OpinionJournal - Taste

OpinionJournal - Taste

Professors on the Battlefield
Where the warfare is more than just academic.
BY EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN

Great article about multicultural - blending academicians with the military in understanding a foreign culture. Nice in the face of the current "anti-intellectualism." The military is bringing "intellectuals" (i.e., college professors) in to help out.

Excerpts:

The terms of this relationship are most evident in the new Counterinsurgency
Field Manual. In the face of a gruesomely persistent Iraqi insurgency, Gen.
Petraeus [commander of the multinational forces in Iraq. Gen. Petraeus, who
holds a doctorate from Princeton University in international relations] was
charged with revamping the outdated counterinsurgency doctrine. In an
unprecedented collaboration, he reached out to Sarah Sewall, who directs the
Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, to help him
organize a vetting session of the draft manual at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.

Journalists, human-rights activists, academics and members of the armed forces exchanged ideas about how to make the doctrine more effective and more humane.

In the Human Terrain System (what terminology! - how about emotional intelligence and multicultural EQ?), Marcus Griffin, a professor of anthropology at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va. has been sent to assist the military in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he, and others 'professors' serve as "cultural advisers" to brigade commanders. Griffin's job is to shed some light on the local culture-- "thereby diminishing the risk that U.S. forces unwittingly offend Iraqi sensibilities...he can improve Iraqi and American lives.

Hopefully he includes emotional intelligence. It's one thing to know anthropologically the people are different; another, to know what to do about it, and how.

Lastly, in a blog article, Tom Hayden is cited -- "a bizarre conception of the role of scholars in American life: that they should be held to a priestly standard of ethical purity.

"Are academics so much purer than anybody else that we can't ever be in
situations where we are confronting tough ethical choices?" asks Noah Feldman, a
professor of law at Harvard who briefly, in 2003, was an adviser to the
Coalition Provisional Authority. "If academics didn't get involved with these
kinds of difficult questions, maybe all that would be left is a department of
Kantian philosophy," he jokes. "Then we would be pure, but we would be
irrelevant."

Increase your emotional intelligence and multicultural awareness with THE EQ COURSE and "Emotional Intelligence and Multicultural Awareness." Useful in your own particular war zone! :-)