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Malcolm H. Kerr Biography
MALCOLM HOOPER KERR
(1931-1984)
Born in 1931 in Beirut, Lebanon, Malcolm
Kerr was both a child of and a student of the Middle East.
His American parents had gone to Turkey in 1919 to work with
the Near East Relief and eventually went to teach at the American
University of Beirut. Malcolm was raised on the AUB campus
on the terraced bluffs above the Mediterranean. His earliest
memories of Lebanon were formed in the pre-World War II days
of the French Mandate before the establishment of the state
of Israel and the full flowering of pan-Arab nationalism. His
family life and his education gave him a foot in two worlds
and an abiding attachment and love of the Middle East.
The family spent the war years in Princeton,
New Jersey, where Malcolm had his first taste of America. In
his junior high school he was called “the boy from Syria”
- an attribute he didn’t forget. When the war ended,
the family went back to Beirut, and Malcolm returned to the
American Community School for two years. Then in 1947, at
not quite 16 years of age, he left the Middle East to spend
his last two years of secondary school at Deerfield Academy
in western Massachusetts, a school where many sons of AUB
families were sent to learn American values and institutions.
He thrived on the rigorous academic and athletic programs
and always said that Deerfield made a man of him. His quick
maturation might also have been due to the fact that he had
to spend most of one semester in the infirmary, incapacitated
by early-onset arthritis. This affliction was with him
all his life, but he learned how to live with it and keep
it at bay much of the time.
Malcolm went on to Princeton where he studied
International Relations and specialized in the Middle East
under Philip Hitti. His post-graduate plans to study at Oxford
in 1953 were thwarted by a recurrence of arthritis; instead
he returned to Beirut where he could live with his parents
on the AUB campus and join the MA program in Middle East Studies. During
that time he met his future wife, Ann Zwicker, who was taking
her junior year abroad at AUB from Occidental College in California. They
were married in 1956, by which time Malcolm had started work
on his PhD at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International
Studies. Choosing to write his thesis with Sir Hamilton
Gibb at Harvard, they spent the next two years in Cambridge
and had to find their way to the Johns Hopkins Baltimore campus
where his graduation was held in 1958.
Two books resulted from his graduate studies.
His master’s thesis became Lebanon in the Last Years
of Feudalism, 1840-1868; A Contemporary Account by Antun Dahir
Al-Aqiqi. His PhD thesis became Islamic Reform: The Political
and Legal Theories of Muhammad `Abduh and Rashid Rida.
Malcolm’s first teaching job was
at AUB where he taught for three years in the Political Science
Department. The first two of the couple’s four children,
Susan and John, were born during that time. From AUB,
Malcolm was hired by Gustav von Grunebaum to teach at UCLA
in the Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Department
of Political Science. He delayed that appointment by a year
to do post-doctoral study at St. Antony’s College, Oxford
with Albert Hourani. As with so many of Albert's students,
the year of study together led to a life-long friendship.
Malcolm had a twenty- year teaching career at UCLA, but at
every opportunity the family used leaves-of-absence and sabbaticals
to get back to the Arab world. In 1964-65, Malcolm received
a Social Science Research Council grant to Cairo where he
completed his best known book, The Arab Cold War; Gamal Abd
al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958-1970, a study of the interplay
of ideology and political tactics in Arab affairs and of Nasir’s
career as a pan-Arab leader. His concern was to dispel
the notion of Arab politics as a projection of decisions made
in Washington. The next year was spent teaching at AUB where
the Kerr’s third child, Stephen, was born.
Shortly after his return to UCLA, he became
chairperson of the Political Science Department, a job he
declared in later years to be the best preparation for any
kind of job in university administration. The Kerr’s
fourth child, Andrew, was born during that time, and a beautiful
house on top of a mountain overlooking the Pacific was purchased before
the inflation of real estate prices began.
