Over at the new, independent Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan has been hosting an interesting thread on why academic writing is frequently abysmal. As someone who tries hard to make even my academic writing clear and accessible and who tries to instill that value in my students, I've followed the thread with interest.

For starters, I don't think the problem is that no one encourages future academics to write well. In my own case, for example, I was fortunate to study with Alex George at Stanford as an undergrad and with Kenneth Waltz at Berkeley during graduate school, and both repeatedly stressed the importance of writing well. Waltz didn't do a lot of line-editing of grad student papers or dissertations, but he certainly let me know when he thought my writing was obscure, verbose, disorganized, or just plain confused. He also spoke openly about the importance of writing in his graduate courses, encouraged students to read books such as Fowler's Modern English Usage, and was scornful of the trendy neologisms that infest academic writing like so many weevils.

I also don't think the problem is due to poor editing at journals or university presses. I've published in over a dozen academic journals, with a prominent university press, and with two different commercial publishers, as well in a number of journals of opinion. Almost all of the editors or copy-editors with whom I've worked were helpful and attentive, and some were superlative. Indeed, I can think of only one case in nearly thirty years where a manuscript of mine was truly butchered by an editor (it was actually done by an intern) and fortunately the magazine let me repair the damage before the article appeared.

So why is academic writing so bad?

One reason academic writing is sometimes difficult is because the subjects being addressed are complicated and difficult and hard to explain with ordinary language. I have more than a little sympathy for philosophers grappling with deep questions about morality, time, epistemology, and the like, as these subjects are inherently slippery and it is easy to lose the reader in a fog of words. But it isn't inevitable even there. Some philosophers manage to write about very deep and weighty matters in a prose that is crystal clear. You still have to pay attention and think hard to understand what is being said, but not because the author is making it more difficult than it needs to be.

A second reason is the failure of many scholars to appreciate the difference between the logic of discovery and the logic of presentation. Specifically, the process by which a scholar figures out the answer to a particular question is rarely if ever the best way to explain that answer to a reader. But all too often articles and manuscripts read a bit like a research narrative: "First we read the literature, then we derived the following hypotheses, then we collected this data or researched these cases, then we analyzed them and got these results, and the next day we performed our robustness checks, and here's what we're going to do next." 

The problem is that this narrative form is rarely the best way to make a convincing case. Once you know what your argument is, really effective writing involves sitting down and thinking hard about the best way to present that argument to the reader. The most important part of that process is figuring out the overall structure of the argument -- what points need to be developed first, and then what follows naturally or logically from them, and so on. An ideal piece of social science writing should have a built-in sense of logical or structural inevitability so that the reader moves along the argument and supporting evidence as effortlessly as possible. 

Achieving this quality requires empathy. You have to be able to step outside your own understanding of the problem at hand and ask how your words are going to affect the thinking of someone who doesn't already know what you know and may even be inclined to disagree with you at first. Indeed, persuasive writing doesn't just convince the already-converted, a really well-crafted and well-supported argument will overcome a skeptic's initial resistance.

Why does this matter? Because the poor quality of academic writing is both aesthetically offensive and highly inefficient. Academics should strive to write clearly for the obvious reason that it will allow many others to learn more quickly. Think of it this way: If I spend 20 extra hours editing, re-writing, and polishing a piece of research, and if that extra effort enables 500 people to spend a half-hour less apiece figuring out what I am saying, then I have saved humankind a net 230 hours of effort.  

Which leads me to the real reasons why academic writing is often bad. The first problem is that many academics (and especially younger ones) tend to confuse incomprehensibility with profundity. If they write long and ponderous sentences and throw in lots of jargon, they assume that readers will be dazzled by their erudition and more likely to accept whatever it is they are saying uncritically. Moreover, jargon is a way for professional academics to remind ordinary people that they are part of a guild with specialized knowledge that outsiders lack, and younger scholars often fear that if they don't sound like a professional scholar, then readers won't believe what they are saying no matter how solid their arguments and evidence are. 

The second problem is the fear of being wrong. If your prose is clear and your arguments are easy to follow, then readers can figure out what you are saying and they can hold you to account. If you are making forecasts (or if the theory you are advancing has implications for the future), then you will look bad if your predictions are clearly stated and then fail. If your argument has obvious testable implications, others can run the tests and see how well your claims stand up.

But if your prose is muddy and obscure or your arguments are hedged in every conceivable direction, then readers may not be able to figure out what you're really saying and you can always dodge criticism by claiming to have been misunderstood. (Of course, sometimes critics do deliberately misrepresent a scholarly argument, but that's another matter). Bad writing thus becomes a form of academic camouflage designed to shield the author from criticism.

In the endless war against academic obscurantism, I tell my own students to read Strunk and White's classic The Elements of Style and to heed their emphasis on concision. Most of us tend to overwrite (especially by using too many adverbs), and shorter is almost always better. Or as Strunk and White put it:  

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

I'm also a fan of Anthony Weston's A Rulebook for Arguments, a very smart primer on the different forms of persuasive argument and the ways to make written arguments more convincing.

Finally, I encourage students to emulate writers they admire. If there are scholars whose books you enjoyed, read them several times and try to capture what it is that makes their use of language so effective. I've found inspiration in writers like Waltz, Thomas Schelling, James Scott, John Mueller, and Deirdre McCloskey. And you don't have to agree with someone to respect their ability to write: Charles Krauthammer's ideas usually appall me, but there's no question that he is an effective prose stylist.   

In the end, it comes down to what a scholar is trying to achieve. If the goal is just narrow professional success -- getting tenure, earning a decent salary, etc. -- then bad writing isn't a huge handicap and may even confer some advantages. But if the goal is to have impact -- both within one's discipline and in the wider world -- then there's no substitute for clear and effective writing. The question is really pretty simple: do you want to communicate with others or not?

It's August, which means that students in America (and plenty of other places) are heading off to college for the first time. Some of them are undoubtedly thinking about preparing for careers in international affairs. As a public service to those eager future Secretaries of State (and the parents worrying about their college choices) here's my Top Ten Things that Future International Policy Wonks Should Learn.

