Contention Opens Wider Window on the World : Publishing: In an age of specialization, a new journal creates a forum for debate on all subjects, from biology to the collapse of Marxism.

The late 1980s were contentious times for the planet--and for academia. As the “domino theory” went into reverse, Marxist-socialist regimes collapsed in rapid succession. Debates flourished on campuses: “What went wrong?” vs. “We told you so.”

“It was a period when a lot of people were abandoning old certainties,” says Nikki Keddie, a UCLA history professor.

Other, less dramatic shake-ups also were in the air, she adds, and they covered all fields: Freud was questioned, even attacked. Even postmodern deconstructionists like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, French philosophers and theorists, were increasingly in disfavor.

Change was everywhere, affecting everyone. There was much to debate, argue, rethink.

But where?

“There were very few general-interest journals,” Keddie recalls. “Things were breaking down into smaller and smaller specialties. It is the nature of fields to become ever more specialized, but there are people around--for example, those who read the New York Review of Books--who want a variety of areas.”

Keddie thought there was room for a journal that would offer a forum for multicultural, multiethnic debates on all areas of society.

And indeed, last fall, Contention, newly founded by Keddie, offered explorations of the collapse of Marxism and communism, of the impact of molecular biology on Darwinism and of the link between procreation and female oppression.

Keddie says Contention is “really a good title. It means argument but also taking a position. A few (colleagues) objected,” she adds, starting to chuckle, “that it was too contentious.”

But the journal will need more than a good title to succeed.

“She’s going against the norm. I’ve yet to see a professor who has the time (for general-interest publications). They’re looking for ultra-specialization,” says Samir Husni, a University of Mississippi journalism professor who tracks American consumer periodicals.

For both consumer and academic journals, Husni says, the trend is the same--specialization. So is the difficulty of starting up a magazine, especially a general-interest one, in this economy--and having it succeed.

Keddie is well aware of the odds. Getting someone to publish Contention was difficult; her own University of California Press turned her down. The Indiana University Press, on the lookout for a general academic journal, gave Keddie a three-year contract.

Contention, which will appear three times a year, went to print with several hundred advance $25 subscriptions. At this point, Keddie’s hopes for circulation are modest--”well over a thousand.”

So far, Keddie has been successful in getting a high level of writer--”fancy people,” she calls them--to work for no pay.

The first issue announced that “the journal’s emphasis is on controversies, not for the sake of controversy but, rather, as a vehicle to understand what are considered central issues.”

The first two issues weigh in heavily on the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the decline of Marxism-socialism. Future issues will concentrate on North-South global development and multiculturalism in education.

Debates may be confined to one issue or spill over into succeeding issues. No name-calling, though, nor academic free-for-alls, Keddie says, adding that she wants to limit the comment to the content.

Keddie intends the journal to be “easy to read but not oversimplified,” appealing to those New York Review of Books readers--well-educated, non-academic people with a wide range of interests.

Looking at Keddie’s professional life, it would seem she is no stranger to contention. A member of UCLA’s history department since 1961, she was the first woman to have a regular appointment in the social sciences there and during the 1960s was the only woman in the department.

Once there, Keddie immersed herself in, and has yet to emerge from, a world of strong ideology and violent conflicts.

Widely recognized as an expert on Iran, the Middle East and the Islamic world, her “work in progress” includes one book on the frequency of revolution in Iranian history and another on Islamic revolutions since 1700.

Keddie says that while she was a doctoral student at UC Berkeley, she saw that her original field of European history was crowded. Middle Eastern history was relatively empty, and she decided to switch.

She had no prior connection to the Middle East, she says, and had probably never met an Iranian. But Iran was in the news after the August, 1953, royalist uprising that restored Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as shah.

In her dissertation on Western impact on modern Iranian social history, Keddie theorized that the coup was not indigenous, contrary to what most Westerners believed at the time.

“I was already quite sure the U.S. was involved. I got into trouble with that,” she recalls of her implications of CIA chicanery. “I got into an argument with my professor.”

But she received her degree--and was later proved right when it was learned that British and American intelligence agencies had intervened in Tehran.

She has visited Iran only once since the Islamic Republic was established in 1979, but she is encouraged that her book, “Roots and Revolution,” has been translated into Farsi and favorably reviewed. In addition, she edited the book “Women in the Moslem World” and co-edited “Women in Middle Eastern History,” released last month by Yale University Press.

Invariably, publications that spotlight political and social issues do get pegged as right or left.

“I don’t like to identify (Contention) that way,” Keddie declares, although she notes that the academic world, “particularly in the humanities and social sciences, is to the left of the world at large.”

She insists that her journal intends to air all points of view. For example, she notes, conservative writers are being given space: sociologist Daniel Chirot in the first issue, as well as several forthcoming contributions from researchers at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

“It sounds like the closest thing to it is NPQ (New Perspectives Quarterly, a general-interest intellectual journal published out of Los Angeles),” says Victor Navasky, editor of the Nation, an independent weekly widely described as left wing.

“NPQ purports to be open on the surface, to present two views, but clearly they have their own set of political values underlying it,” Navasky says, adding that a publication’s values often show up in the content.

NPQ Publisher Stanley Sheinbaum, who is familiar with Contention and “impressed with the quality,” says his definition of openness would apply to the new journal as well as to his own publication. According to Sheinbaum, openness means being “open to anyone who has something to say,” rather than offering equal space to opposing views.

Contention has received scant but favorable attention so far, with high marks from Harvard magazine and the London Times Literary Supplement.

One early reader, John Esposito, a religion professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., wrote in: “For those who ask, ‘Why another journal?’ Contention’s first issue provides the answer. It pulls us out of our disciplines and specializations. . . .”