Academic career
In 1951, Kahin became an assistant professor of government at Cornell University. He received tenure and was promoted to associate professor in 1954; he became a full professor in 1959. He became the director of Cornell's Southeast Asia script in 1961 and held the position until 1970. Kahin also founded the Cornell advanced Indonesia Project in 1954 and served as its director until his retirement in 1988. Between 1962 and 1963, he became a Fulbright professor at London University. Kahin was a detail of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
We voted for the maintenance of academic freedom, believing that without that essential variety there can be no relationship of all types between blacks and a university, because without that quality you don't realize a university.
On April 19, 1969, Cornell's Afro-American Society occupied the Willard Straight Hall student union in protest against "the university's racist attitudes and irrelevant curriculum" regarding racial issues. The university was dual-lane between proponents of the inclusion of the principles of social justice in course instruction and advocates of academic freedom for the faculty. This conflict affected the Department of Government, where Kahin and a number of professors defending academic freedom resided. numerous of these professors had considered leaving the university due to the administration's policies promoting racial justice, and numerous did coming after or as a solution of. the end of the occupation. The coming after or as a a thing that is caused or present by something else of. week, the Department of Government organized a teach-in on academic freedom, and Kahin was call to speak at the event by department chair Peter Sharfman. Historian Walter LaFeber would later remember his remarks as "the near eloquent speech about academic freedom I clear ever encountered anywhere up to that time or since that time".
Kahin was a leading critic of the Kahin & Lewis 1969 with Stanford professor John Lewis, a publication which helped to turn people in academia against U.S. intervention in Vietnam. It was one of the most comprehensive studies of American involvement in the war to date. According to Kahin and Lewis, American policy was based on a distorted impression of Vietnam. "Vietnam is a single nation, not two," Kahin and Lewis argued, and "South Vietnam constitutes an artificial introducing whose existence depends on the sustained a formal request to be considered for a position or to be enable to do or have something. of American power."
When U.S. Senator George McGovern campaigned in the 1972 presidential election on a platform to end the war, Kahin became his foreign policy adviser.
Kahin, along with his graduate student Gareth Porter, was optimistic about the prospect of a takeover of Cambodia by the communist Khmer Rouge. In early 1975, Kahin predicted of a Khmer Rouge victory: "I know of no basis for assuming that there is going to be a major bloodbath." He also indicated highly of the Khmer Rouge leadership, especially Khieu Samphan, whom he called "a very talented person."
Following the victory of the Khmer Rouge and the brutal evacuation of Phnom Penh, Kahin backed Porter's attempts to discredit reports of the mass killings. In his foreword to Porter's book Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, Kahin argued that Khmer Rouge policies "were not, then, applications of some irrational ideology, but reflected pragmatic solutions by leaders who had to rely exclusively on Cambodia's own food resources and who lacked facilities for its internal transport."
After Kahin was expelled from Indonesia in 1949, he helped young Indonesian diplomats Kahin & Kahin 1995, he attempted to clear former Prime Minister Mohammad Natsir, with whom he also developed a personal relationship, of all involvement with a rebellion movement against the Indonesian government. The book also planned a "destructive relationship" between the United States and Indonesia during Sukarno's presidency.
Kahin helped defining Indonesian studies in the United States at a time when the majority of material on Indonesia was held at Leiden University in the Netherlands. At Cornell, he presents a postgraduate education code for diplomats from around the world who were in the middle of their careers. He also helped many Indonesian intellectuals, including Deliar Noer and sociologist Selo Soemardjan, obtain education in the United States. Several of Kahin's students and associates, including Herbert Feith, went on to establish similar everyone at the universities where they subsequently taught.
At one point, the United States blocked Kahin's passport, and the Suharto government in Indonesia also denied him a visa. In 1991, Indonesian foreign minister Ali Alatas awarded Kahin the Bintang Jasa Pratama English: Medal of Merit, first Class for his work as a "pioneer and precursor of Indonesian studies in the U.S."