Iraqi students to be exposed to challenging ideas at Harvard, will have to use critical thinking - Democracy Project

Democracy Project has an interesting and lengthy post on six Iraqi students attending a model UN at Harvard, at Harvard's expense. It begins:

Iraq's universities were ignored during the long dark night that was Saddam's reign. In that, they share some of the problems faced by Eastern European universities after the Wall fell: aging infrastructures, a cowed and politicized professoriate and student body, and the effects of a generation of isolation from the world's great centers of higher learning.

Therefore, it's heartening to know that some Iraqi students are now able to travel abroad -- something nearly impossible to before -- to be exposed to Western higher education. Or at least, it would be heartening if American schools weren't filled with people who opposed Iraq's liberation, wish America's attempt to allow democracy to flourish there ill, and preach their own form of anti-intellectual orthodoxy.

Democracy Project then digs into the background behind the conference course Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality 1203, “Gender and the Cultures of US Imperialism” that the students will attend while on campus at Harvard. From the syllabus of the course DP finds this nugget:

We will use the methods of Cultural Studies to consider US imperialism not only as a military venture, but as a cultural project. Cultural Studies is (to offer a very condensed definition) an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the creation and flow of power and resistance, especially through ordinary people’s uses of mass-marketed products. The field of Cultural Studies enables us to consider imperialism not as a narrowly defined governmental venture, but rather as a sprawling set of practices in which many, if not all, people participate.

Democracy Project is bothered that the Iraqi students will be exposed to these ideas. Well, DP, there is one big difference between the Iraqi universities of Saddam's reign and American universities: There's not a dictator preventing you from saying what you think. Out of American universities come ideas that compete in the marketplace of ideas. Some of those ideas find resonance in that marketplace and others do not. But no one is orchestrating which ideas get heard.

One skill the Iraqi students will need to develop in their new world is the skill to sort out amongst competing ideas which of those seem true to them. It will no longer be enough to assume that all they hear is the Bathist party line (or the Al Hurra line), and discount it as such.