1. History. Trying to understand international affairs without knowing history is like trying to cook without knowing the difference between flour and flounder. Not only does history provide the laboratory in which our basic theories must be tested, it shapes the narratives different peoples tell themselves about how they came to their present circumstances and how they regard their relationship to others. How could one hope to understand the Middle East without knowing about the Ottoman Empire, the impact of colonialism, the role of Islam, the influence of European anti-Semitism and Zionism, or the part played by the Cold War?  Similarly, how could one grasp the current complexities in Asia without understanding the prior relations between these nations and the different ways that Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Japanese, Pashtuns, Hindus, Muslims, and others understand and explain past events? 

But don't just memorize a lot of names and dates: seek out teachers who can help you think about the past in sophisticated ways. Among other things, it's useful to know how other societies see the past even if you don't agree with their interpretation, so make sure you read histories written by citizens of other countries. And if you're studying in the United States, don't just study "Western Civilization." The world is a lot bigger than that.

2. Statistics. Most high schoolers have to learn a certain amount of math, but unless you're going into a technical field, a lot of it won't be directly relevant to a career in international affairs.  But statistics is part of the language of policy discourse, and if you don't understand the basics, you won't be a discerning consumer of quantitative information and others will be able to dazzle you with data that may not be right. You can avoid this fate with a little study.

3. Foreign Language. If you grew up outside the United States and are headed for college, you probably already speak more than one language. If you're an American, alas, you probably don't. You should. I know that everyone is learning English these days, but learning at least one foreign language provides a window into another culture that you can't get any other way, and also provides a sense of mastery and insight that is hard to achieve otherwise. I'm not particularly good at languages, but I'd gladly trade my mediocre abilities in French and German for real fluency in one of them (or many others).  Don't make my mistake: get to the language lab and acquire some real skills.

4. Economics. Economists aren't the wizards they think they are (see under: 1929, 2007-08), but you can't understand world affairs these days if you don't have a basic grasp of the key principles of international trade and finance and some idea how the world economy actually works. I might add that some forms of economics (e.g., game theory) can provide some useful ways of thinking about strategic interaction, provided you don't push it too far. So take enough economics to be able to read the WSJ op-ed page and know when they are BS-ing you.

5. International Law. You might think that a realist like me would dismiss international law completely, but I took a course in the subject as an undergraduate and have always been grateful that I did. Among other things, it reaffirmed my suspicion that international law is a pretty weak instrument, especially when dealing with great powers. Nonetheless, states and other international actors use international law all of the time, and they certainly invoke it to try advance their own particular interests. So it's good to have some idea what international law is, how it works, and what it can and cannot do.  

6. Geography. We often hear that we live in "one world," but it's divided up into lots of regions, countries, areas, and physical configurations, and these variations matter a lot.   I don't know when or why we stopped teaching geography, but it is an important part of the world affairs tool kit.   I might not go so far as to say "geography is destiny," but just look at all the international issues that you couldn't begin to understand without a detailed knowledge of the physical characteristics of the region in question.   South China Sea?  The West Bank?  The new sea routes in the Arctic?  The list is endless, yet I'm often struck by how little geography most students seem to know these days. Here's a good test: if you were given a map of the world with all the country names removed, how many could you fill in? If you can't get at least 75%, time to get out that atlas and start brushing up. The exercise will also tell you which regions you may know well and which ones you need to learn a bit more about.  If you're still not convinced that geography matters , check out Robert Kaplan's new book.

7.  Get some culture. Education in international affairs tends toward the technocratic, as the previous items on this list suggest. But some appreciation for art and culture is essential.  The music, literature, and visual arts of different societies are where their collective souls reside, and more people have been inspired by poetry, art, and music than by the most compelling regression equations. If you don't know why Picasso, Kurosawa, Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn, Austen, Ellington, Rushdie, Shankar, etc. matter, then you've missed out an enormous part of the human experience and your ability to understand what makes other societies tick will be impoverished.

 8. Learn to communicate. Based on some of the graduate students I see, I'm not sure this is something most colleges teach anymore. But not matter what path you end up taking in life, being able to write clearly, quickly, and without enormous effort is a huge advantage. I'm not saying you have to aspire to be a prose stylist on the order of George Kennan, Joan Didion, or Paul Krugman, but overcoming the fear of the blank page or screen and developing the ability to write a clear, well-organized argument is an enormous force-multiplier.

While you're at it, hone your ability to speak effectively and persuasively. Regardless of what sort of career you pursue, being able to present your ideas orally will be very valuable. And I'm not just talking about formal lecturing or giving a keynote speech, I also mean knowing how to brief your boss in five-minutes or less, and how to ask a good question. I go to lots of public lectures and seminars, and I'm often struck by how few people know how to ask a clear, sharp and penetrating question. If you master that skill, you'll stand out.

Formal training and activities like debate can enhance these abilities, but mostly they come from practice. Repetition also helps overcome stage fright, and being relaxed while you're speaking is easily worth 10 or 20 IQ points.

9. What about science?  Most of us had to take a lot of science in high school, and some of us continued to do so in college. Although in-depth knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, etc., is not directly relevant to many aspects of international affairs, it is powerfully linked to a host of important political phenomena. How can one understand cyber-security, climate change, global pandemics, economic development, and a host of other issues without understanding the scientific knowledge that lies at their core? More importantly, a clear understanding of the scientific method helps protect you from the proud know-nothingism that is increasingly a badge of honor among some politicians. So stick with some science too. And by the way: if you happen to interested in topics where science is central (such as arms control or the environment), you'd probably be better off majoring in a relevant scientific field rather than politics or history.

10. Find your ethical foundation. Universities teach classes on ethics, but apart from favoring free speech and opposing academic fraud, they don't endorse any particular ethical stance.  So don't expect your college to teach you what is right or moral. Nonetheless, if you haven't figured these things out for yourself yet, college is a good time to get cracking on it.  You'll meet lots of people with different views on this subject, and engaging with them will help you sort out where you stand. What's your view of the good or virtuous life?  Where are the lines that shouldn't be crossed? How do you propose to handle the ethical tradeoffs that will inevitably greet you as you advance through life? And as you study, keep a sharp eye out for role models: which people strike you as admirable and worthy of emulation and which seem morally challenged? And on what basis did you decide?

Alert readers will have noticed that my list looks a lot like the classic liberal arts education.  True enough: in world that is both diverse and changing rapidly, a broad portfolio of knowledge is almost certainly the best preparation for a long career in the field. My list also leaves out various extracurricular activities that may be every bit as important as what you do in class, such as living for an extended period in a foreign country. But a solid knowledge of these fields and a serious effort to develop some key skills would serve you in good stead in a wide variety of global professions. And if you end up doing something entirely different, they certainly won't hurt.

