On Nov. 14, President Obama admitted that closing Guantanamo before he leaves office is becoming a dimmer prospect with each passing week. Between congressional restrictions, and the “nature of the evidence” against those being held, Obama said that while numbers of detainees may still dwindle before Donald Trump takes office, a complete phase-out faces significant roadblocks.

Fordham Law’s Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security and author of Rogue Ju­­­­stice: The Making of the Security State, believes the United States is unable to bring those accused to court because the trials would draw attention to the country’s ethical choice of torturing its prisoners. Greenberg said that if the trial against tortured Muslim expatriate John Walker Lindh had been brought to court in February of 2002, things may have been different.

-Mary Awad

“It’s a game changer in terms of the issues that will be bruited in the presidential election campaign,” said Steven Simon, a visiting lecturer at Dartmouth College.

Otherwise, it will likely spur only the usual reexamination of possible security weaknesses that typically follows these kinds of attacks, he said, referring to such efforts in New York City in particular.

“Everything’s a game-changer,” he said. “Everything’s a wake-up call, everything’s somebody’s 9/11. God knows after 1941 how many things were somebody’s Pearl Harbor. So I’m not inclined to think in those terms.”

He appeared with Jonathan Stevenson, professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College, to discuss the recent Foreign Affairs article they coauthored, “The End of Pax Americana: Why Washington’s Middle East Pullback Makes Sense.” The Nov. 18 event was hosted by Fordham Law’s Center on National Security and moderated by its director, Karen Greenberg, PhD.

Both men served in the Obama administration— Stevenson as the U.S. National Security Council staff’s director for post-military affairs for the Middle East and North Africa from 2011 to 2013, and Simon as director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs at the White House from 2011 through 2012.

Stevenson agreed the attacks can change things in the “limited context” of presidential politics.

Conservatives, for example, might argue that if “we’d gone into Syria harder … then we could have done more to bog down ISIS and distract its attention from out-of-area attacks,” he said.

But he offered an easy counterargument: “If we’d done that, and weakened them there, it would have been all the more reason to undertake operationally less challenging terrorist attacks … in loosely defended Western cities.”

The speakers said that the Obama administration’s pullback from the Middle East makes sense in light of “what’s going on there” as opposed to “what’s going on in Washington,” in Stevenson’s words.

Simonson said the Middle East’s civil wars “have taken on a decidedly sectarian character,” making it unlikely the United States would heed its allies’ pleas to get involved.

The conflict in Syria is a case in point.

“It would be awkward, to say the least, for us to get integrally involved, say, with some kind of ground deployment in what is at its core a sectarian war,” said Stevenson, “and very difficult for us to extricate ourselves from it once we were there.”

“It seems to me we learned this lesson with arguably an even simpler scenario, and a less complicated one, in Iraq.”

Simon noted other constraints on American action in the Middle East, like the eventual costs—on the order of $4 trillion—of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the need to prepare for China’s rising military influence.

“The Chinese are spending like there’s no tomorrow, and they’re allocating their money to technologies and capabilities that are designed specifically to impede U.S. maritime operations in the Western Pacific,” he said. “The United States needs to do a lot of investment in that domain.

“You’ve got this global picture and you’ve got this budgetary situation that have sort of bumped up against political dynamics internal to the Middle East, [and]that have made gains from intervention [there]really rather low,” he said. “I mean, vanishingly low, at this stage.”

In response, Fordham has launched an effort to deeply examine liberal arts education and articulate its value for students. At the request of Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, Stephen Freedman, Ph.D., provost of the University, convened the Fordham Task Force on the Future of Liberal Arts Education.

Freedman tapped Eva Badowska, Ph.D., now acting dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, to chair the task force; she invited representatives from across the University to take part. Badowska said members are grappling with how to address the liberal arts, given the businesslike language that more people are applying to higher education.

“There’s this perception [among academics]of the language of the market, which is ‘bad,’ and the language of the academy, which is ‘good,’” said Badowska, who is also an associate professor of English. “There’s a strong concern we will fall into the trap of speaking about the value of a liberal education using market terms, and in doing so, cheapen the discourse.”

President Obama’s concentration on higher education came as the country emerged from the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis. As a result, business terms such as “value,” “results,” and “skills” have worked their way into the debate about higher education’s future.

“What executives want from graduates are the softer skills of liberal arts, not just technical skills,” said Badowska. “So we debated how what we teach could be labeled ‘skills.’ In some sense we can say what we teach are ‘transferable skills,’ ‘high-level skills,’ ‘intellectual skills,’ or even ‘habits of mind.’”

The task force has defined just a few of those softer skills as being able to analyze problems from several angles using distinct processes like the analytic and scientific methods. Other soft skills include writing and presentation skills and having a broad historical awareness of the world and its peoples.

The return-on-investment mindset was highlighted in January when President Obama told some General Electric factory workers that “folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.” (The president, who was educated at two distinguished liberal arts colleges, Occidental and Columbia, later apologized for his remarks.)

“There is a prejudice that liberal education is a matter for expensive private colleges and doesn’t easily translate into careers,” said Badowska.

Several on the Fordham task force have noted that “liberal education” once denoted freedom from the manual labor of vocational trades. Members agreed that today this idea would be seen as a slight. In an attempt to recast the debate, liberal arts promoters have adopted some of the terms used to promote vocational training, such as “skills.”

Badowska said that “skills” has become a source of tension not just for the Fordham task force, but for liberal arts promoters in general, igniting a debate about how the word should be used.

“There’s been such a push toward assessment that whenever faculty hear the word ‘skills,’ there’s a kind of knee-jerk reaction: ‘Here comes assessment again,’” she said.

Nevertheless, she said, liberal arts colleges have begun to embrace this term in order to make a liberal arts degree understandable and valuable to a job-seeking public.

While Badowska said that the term “skills” continues to “wreak havoc with liberal arts,” she said it also shows the need for a better communication strategy. She paraphrased Father McShane, saying that liberal arts professors need to be “bilingual.”

“Liberal arts professors have to be able to speak the academic language that ensures intellectual credibility, but they also have to speak the language of the public debate—which is often the language of dollars and cents.”

Badowska said that to address this concern, the task force has made public relations a primary goal.

“The story in the news right now is ‘who can afford liberal education?’” she said. “It’s becoming patently clear that we are facing a future in which the few people who will be able to afford to attend liberal colleges will be the rich.”

So while the bulk of the task force’s work is to articulate the value of a liberal arts education, Badowska said that developing a strategy to advocate for the liberal arts would be just as important.

Social media and web presence strategies are being developed to ensure that the academic work of the task force (several papers are expected to emerge from the effort) will not gather dust on a library shelf, but become the basis for the University to actively participate in the national debate online.

Badowska said the task force’s discussions have been freewheeling and open-ended. She is well aware that faculty often view such efforts as idealistic at best, but she thinks the task force’s academic work will find broad support and exert influence on the shape of the liberal arts at Fordham.

The task force expects to unveil the results of its efforts by the end of the academic year.