outside of the academy for work. Down the road, however, to stop the exploitative cycle, the professors with the plum jobs will have to show some more courage than they have so far. They’ll have to fight against the very trends that make their own positions so esteemed. English departments can, on their own, vote to reduce the admission of graduate students; they aren’t powerless. And senior professors can — God forbid — go into the trenches and help teach low-level courses, taking a hit in the free time they have for research. They can refuse to accept more adjuncts in their departments. No one wants to go first — both out of self-interest, and because the university president will scream, “Who’s going to teach freshman composition?” But let the president figure out how to create a system that doesn’t lean so heavily on graduate students and adjuncts. Her solution might actually include hiring more full-time, real, English professors.

More courageous would be for mediocre-or-worse departments to wave the white flag and stop admitting graduate students altogether. Do Idaho State
University and Middle Tennessee State University — ranked 126th and 127th out
of 127 graduate programs by the National Research Council in 1995 — think they
are doing anyone any favors by pumping out more Ph.D.’s?

Silly arguments have been raised within the MLA against reducing the number of graduate students. Some senior professors — Rutgers’ Patricia Carter, for instance — refuse to act because doing so might mean a reduction in graduate-student diversity. But it simply doesn’t follow that a department
with 20 students must be less diverse than a department with 40.

A few of the dyed-in-the-wool lefties — notably Andrew Ross, of New York University — propound that if graduate-student enrollment is reduced, fewer well-trained intellectual radicals will be around for the next revolution. That seems to underestimate the political commitment of students. Even if a would-have-been graduate student takes a job at one of the hundreds of corporations scrambling for fresh blood, there’s no reason she can’t read
Marx, Foucault and Derrida after 5 o’clock and carry on the revolution
from within. The only difference is that she would be a revolutionary whose
rent is up to date and who can afford to eat out once in a while.