And if you're just starting your freshman year, I hope you find the next four years challenging and inspiring. Learn as much as you can, because there will be plenty of tough problems for you to work on as soon as you graduate.

Which university is more likely to defend academia's basic commitment to sharing ideas and knowledge in an open and unconstrained way, West Point or Yale? You'd probably think it would be Yale, that well-known bastion of tweedy academics and liberal values. How wrong you'd be.

As West Point faculty member Gian Gentile outlines in a fascinating piece in the Atlantic, former U.S. Afghan commander Stanley McChrystal has been teaching a course at Yale's Jackson Institute of Global Affairs on strategy and leadership. Nothing wrong with that: Plenty of universities (including my own) hire practitioners to share insights from the real world with students. And I've got no problem having a former general teach a course. But in a shocking departure from normal academic practices, Yale requires students taking the course to sign a non-disclosure form, pledging that they will not divulge what is said in the course to outsiders. In other words, McChrystal is teaching an "off-the-record" course.

This restriction is so contrary to the normal practice of universities that it is hard to know where to begin. Academic institutions exist to pursue knowledge, to teach what we know to our students, and to instill in them an appreciation for free and open inquiry. The whole principle of academic freedom rests on the idea that knowledge is best advanced by allowing ideas to blossom and to be shared without restriction. In this way, good ideas can be validated and retained and bad ideas or conjectures can be scrutinized and eventually excluded. By telling students in McChrystal's class that they cannot share what they learn with others, Yale is artificially constraining the normal give-and-take of ideas. There may be vigorous discussions inside that particular classroom, but the rest of Yale (and the larger world) won't know about them. Secrecy of any kind is fundamentally at odds with the principles that universities stand for, yet here Yale has enshrined it in one of their courses.

A commitment to free and open discussion also keeps the focus on the ideas themselves, rather than on the identity or the supposed prestige of the faculty member leading the course. Giving McChrystal a special exemption immediately tells Yale students that the general is a "Very Important Person" who gets to be treated differently from other members of the faculty. Again, that's not how universities are supposed to work: People taking my courses aren't supposed to accept what I tell them because I am the professor and they are mere students. They are supposed to accept what I tell them only if I've successfully convinced them it is useful and makes sense. And they are free -- even encouraged -- to disagree with me, especially if they have good reason to do so and can make their objections stick. And I want them to talk about my courses outside of class; maybe someone they know will point out a new way to think about an issue or identify a mistake I've made. But if I made my students sign a non-disclosure form, I would limit their capacity to hold me accountable.  

Requiring students to sign a non-disclosure form also sends the subtle but unmistakable signal that the instructor is imparting secret knowledge that is too hot or potentially controversial to be shared with the outside world.  I can easily imagine students lapping this up -- we all like thinking we're getting info that others aren't privy to -- but this is just not how universities are supposed to work.

Yale officials might argue that McChrystal is a unique asset for their teaching program, and that the only way they could convince him to teach there was to promise him that some student wouldn't blab about the course to the Yale Daily News or the New York Times. But that argument won't wash: If McChrystal really believes what he's teaching, then he should be willing to have it openly discussed. He shouldn't be able to win arguments in the classroom by saying, "Now let me tell you about some really secret stuff I did in Afghanistan, stuff you won't find out about in books. Trust me." He should be willing to be held accountable for what he says to his students, and not just by those who happen to be sitting there (and whom he might eventually be grading). If some students disagree with him, he should be willing to have them voice their disagreements to the rest of the class, but also to their roommates, friends, parents, other faculty members, and yes, even to reporters. That's the same risk that all of us run when we teach: All of our students are free to talk about what they learn with anyone they want. What's General McChrystal so afraid of?

Yale's abandoning of its principles is itself a symptom of the growing deference that Americans now grant the professional military (and to a lesser extent, top members of the broader national security establishment). The country has been at war for over a decade, and there's an inevitable tendency for civilians to start treating those who've been fighting these wars with kid gloves. This tendency is not healthy, however, because the professional military has its own interests and world view -- as such, it is not necessarily the best judge of what is in the overall interests of the nation. National security is a topic that affects all Americans, and it is more likely to be openly and intelligently debated when we don't give any of the participants (and especially not those with particular interests in the subject) a free pass.

Today, I'd like to try a bit of crowd-sourcing. Specifically, I'd like to ask readers of this blog for some help with one of my courses. The course is a graduate-level survey of international and global affairs, designed for public policy students concentrating in that area. One of the components I'm adding this year is a session explicitly focused on the topic of "policy analysis in international and global affairs." By "policy analysis," I mean the method (or for some, the art) of analyzing concrete policy problems and deciding which policy options will best achieve some intended goal.

Here's the problem. There is an extensive literature on policy analysis, including well-known works by Eugene Bardach, Michael Munger, John Kingdon, Edith Stokey and Richard Zeckhauser, Deborah Stone, and many others. Yet the bulk of these works focus on domestic policy analysis (i.e., on the analysis of problems that policy analysts face in purely domestic contexts). So far, I have yet to discover any serious work explaining how to do policy analysis in the realm of foreign policy or international and global affairs.

There is a large literature on the analysis of military budgets and defense management--dating back to the heyday of "systems analysis" in the Pentagon-but this literature views these problems as essentially a domestic issue (e.g., the choices decision-makers make between guns vs. butter, or between Weapon System #1 vs. Weapon System #2, etc.). There are also works like Wolfgang Reinecke's Global Public Policy, but this book is an extended argument for why we need to situate policymaking at the global rather than national level. It is not a primer explaining how one actually performs the analysis of a concrete global policy issue.

I'm not saying that such works do not exist; I just haven't been able to find them. And assuming that there aren't any/many, it's interesting to speculate on why that is the case. I think it is partly because scholars in international relations have tended to focus on grand theory (realism, liberalism, constructivism, etc.), or on trying to identify recurring laws or tendencies between states or other groups. In short, they are mostly engaged in a positivist search for regularities, and trying to devise theories that explain them). In other words, most scholars stand apart from the policy process and treat international affairs as something to be studied from a safe distance, much as a biologist might study animals in the wild. There's just not that much interest in the academy in giving students practical advice on how to solve problems, and it's not clear that most academics would have much to contribute even if they were interested. With the exception of some important work on environmental issues (which tend to be global in scope), that task has been mostly addressed by scholars of public management or public administration, not IR.

