Trojan Horse at Southern Cal?

Proposed Arab studies center stirs up a campus row

To Los Angeles Businessman J. Robert Fluor, it seemed a natural way to benefit his two favorite institutions: the University of Southern California, which he serves as chairman of the board of trustees, and the Fluor Corp., an international construction firm he heads that last year did $272 million worth of business in Saudi Arabia alone. Fluor's brainchild was a $22 million research institute at U.S.C. to be called the Middle East Center and funded by American corporations, including his own, with a stake in the Middle East. After all, some 20% of U.S.C.'s enrollment is foreign (one of the nation's highest ratios), and a passel of Saudi princes has passed through there. When plans for the center were announced last month to U.S.C.'s trustees, however, Jewish leaders and the Los Angeles Times attacked it as a Trojan horse for Arab propaganda, and the center came under heavy fire from members of U.S.C.'s faculty senate.

There had already been uneasiness in parts of academe that some Middle Eastern nations, by freely spending their petrodollars to support programs at universities ranging from Georgetown to Stanford, were trying to gain undue influence in the U.S. Nonetheless, some of the resistance to the U.S.C. center seemed more emotional than anything else. Jewish Businessman Allen Ziegler, a U.S.C. alumnus,, announced that he had sent back his lifetime membership card in the Alumni Association in protest. Said Ziegler: "I wonder where they're going to put the mosque."

But there were other concerns as well, having less to do with geopolitics than with campus politics. As announced by U.S.C. President John Hubbard, responsibility for the financial support of the center was to be vested in a three-man committee comprising a Los Angeles-area businessman, a U.S.C. dean and U.S.C. Professor Willard Beling, a former employee of Aramco (Arabian American Oil Co.) and holder of the Saudi-endowed King Faisal Chair of Islamic and Arab Studies. Beling would also become the center's director, and many of the faculty were fretting over his not being subject to the university's normal committee checks and balances in making appointments and running the center. Quipped one professor: "Why not just set up a feudal society on the campus and establish fiefdoms instead of departments?"

The planned corporate support, and Fluor's Riyadh connections, caused some to wonder whether the center, under so loose a rein, would truly qualify as an academic enterprise. Asked a faculty critic: "Are we following an industrial model or an academic model?" Such doubts were aggravated by the fact that Hubbard presented the planned center to the faculty senate as a fait accompli, leaving no room for debate. Then, too, there was Fluor's ambiguous role. Said he: "People can say I have selfish interests, and obviously I have some. But I believe any time information is available, better decisions can be made."

Last week Hubbard defused much of the criticism by issuing a "binding" memorandum stating that control of the center's staff and budget would remain within the university's normal administrative channels. Still, the passions stirred by the incident may not cool so quickly. Los Angeles Assemblyman Mel Levine, for example, plans to seek a new state law requiring that "if foreign money is received by a California university, the sources [and] the content of all contracts agreed to must be publicly disclosed." Such a law would put foreign contributors to U.S. universities in much the same position as lobbyists for foreign countries, who are required to register with the U.S. Justice Department.

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