After the June War of 1967, Malcolm had
become discouraged with Israeli-Arab politics, and so the
family decided to spend time in France and North Africa during
their next sabbatical in 1970-71. He obtained a grant to study
the politics of higher education in North Africa. In actuality,
he missed the issues of the eastern Mediterranean Arab world
and neglected the politics of education in favor of working
on the third edition of The Arab Cold War. His concern
for the problems of the region are revealed in the preface:
…since June, 1967 Arab politics
have ceased to be fun. In the good old days most Arabs refused
to take themselves very seriously, and this made it easier
to take a relaxed view of the few who possessed intimations
of some immortal mission. It was like watching Princeton
play Columbia in football on a muddy afternoon. The June
War was like a disastrous game against Notre Dame which
Princeton impulsively added to its schedule, leaving several
players crippled for life and the others so embittered that
they took to fighting viciously among themselves instead
of scrimmaging happily as before. This may be instructive
for the student of politics, but as one who all his life
has had friendships and memories among the Arabs to cherish,
I have found no relish in describing it.
Back at UCLA, the Kerrs spent a record
five-year stretch in California, during which time Malcolm
continued teaching and was appointed Divisional Dean of Social
Sciences. He joined the ranks of “air academics”
who flew around to conferences giving papers, but, in the
memories of his daughter and three sons, still managed to
be a loving father who liked nothing better than to play basketball
in the driveway or attend father-daughter Camp Fire Girl dinners.
In 1976-77, Malcolm was asked to be a visiting
distinguished professor at the American University in Cairo.
With civil war going on in Lebanon this was a good alternative
to taking the family to AUB. During that sojourn, he obtained
Ford Foundation support for a collaborative enterprise between
the von Grunebaum Center and the Strategic Studies of Al-Ahram
Foundation. This was to be a joint study by Egyptian and American
scholars on the subject of rich and poor states in the Middle
East. Returning to UCLA in 1977, Malcolm administered the
program and became director of the von Grunebaum Center for
Near Eastern Studies. Two years later the family again departed
for Cairo where Malcolm ran the University of California Education
Abroad Program and completed the rich and poor Arab states
project with an edited book entitled, Rich and Poor States
in the Middle East; Egypt and the New Arab Order. In
the concluding chapter he wrote of five scenarios for the
future of Egypt in the year 2,000. Reading them today, they
seem remarkably on target.
As much as the Kerr family loved Cairo,
Malcolm’s heart always belonged to Beirut and AUB. He
had become a trustee of the university and traveled to Lebanon
from Cairo during lulls in the Civil War. When he was asked
to be the president of AUB in 1982, it seemed like an ideal
job fit - except for the political climate - but it was easy
to overlook the danger for the chance to lead the institution
which stood for all the things he believed in and where his
parents had taught for forty years. His enthusiasm for
taking the job was summed up by his statement, “The
only thing I’d rather do than watch Steve (his son who
then played for the University of Arizona) play basketball
is be president of AUB.” The Civil War had been going
on for seven years, but it was hoped that the shuttle diplomacy
of Henry Kissinger that had brought about the exodus of the
PLO to Tunis would soon bring peace. Betting on those chances
and feeling a sense of calling to the job, the Kerrs decided
to go to Beirut. Malcolm was president for only seventeen
months. The war had not been spent but kept going for
seven more years. On January 18, 1984, Malcolm was shot outside
his office by two gunmen. Later Islamic Jihad made a telephone
call to claim the credit for his death. The irony, of course,
was that they had killed a man who understood and loved the
Middle East as much as any foreigner could.
Malcolm’s spirit is carried on in the American University
of Beirut, where hundreds of students have studied under scholarships
in his name, in the students he taught at UCLA, AUB and AUC -
and in his family. His children, in their own lives, personify
and continue the various aspects of Malcolm’s career
and interests and reflect the values of their parents as they
raise their own children.
There is probably no academic tribute that
Malcolm would appreciate more than having the MESA dissertation
award named after him. His own scholarship was forthright
and honest to the point of sometimes getting him into trouble.
While he was often thought of as “pro-Arab” in
writing about the Israeli-Arab conflict, he could be as critical
of the Arabs as he was of the Israelis. He spoke the truth
as he saw it and was committed to the cause of Arab-Israeli
peace and to building understanding between the Arab World
and the West. He was a founding member of MESA and served
as president in 1972. Attending the fall meetings and seeing
all his colleagues and friends was one of the highlights of
his year. It is fitting that Malcolm Kerr’s spirit and
scholarly love of the Middle East are perpetuated in the MESA
dissertation award.
Ann Z. Kerr, June 2000
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