Similarly, the field of "foreign policy analysis" tends to focus on explaining why governments make the foreign policy decisions that they do, and not on developing methods or techniques for analyzing different foreign policy options. So this literature investigates how regime type, bureaucratic politics, interest groups, social and individual psychology and any number of other "independent variables" influence government decisions. In other words, the subfield of "foreign policy analysis" does not tell you how to analyze a concrete policy problem or compare the merits of alternative policy choices.

For whatever reason, scholars working in the broad area of international and global affairs have not devoted much attention to helping would-be policy analysts learn how to do the jobs that most of them will eventually occupy. Instead, I suspect graduates of leading public policy schools end up learning this on-the-job.

One might ask: why can't we just take the existing literature on "policy analysis" and apply it to foreign policy? I think students can get some useful insights from that literature, and that some of the specific analytic techniques developed there (such as cost-benefit analysis) are clearly germane and valuable. But there are some key differences between the situation facing a domestic policy analyst and someone addressing an international or global problem. In general, policy analysts working on domestic issues are dealing with situations where there is clear legal authority and where politics, though never absent, is less salient. If your job is figuring out how to cut costs for an urban bus system, decide how to accommodate increased enrollment in a local public school, or come up with proposal to improving health care improve, etc., the main task is to identify the goals, figure out the alternatives, identify the likely results of different choices, and eventually decide which alternative will best accomplish the intended goal. Once the decision is reached, legitimate authority to implement it presumably exists (although one may also have to develop a strategy for building sufficient political support).

In global affairs, by contrast, the rule of law is far weaker and there are often competing power centers with very different interests. Strategic interactions loom much larger, and the success of a given policy choice often depends not just on the intrinsic merits of the specific initiative but on how other key actors will respond to it. (Among other things, this is why simple game theoretic models are often useful for analyzing certain international policy problems). To the extent that the issues are truly global, the correct policy choice depends far more on bargaining, persuasion, in some cases coercion, and on developing solutions that either elicit others' voluntary compliance or achieve the objective in the face of opposition. Such features are not entirely absent in domestic policy discussions, but they play a larger role in interactions between states, corporations, and non-state actors operating in the anarchic world of international politics.

Whatever the reason, there seems to be a large and regrettable gap in the existing literature. Note to potential authors: we need a good book or article that gives students a useful guide to performing policy analysis in international and global affairs.

Unless, of course, such a work already exists. So here's your chance to shape what my students read next term: is there anything good to read about global policy analysis? Anybody got any good suggestions?

Apart from a few brief sojourns at various think tanks, I've spent most of my professional life in the academic world. Seven of these years were spent helping run various programs, first as deputy dean of social sciences at the University of Chicago and later as academic dean here at the Kennedy School. I have one child in college and another heading there in two years. You can therefore assume I have a certain professional and personal interest in the whole business of higher education.

Which is why I find discussions of how technology might transform this whole enterprise quite fascinating. It's hard not to read such articles and wonder how my own job might change in the years ahead, and to reflect on how I think it ought to change. I have not studied this issue in detail, so what follows are some purely impressionistic observations, based mostly on my own experience.

1. I think there's no doubt that the traditional model of the academic lecture is headed the way of the dodo. I say that with a certain wistful regret, because I enjoy lecturing and like to think I'm fairly good at it. But it's hardly an efficient mode of information-transmission, and there are plenty of studies suggesting that students don't learn particularly well in this sort of passive "I-speak-while-you-listen-and- take-notes" experience. Lecturing of the old-fashioned sort can be entertaining and inspirational, but real learning requires students to engage and wrestle with the material instead of just hearing some older person declaim about it.

2. Given that top-flight faculty are among any college or university's scarcest resources, having them stand in front of a handful of students and talk is especially inefficient, and all the more so in basic introductory courses. In other words, you probably don't want Nobel Prize winners teaching basic statistics, Economics 101, or even Intro to Biology -- especially when there may be lots of less renowned people who are actually better at doing that. But you do want students to have the opportunity to interact with the most brilliant minds, to argue with them, to see how they do their work, and to be inspired by their example. And that means creating different sorts of educational experiences (seminars, workshops, mini-courses, etc.) rather than just one.

3. Information technology is making it possible to transmit educational content at almost no cost; you can put course materials on the web and stream lectures to anyone with an internet hookup. This is what MIT is doing now, and it doesn't seem to be discouraging people from wanting to attend full-time and pay full-freight. There are also online teaching programs that might do a better job of teaching basic materials (such as introduction to microeconomics, statistics, calculus, etc.) than that old model of the single lecturer with a chalkboard and a pile of notes. This suggests that we ought to be thinking of ways to use faculty rather differently -- in more interactive and personal modes--where hands-on attention, genuine inspiration, and pedagogical ability can produce big payoffs, while using online tools to deliver basic factual or technical content.

4. I suspect that in the near future we are going to see a lot of experimentation with new forms of higher education, reflecting the fact that these institutions in fact serve many purposes other than merely transmitting knowledge/skills to students. One reason MIT can make its content available for free is that students understand there is a difference between watching lectures online and actually being in the class, being on the campus, and being immersed in the broader in-person environment. In the United States, at least, universities and colleges also provide a relatively safe space for making the transition from adolescence to adulthood. They are environments where young people can meet future spouses of similar class or social backgrounds, have lots of arguments with peers and with their professors, and get a lot of preconceived notions challenged. For many young people (though not all), college is about a lot more than just what they learn in class, which is one reason parents are willing to pay through the nose to make that whole experience possible.

What I'm describing here, of course, is the traditional model of a liberal arts education, and it's hardly the only model out there. Other institutions (e.g., commuter colleges, junior colleges, vocational institutes) serve somewhat different educational functions and are already organized differently. My guess, therefore, is that changes in information technology and the overall globalization of information and education is going to produce an explosion of innovation over the next few years. The traditional four-year university/college won't disappear, but it will be coexisting and competing with a lot of other models.

