In "Critics Accuse Turkish Government of Manipulating Scholarship" (October 27), Heath W. Lowry, Ataturk Chair of Turkish Studies at Princeton University, is show to have worked directly with the Turkish government to intimidate and discredit scholarship about the Armenian genocide.
In 1990, Mr. Lowry drafted a letter for the Turkish Ambassador to send to Robert Jay Lifton that attempted to intimidate Professor Lifton, because he mentioned the Armenian genocide in his book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Mr. Lowry was then director of the Institute of Turkish Studies, an institution funded by the Turkish government, as is the Princeton chair.
Abraham Udovitch, Mr. Lowry's colleague in Princeton's Near Eastern-studies department--which Mr. Lowry chairs--says in support of his chairman that he is "very able" and "a leading expert in Turkish studies and a master of Turkish."
Putting aside for the moment the question of whether a former propagandist for a foreign government is a fit recipient for a chair (funded by that government) at an American university, let's examine Mr. Lowry's scholarly achievement as judged by his publications. He is the author of three books: The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau's Story(1990) and Studies in Defterology (1992), both published only by Isis Press in Istanbul, Turkey; and The Islamization and Turkification of the CIty of Trabzon, ca. 1486-1583 (1993), published by Darwin Press, a small publisher in Princeton, N.J.
The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, a paperback of 90 pages, is an attempt to discredit an account of the Armenian genocide by Henry Morgenthau, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916. Mr. Lowry's book is in just 53 of the 20,000 academic and research libraries whose holdings are listed by the On-line Computer Library Center Inc. Studies in Defterology is held by 14 libraries, and The Islamization and Turkification of the City of Trabizon is in one library. Furthermore, according to Social Sciences Citation Index (which indexes 2,100 journals in more than 50 languages), Mr. Lowry was cited only twice from 1987 to 1995.
The relationship between this kind of scholarly record and a chair at Princeton University forces one to ask: What are the standards for appointment to a chair at Princeton? What was the relationship between Mr. Lowry's appointment and his work for the Turkish government? Mr. Udovitch, in defense of Mr. Lowry, invokes academic freedom. But isn't academic freedom compromised if a foreign government imposes its agenda on the academy?
The Armenian genocide was a major event in 20th-century history that has been documented by eight decades of scholarship, based on an abundance of documents in state archives around the world (including Ottoman Turkish court-martial records), eyewitness accounts, photographs, and the testimony of survivors. Would an American university appoint to a chair in European history a "scholar" who denies the Holocaust?
Peter Balakian
Professor of English
Colgate University
Hamilton, N.Y.
Roger Smith
Professor of Government
College of William and Mary
Williamburg, Va.