A Life Beyond Boundaries

A Life Beyond Boundaries by Benedict Anderson Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: A Life Beyond Boundaries by Benedict Anderson Read Free Book Online
Authors: Benedict Anderson
and wartime Indonesia. He was one of Kahin’s first students, though he was the slightly older man. It says something for the fluidity of academic life in those days that his dissertation in political science was no barrier to him becoming a professor of history at Yale.
    Pelzer and Benda gave the Yale program a ‘European’ culture and outlook in contrast to a more ‘American’ Cornell. But the two programs were in driving distance of one another, the faculties were friendly to each other, and by the time I arrived at Cornell, the universities took turns hosting tough language classes during the summer.
    The four teachers who influenced me most as a graduate student formed a wonderfully diverse constellation of characters, talents and interests. Claire Holt and Harry Benda were my fellow Europeans, and very interested in history and culture. Benda had a gifted mind, a thoroughly sceptical outlook on life, and a restless temperament. He worked at being ‘unconventional’ in his thinking. He was loyal to the US but never really felt himself part of it. Claire Holt was very special to me, and I spent many hours at her house, asking her about art, dance, archaeology and Javanese life. Sometimes we would read Russian poetry aloud together. She was not at all academic, and helped me not to become too embedded in academic culture.
    Kahin and Echols were two perfect American gentlemen, kind, gentle, morally upright, and devoted to their students. Echols introduced me to modern Indonesian literature and gave me an abiding love of dictionaries. Still today, the favourite shelf in my personal library is filledonly with dictionaries of many kinds. And every time I go to the fabulous library collection that bears his name, I think of his selfless dedication. Kahin formed me politically, with his progressive politics, his activist commitment to justice at home and in the rest of the world, and his tolerance of honest difference.
    Sharp and Kahin were both intelligent academic politicians who recognized the power of disciplinary departments in American universities. They also understood, better than Pelzer and Benda at Yale, that the long-term growth and stability of Southeast Asia programs depended on new faculty being integrated, intellectually and financially, into these departments. New, young professors in America are on trial for their first six years, during which they can be dismissed very easily. In the sixth year, at the latest, they come up for an intensive review of their teaching and publication records. If they pass, they move up in rank from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor, and get lifetime tenure, meaning that they cannot be dismissed except for criminal activity or serious sexual scandals.
    The Sharp-Kahin strategy therefore involved two stages. The first was to find youngsters capable of securing tenure by showing strong disciplinary credentials. (Usually departments were not much interested in Southeast Asia as such.) Having located such youngsters they would then use Rockefeller and Ford money to pay the salaries of these young scholars for a few years, on the understanding that if they did well from a disciplinary viewpoint, they would be moved over to their department’s regular salary budget. The second step was to make sure the youngsters did a lotof undergraduate teaching on subjects having nothing to do with Southeast Asia. In my case, I taught subjects like ‘Traditions of Socialism’, ‘Politics in the British Commonwealth’, ‘The Political Role of the Military’, or ‘Politics and Literature’. This involved a lot of work, but it protected the program from lapsing into isolation and Orientalism. The crucial thing was that every professor in the program should have a firm base in a discipline, and be able to teach many more subjects than just Southeast Asia.
    It was still quite hard to realize these goals in the 1950s, but the situation

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