Lastly, this is going to be a painful process. Universities are filled with brilliant and innovative people -- as individuals -- but they are also incredibly conservative institutions (not politically, but in the sense of being wary of change). As a former Harvard president reportedly said, "trying to change the curriculum is like moving a graveyard." Faculties don't like having to retool and alumni and other stakeholders often have powerful emotional attachments to traditional ways of doing business. And the older and more successful a university is, the more impervious to change it is likely to be.

Plus, coming up with new educational models is hard to do if you're already working pretty hard teaching the existing program. But there's no stopping this sort of Schumpeterian "creative destruction," and I'd hate to be working for the educational equivalent of Polaroid -- a brilliant and innovative company that proved unable to adapt to a rapidly changing technological frontier.

Now if we can just get universities out of the business of running semi-professional athletic teams...

A graduate student at UC-Berkeley, Allan Dafoe, has asked for my help in a project he's conducting (in collaboration with researchers at Uppsala University) on the impact of perception in international crises. To be more precise, what he really wants is your help. Part of his project involves collecting responses from "foreign policy elites" to a hypothetical crisis scenario, and who better than the enlightened readers of this blog?

Because FP readers are hardly typical -- even among "foreign policy elites" -- there is obviously a potential problem of sampling bias here. But that is for Allan and his collaborators to sort out. If you'd like to become a data point in his project, go to this link and take the survey. It will take you about five minutes, and you'll be helping extend our knowledge of crisis behavior. Then you can go back to sticking pins in your voodoo doll of whichever U.S. politician you think is most responsible for the embarrassing spectacle that has been playing itself out in Washington.

Back when I was in graduate school, Stanley Hoffmann wrote an essay in Daedalus entitled "An American Social Science: International Relations." Among other things, he argued that the field of international relations was dominated by scholars from North America, and especially the United States, in part due to the U.S. dominant global role in post-World War II era. (Foreign-born scholars like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Peter Katzenstein, and the late Ernst Haas are exceptions that support the rule, as each received most if not all of their advanced training in the United States)

Has this situation changed? I ask this in part because lately I've been thinking about faculty recruiting at Harvard's Kennedy School. We have a very strong IR faculty -- my colleagues include Joe Nye, John Ruggie, Graham Allison, Samantha Power (on leave), Ash Carter (ditto), Monica Toft, Nicholas Burns, Meghan O'Sullivan, etc. -- but notice that this is a very U.S.-centric group, even though over 40 percent of our students come from overseas. We are fortunate to have a few colleagues from other countries (such as Karl Kaiser and Jacqueline Bhabha), but the center of gravity is decidedly Washington-focused. And we're no different in this regard than peer institutions like Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School.

I was discussing this issue with a colleague in D.C. the other day, and he argued that one reason was the simple fact that there were hardly any world-class foreign policy intellectuals outside the Anglo-Saxon world. He wasn't saying that there weren't smart people writing on world affairs in other countries; his point was that there are very few people writing on foreign affairs outside North America or Britain whose works become the object of global attention and debate. In other words, there's no German, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, or Indian equivalent of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, Frank Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, or Joseph Nye's various writings on "soft power."

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Saturday's New York Times contained an interesting op-ed piece by Charles Blow, titled "American Shame." The main item was a table listing the 33 countries designated as "advanced economies" by the International Monetary Fund and comparing them on various social and educational characteristics. Specifically, Blow charted income inequality, unemployment rates, level of democracy, the "percentage thriving" (according to the Gallup Global Well-Being Index), food insecurity, prison population, and student performance in math and science. The bottom line: The United States is at the bottom of the heap on most of these measures, and at or near the top in none. 

It's a sobering collection of data, to be sure, but I wish Blow had added two more columns to his chart: 1) percentage of GDP devoted to defense, and 2) defense spending per capita. According to the 2010 IISS Military Balance, here's what those columns would have looked like (the countries are in the order presented by Blow, which reflected their summary ranking on the various measures, from best to worst):

Country            Defense $/GDP (%)     Defense $/population (2008)

Australia                 2.24                         1,056
Canada                     1.19                             597
Norway                     1.49                        1,264
Netherlands             1.41                            738
Germany                    1.28                            570
Austria                     0.77                            389
Switzerland                 0.83                             542
Denmark                  1.94                             344
Finland                      1.33                             693
Belgium                     1.10                             534
Malta                         0.60                             122
Japan                         0.93                             362
Sweden                      1.30                              736
Hong Kong                   n.a.                               n.a.
Iceland                         0.27 (200                  153 (2006)
New Zealand               1.39                             420
Luxembourg             0.43                             478
United Kingdom        2.28                             998
Ireland                        0.60                             382
Singapore                   4.20                            1,663
Cyprus                         2.16                              503
South Korea              2.60                             500
Italy                            1.34                              532
France                        2.35                           1,049
Czech Rep.                 1.46                              310
Slovenia                      1.53                               415
Taiwan                        2.76                              458
Slovakia                      1.55                               271
Israel                           7.41                           2,077
Spain                           1.20                              276
Greece                        2.85                             946
Portugal                      1.53                             349
United States            4.88                          2,290

And just for fun, let's toss in:

P.R. China                1.36                            45

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For years a number of political scientists have been complaining about the propensity for scholars to study topics that are of little real-world value or of interest only to a handful of fellow scholars. We've come to call this the "cult of irrelevance." At the same time, many academics cloud their analyses in obscure jargon or a fog of methodological "sophistication," and rarely bother to offer up translations for the busy policy-maker. To make matters worse, although academics defend the institution of tenure fiercely, most of them do not use the protection it affords to pursue topics that might be politically controversial.

These unfortunate tendencies are not universal, however, and a number of us have tried to address the broader issue in various ways. You can read about the general subject here, here, here, or here. In that spirit, I'm also happy to pass on the news that a group of political scientists have organized a week-long summer institute designed to tackle the problem head-on. Under the guidance of Bruce Jentleson of Duke, Steve Weber of UC-Berkeley, and James Goldgeier of George Washington, a new International Summer Policy Institute will "deliver an intensive curriculum designed to teach participants how to develop and articulate their research for a policy audience, what policymakers are looking for when they look to IR scholarship, whom to target when sharing research, and which tools and avenues of dissemination are appropriate." The Institute is part of a larger effort to "bridge the gap" between academia and policy, and you can find out more about its activities here.

