| Submit your comments on this article |
| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| The Troubling Case of Professor Stephen Cohen |
| 2015-02-04 |
| A top scholar in the field of Russian studies is denied funding for more Russia and East European studies, mostly because of his past articles about the civil war in southeastern Ukraine, published in his wife's magazine, The Nation, which appear to be sympathetic to Russian president Vladimir Putin. As an aside, I heard from other sources, that the amount Cohen wanted was around $400,000. Recently considerable attention has been paid on this blog and elsewhere to potential threats to academic freedom posed by the undue influence of outside donors on scholarship. One thinks immediately, of course, of efforts by the Koch brothers at Florida State and elsewhere to fund academic positions that reflect their personal ideology and of the possible impact of donors on the University of Illinois’s decision to summarily dismiss Professor Steven Salaita. But yesterday an article in the New York Times made public a quite different sort of donor controversy that has been brewing in the American Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), which also has quite troubling implications for academic freedom. Stephen F. Cohen is a respected senior scholar of Soviet history and politics, having taught for most of his career at Princeton and New York Universities. He is the author of several books, including a pathbreaking biography of Nikolai Bukharin, that have arguably been critical to shaping the field of Soviet studies over the past several decades. He is also married to Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation magazine. For several years vanden Heuvel’s KAT Charitable Foundation has funded, under ASEEES auspices, an annual dissertation award named for Cohen and his mentor and friend, the late political scientist and Stalin biographer Robert C. Tucker. In the wake of serious cutbacks in government and private funding available for research in Russian and Soviet studies, especially the 2013 termination by the State Department of Title VIII funding for graduate student research in Russia, Cohen and vanden Heuvel entered into discussions with ASEEES Executive Director Lynda Park about potentially funding an additional program to support doctoral research in the field. |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #3 He has also been branded an “apologist,” a “useful idiot,” and a “dupe.” Is this not accurate? |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2015-02-04 21:04 |
| #2 I don't get it. It's not like he claimed that AGW is a hoax, or alleged that there are extensive psychological differences between men and women. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2015-02-04 13:07 |
| #1 No, Cohen wasn't denied funding, he (or rather his wife) was trying to DONATE money to the American Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). The money was to be used to fund 6 fellowships in Russian Studies. Cohen and his wife wanted the fellowships to be named after Cohen. People in the ASEEES didn't want to name the fellowships after Cohen, and said they would only accept the money if the requirement to name it after him was removed. The amount Cohen's wife was going to donate was around $400,000. Apparently Cohen is so controversial around the ASEEES that they didn't want his money enough to be willing to put his name on the Scholarships. Well, it's a free country. If Cohen and his wife want to spend $400,000 funding fellowships in Russian Studies I expect they won't have much trouble finding another organization willing to help. |
| Posted by: DLR 2015-02-04 12:16 |