Institute of Turkish Studies - Controversies

Controversies

• In the 1980s, the Turkish government began founding a series of chairs in Turkish studies at major American universities (including the Atatürk chair in Turkish studies at Princeton University), and research centers like the Institute of Turkish Studies, founded in Washington, DC. These endeavors were to give a polished look to the academic's genocide denial. Some of the key members of the Institute, Stanford Shaw, Heath W. Lowry, and Justin McCarthy, argue against defining the Armenian events as genocide. In 1985, Lowry was instrumental in getting 69 academics to sign a letter against the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. The letter was printed in the New York Times and Washington Post.

• Amy M. Rubin, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, disclosed a petition of scholars that charge the Turkish government with a campaign to manipulate history to enforce its views of the Armenian Genocide. A year later, a story ran in the New York Times accusing Princeton of "fronting for the Turkish government." The university had accepted a large gift from Ankara to establish an Atatürk chair of Turkish studies, with the first occupant being Heath Lowry, executive director of the Institute of Turkish Studies, in 1994.

• In 1997, the University of California, Los Angeles, returned a $1 million grant to establish a chair in Ottoman studies, from the Turkish government, after it was revealed that scholars using archives in Istanbul would be refused access to any material that might confirm the Armenian Genocide of 1915.

• Donald Quataert, a professor of history at the State University of New York at Binghamton, served as chairman of the Institute of Turkish Studies board of governors from 2001 until 13 December 2006. He was forced to resign by Turkish Ambassador Nabi Sensoy after he refused to retract a scholarly book review in which Quataert wrote "what happened to the Armenians readily satisfies the U.N. definition of genocide." A few years before, Quataert said, members of the board checked what they thought was an irrevocable blind trust "and to our surprise it turned out to be a gift that could be revoked by the Turkish government." But in the fall, around the same time that Congress was debating the Armenian Question, Quataert was asked to speak at a conference about what had happened at the institute. He told members of the Middle Eastern Studies Association that the ambassador told him he must issue a retraction of his book review or step down—or put funding for the institute in jeopardy.

• Since the May 27 letter from the scholars association was sent, several associate and full members of the board have left. Marcie Patton, Resat Kasaba and Kemal Silay resigned; Fatma Muge Gocek said she would resign as well.