Needless to say, I think this is a worthy enterprise. Together with efforts like the Tobin Project, it may encourage more academics to focus their research efforts on policy-relevant topics and teach them how to communicate their results in ways that policymakers will find more accessible. The point here, by the way, is not to "dumb down" scholarship or to imitate the plethora of partisan think tanks now located inside the Beltway. Academic scholars should be independent researchers first and foremost, and seekers of truth above all. But the topics that they choose to address can be chosen to illuminate important policy issues more directly, and devoting some time to figuring out how to communicate their results more broadly would surely be a good thing.

What is also needed is a change in academic practice, including the criteria that are used to make key hiring and promotion decisions. The standards by which we assess scholarly value are not divinely ordained or established by natural law; they are in fact "socially constructed" by the discipline itself. In other words, we collectively decide what sorts of work to valorize and what sorts of achievement to reward. If university departments placed greater weight on teaching, on contributions to applied public policy, on public outreach, and on a more diverse range of publishing venues -- including journals of opinion, trade publishers and maybe even blogs--then individual scholars would quickly adapt to these new incentives and we would attract a somewhat different group of scholars over time. If university departments routinely stopped the "tenure clock" for younger academics who wanted to do a year of public service, that would enable them to gain valuable real-world experience without short-changing their long-term academic futures. It would also send the message that academia shouldn't cut itself off from the real world. And it probably wouldn't hurt if deans, department chairs, and university presidents welcomed controversy, encouraged intellectual diversity, and defended the slaying of sacred cows. As I've said before, academics really shouldn't count it a great achievement when students have no interest in their classes, and when people outside the ivory tower have no interest in what we have to say.

I hadn't intended to say anything further about the shameful Martin Peretz affair, and lord knows there are plenty of good reasons for me not to poke my finger in the eye of Harvard's current leadership. But seriously: You'd think after nearly 400 years the leaders of the university would have figured out what the principles of academic freedom and free speech really mean -- and also what they don't mean. But judging from the official university response to the furor, the people I work for appear to be somewhat confused about these issues.

To recap: A couple of weeks ago, Peretz made some offensive and racist statements about Muslims on his blog. Specifically, he wrote that "Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, especially for Muslims," and then went on to say that he didn't think American Muslims deserved the protections of the First Amendment, because he suspected they would only abuse them.

These statements were not an isolated incident or just a lamentably poor choice of words. On the contrary, they were the latest in a long series of statements displaying hatred and contempt for Muslims, Arabs, and other minorities. Peretz retracted part of his latest remarks after they were exposed and challenged by Nicholas Kristof (Harvard '82) in his column in the New York Times, but in his "apology," Peretz nonetheless reaffirmed his belief that "Muslim life is cheap." Indeed, he declared that "this is a statement of fact, not value."

A number of people then began to question whether it was appropriate for Harvard to establish an undergraduate research fund in Peretz's name and to give him a prominent role in the festivities commemorating the 50th anniversary of its storied Social Studies program. A University spokesman defended the decision to accept the money for the research fund and to have Peretz speak at a luncheon by saying:  

As an institution of research and teaching, we are dedicated to the proposition that all people, regardless of color or creed, deserve equal opportunities, equal respect, and equal protection under the law. The recent assertions by Dr. Peretz are therefore distressing to many members of our community, and understandably so. It is central to the mission of a university to protect and affirm free speech, including the rights of Dr. Peretz, as well as those who disagree with him, to express their views."

In a masterful display of understatement, the Atlantic's James Fallows (Harvard '70) termed this response "not one of the university's better efforts." As he (and others) pointed out, nobody was questioning Peretz's right to write or say whatever he wants. For that matter, nobody has even questioned whether Harvard ought to give him a platform to expound his views on this or any other subject. (For my own part, if the Kennedy School invited him to speak on any subject he chose, I wouldn't object.

As should be obvious, this issue isn't a question of free speech or academic freedom. Rather, the issue is whether it is appropriate or desirable for a great university to honor someone who has repeatedly uttered or written despicable words about a community of people numbering in the hundreds of millions. And isn't it obvious that if Peretz had said something similar about African-Americans, Catholics, Jews, Asians, or gays, the outcry would have been loud, fierce, and relentless and some of his current defenders would have distanced themselves from him with alacrity.

And let's also not lose sight of the double standards at work here. After a long and distinguished career, journalist Helen Thomas makes one regrettable and offensive statement and she loses her job, even though she offered a quick and genuine apology. By contrast, Peretz makes offensive remarks over many years, reaffirms some of them when challenged, and gets a luncheon in his honor and his name on a research fund at Harvard. 

And why? Because Peretz has a lot of wealthy and well-connected friends. Bear in mind that in 2003 Harvard suspended and eventually returned a $2.5 million dollar gift from the president of the United Arab Emirates, after it learned that he was connected to a think tank that had sponsored talks featuring anti-Semitic and anti-American themes. As the Harvard Crimson said at the time, "no donation is worth indebting the university to practitioners of hate and bigotry." So the University clearly has some standards, it just doesn't apply them consistently.

For more on this unequivocally depressing business, you can read:

1. An open letter from Harvard students protesting the honor to Peretz, and the petition protesting Harvard's policy that now has over 500 signatures, many from Social Studies alums.

2. James Fallows' summary of recent developments.
3. A powerful statement by Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic, examining Peretz's achievements as an editor and questioning his liberal bona fides.
4. A comment by Alan Gilbert of the University of Denver, a former tutor in the same Social Studies program.
5. And while you're at it, you might read the Boston Globe's editorial whitewashing Peretz, and compare it with their reaction to the Helen Thomas affair.

And no, this isn't just a matter of Ivy League academic politics, unrelated to issues of foreign policy. As everyone knows, U.S. relations with the Arab and Muslim world are especially delicate these days. You can read this or this to understand why, but it certainly doesn't help when one of the nation's premier academic institutions decides to honor someone with such deplorable views, even after they have been widely exposed. This is obviously not the main reason why the America's image in the Arab and Muslim world is so negative, but it surely adds fuel to the fires of bigotry.

To take this matter a step further, Islamophobia is on the rise here in the United States.  Efforts to combat this pernicious and dangerous trend would be furthered if institutions like Harvard took a principled stand on this issue, and declined to honor anyone who has made bigoted remarks about Muslims (or any other group). This has not happened with Peretz, and history will not treat Harvard well for its behavior in this case.

Update: As I write this, I've received a couple of emails suggesting that Peretz was not going to be speaking at the Social Studies event after all. I don't know if that's true or not, but to me the issue is less about his being one of the speakers, and more about having his name permanently attached to an undergraduate research fund.

Update 2: James Fallows reports on the reported resolution of the dispute (i.e., Peretz won't have a speaking role at the event), and suggests that Harvard could address the controversy by creating a scholarship fund for students of Muslim background.  

I'm back from my mini-break and digging out emails and correspondence, so I don't have an extended commentary today.

One piece in my mailbox did catch my eye, however, from the June 2010 issue of Perspectives on Politics. For those of you who aren't political scientists, PoP is a relatively new journal, founded eight years ago by the American Political Science Association. It was created in part in response to a bottom-up protest movement within the discipline known as the "Perestroika" movement ("Perestroika" was the pseudonym of the anonymous list-server who got it started).  Although primarily motivated by a desire to defend methodological pluralism, one of the movement's related concerns was the "cult of irrelevance" within academic political science. In my judgment PoP has, been a partial corrective to that tendency, and it often features articles that engage big political issues from an academic perspective.

In any case, the current issue has a provocative article by Lawrence Mead on "Scholasticism in Political Science." Mead argues that academic writings about politics are increasingly "scholastic," which he defines as being increasingly specialized, preoccupied with methods, non-empirical, and primarily oriented to other academic literature instead of engaging real-world issues. In his words:

Today's political scientists often address very narrow questions and they are often preoccupied with method and past literature ... Scholars are focusing more on themselves, less on the real world. ... Research questions are getting smaller and data-gathering is contracting.  Inquiry is becoming obscurantist and ingrown."

This sort of complaint is hardly new, of course. Hans Morgenthau offered a similar critique way back in the 1950s, when he warned of a political science "that is neither hated nor respected, but treated with indifference as an innocuous pastime, is likely to have retreated into a sphere that lies beyond the positive or negative interests of society. The retreat into the trivial, the formal, the methodological, the purely theoretical, the remotely historical -- in short, the politically irrelevant -- is the unmistakable sign of a 'non-controversial' political science which has neither friends nor enemies because it has no relevance for the great political issues in which society has a stake. History and methodology, in particular, become the protective armor which shields political science from contact with the political reality of the contemporary world. Political science, then, resembles what Tolsoi said modern history has become: 'a deaf many answering questions which no one has asked him.'" (Dilemmas of Politics, 1958, p. 31).

Morgenthau's Olympian denunciation was offered without a lot of supporting evidence, but Mead's warning is accompanied by an analysis of every article published in 1968, 1978, 1988, 1998 and 2007 in the American Political Science Review.  You might get different results if you looked at different journals (i.e., the "scholasticism" of the APSR was one of the complaints of the original "Perestroikans"), but Mead's complaints are consistent with a lot of my own impressions of how the field is evolving. As Mead shows, the issue isn't method per se; it's the tendency of many scholars to ask smaller, less significant, and less controversial questions and to produce what he describes as "analyses of jewel-like precision that ... generate only minor findings and arouse little interest beyond specialists." This is accompanied by an aversion to topics that might make a scholar visible outside the academy -- or god forbid, controversial -- because that might screw up your shot at tenure or get your criticized in print.

This tendency is not universally true, of course, and I'd argue that the willingness of younger scholars to take up blogging as a form of public engagement is a prominent counter-tendency. Could it be that younger scholars are just as bored producing "scholasticist" works as many of us are reading them, and that they find blogging far more fulfilling than adding another (largely) unread article to the catalog of academic journals. And if that's the case, what does it tell us about the priorities and values of contemporary academe?

Here's a quick recommendation for all you terrorism mavens out there. The Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (CPOST) has a fascinating and very useful website up and running, which you can access here.

According to its operators (a program headed by Professor Robert Pape), the site contains all known instances of suicide terrorism between 1981 and 2001, and will eventually be brought completely up to date. Three features of the site are especially interesting.  First, it lets you perform interactive searches along multiple dimensions (location of attacks, the target type, the weapon used, demographic and biographical characteristics of attackers, etc. For example, if you wanted to know how many suicide attacks were conducted by women in Kashmir between 1995 and 2000, you can enter those parameters and it will give you the results. Second, the site provides the external sources used to document each attack, so that you can check up on the coding of any specific incident. Third, each incident in linked to GPS data on location, so that you can explore the geographic patterns of contemporary suicide terrorism. On the latter point, by the way, the data shows that almost all these attacks are concentrated in Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Afpak, Iraq, and Israel/Palestine, a finding consistent with Pape's well-known argument that suicide terrorism is primarily a response to perceived foreign occupations.

All in all, a very useful tool. But the skeptic in me has to ask the following question: will the existence of databases like this one tend to feed our fascination with conventional terrorism, a threat that is almost certainly exaggerated and overblown? (WMD terrorism is another matter, although we may be overstating that danger too). That's not a criticism of the Chicago Project -- which is doing excellent work -- it's just a warning to us all not to fixate on a phenomenon just because it's something we can count.

There has been an interesting flap in Cambridge this past week regarding some appalling remarks made by one Martin Kramer. As some of you undoubtedly know, Kramer is a hard-line Israeli-American commentator who has made something of a name for himself attacking the Middle East studies profession, and just about anyone who is remotely critical of Israel’s actions or the U.S.-Israeli “special relationship.” (Full disclosure: he’s taken various ill-aimed swipes at me in the past few years). He was an early supporter of Campus Watch (the organization Daniel Pipes founded to blacklist scholars it disapproved of), and Kramer has also sought to convince Congress to curtail or at least closely monitor the Title VI funding it provides to support Middle East studies and other area studies programs at American universities. He is affiliated with a number of right-of-center organizations in the United States and Israel, and for the past few years, he’s also been a research fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs here at Harvard, under the auspices of its National Security Studies program.

In any case, the ruckus started when it was revealed that Kramer had given a speech at the recent Herzliya Conference in Israel, where he advocated eliminating outside aid to Gazans (which he termed “pro-natal subsidies”) because -- according to him -- it encouraged them to reproduce, which led to the creation of what he termed “superfluous young males,” which, in turn, contributed to terrorism. He also suggested that Israel’s siege of Gaza was intended to deal with this problem. You can watch his remarks here, but the money quote is the following:

“Aging populations reject radical agenda and the Middle East is no different. Now eventually, this will happen among the Palestinians, too. But it will happen faster if the West stops providing pro-natal subsidies for Palestinians with refugee status. Those subsidies are one reason why in the ten years, from 1997 to 2007, Gaza's population grew by an astonishing 40%. At that rate, Gaza's population will double by 2030 to three million. Israel's present sanctions on Gaza have a political aim, undermine the Hamas regime, but they also break Gaza's runaway population growth and there is some evidence that they have. That may begin to crack the culture of martyrdom, which demands a constant supply of superfluous young men."

In other words, if Israel and the West can just keep those pesky Palestinians on a subsistence diet and stop them from having all those babies, the population will get increasingly older and smaller and the terrorism problem will eventually go away.

One rarely hears anyone make such horrific remarks in polite company here in the United States, especially someone associated with a college or university. Not surprisingly, Kramer’s remarks have stirred up a major controversy. Several prominent bloggers -- notably Ali Abunimah (who broke the story) and M.J. Rosenberg -- accused Kramer of advocating genocide. Juan Cole at Informed Comment referred to Kramer’s ideas as a form of eugenics, Richard Silverstein called it anti-Muslim racism, and a number of people complained to the leadership of the Weatherhead Center. I know that because I am on the center’s executive committee and I received several irate emails demanding that Harvard dismiss Kramer or least distance itself from him. In response, the center’s directors issued a statement saying, “It would be inappropriate for the Weatherhead Center to pass judgment on the personal political views of any of its affiliates, or to make affiliation contingent upon some political criterion. Exception may be made for statements that go beyond the boundaries of protected speech, but there is no sense in which Kramer's remarks could be considered to fall into this category.” They also said the charge that he was advocating genocide was “baseless.” The Harvard Crimson took a similar line, which you can read here.

I have three points to make about this matter.

First, although a good case can be made that Kramer’s remarks were tantamount to advocating genocide, I would not use that word to characterize them. The 1948 U.N. definition of genocide does include “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group,” and Kramer’s call for an end to ‘pro-natal subsidies” is very close to that part of the definition. But despite my respect for Abunimah and Rosenberg, I think the word “genocide” has become a loaded term that gets tossed around too loosely, which makes it easy for Kramer and his defenders to portray legitimate criticism of his extreme views as over the top.

What word you use to describe his comments is actually not that important, because their substance is so offensive to any decent person that you don’t need to worry much about getting the right label for them. To illustrate this point, just imagine how Kramer would react if the Iranian government announced that it was worried its Jewish population (some 25,000 or so) was a potential “fifth column,” and that it was therefore imposing measures intended to discourage Iranian Jews from having more children? Or what if a prominent academic at Harvard declared that the United States had to make food scarcer for Hispanics so that they would have fewer children? Or what if someone at a prominent think tank noted that black Americans have higher crime rates than some other groups, and therefore it made good sense to put an end to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and other welfare programs, because that would discourage African-Americans from reproducing and thus constitute an effective anti-crime program? Americans of all persuasions would appropriately denounce such views as barbaric and racist, and that’s precisely how Kramer’s chilling remarks should be viewed.

Second, I take the issue of academic freedom very seriously and believe that the principle applies to Kramer, even though I found his remarks appalling. Thus, I believe that the Weatherhead administrators were correct in deflecting calls to dismiss him. (Some of you may recall that I thought that the head of Ben Gurion University of the Negev was wrong when she tried to censure Professor Neve Gordon, who is on her faculty and who called for a boycott of Israel. By the same logic, it would be wrong for Harvard officials to cut off Kramer because they disagreed with what he said or even found it offensive.)

But notice that the Weatherhead directors did not quite “refrain from passing judgment” on what Kramer said. The appropriate stance to adopt whenever a faculty member or affiliated researcher takes a controversial or unpopular position is strict neutrality; the institution, or its official representatives, should take no position at all about the validity of the person’s views. Therefore, they should have defended Kramer’s right to say what he did but refrained from commenting on whether the accusations against him were “baseless” or not.

It is also more than a little ironic that Kramer and his defenders are using the principle of “academic freedom” as a means of defense, given Kramer’s past efforts to bring external pressure to bear on academics who made arguments about the Middle East that he found objectionable.

Third, the principle of academic freedom does not prevent scholars from challenging Kramer’s racist ideas, and pointing out just how offensive they are. Nor does it prevent any of us -- and that includes academic administrators -- from questioning Kramer’s judgment on matters relating to U.S. Middle East policy or from questioning the judgment of anyone who thought that having him affiliate with Harvard was a good idea.

One final point. It is important to emphasize that many Israelis and most American Jews would undoubtedly find Kramer’s views offensive. At the same, however, he is hardly an isolated extremist, or some messianic settler sitting in a trailer in an illegal outpost in the West Bank. On the contrary, he is an especially well-connected individual, with appointments at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and of course Harvard. Moreover, he is not the only Israeli who has expressed such hateful views about the Palestinians. Of course, one can find equally hateful sentiments about Israeli Jews coming from Palestinians and Arabs. But the key difference is that they don’t hold appointments at prestigious institutions like Harvard.

My copy of Mein Kampf sits on a shelf in my study, along with a couple of dozen books on World War II.  It was the first book ever translated by the late Ralph Manheim (who also translated the works of Gunter Grass and others) and published by Houghton Mifflin in 1943.  I've used it to prepare lectures on the Second World War, where I quote a few of Hitler's more lurid and bizarre passages in order to convey to students the dangerous world-view from which Nazism sprang.

I mention this because authorities in Bavaria are reportedly trying to prevent new editions of this book from being published in Germany (where it has been banned), now that the original copyright (which is controlled by the Bavarian government) is about to run out. Their concern, which is understandable but in my view overstated, is that neo-Nazi groups will use the expiration of copyright as an opportunity to disseminate Hitler's hateful ideas anew.

I think this is a mistake. In addition to being filled with a lot of appalling racist claptrap, Mein Kampf is an awful book-turgid, tedious, badly organized, and mostly boring. So the danger that a German edition it will win a lot of new converts seems remote. Second, it's widely available in pirated versions on the Internet and in plenty of other countries (including the Untied States), so anybody with neo-Nazi sympathies can get a copy already. 

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