Harvard can't capitulate hard enough
Plus Columbia promises to airdrop pro-Israeli faculty into departments and deportations accelerate.
It’s been another dismal few days for the MENA Academy and for American higher education as the leadership of our elite institutions continue to fail us in the face of unprecedented pressure. Here’s a quick roundup of the major stories, along with a few recent contributions from the MENA Academy you might want to check out.
The no good, awful, terrible news:
Harvard forced out the leadership of its Center for Middle East Studies - Ottoman historian Cemal Kafadar and Gulf historian Rosie Bsheer (and canceled a talk scheduled for tomorrow on Gaza by Columbia’s Nadia Abu el-Hajj). That follows in the wake of its adoption of the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism as part of a lawsuit settlement, and its ending a longstanding relationship with Birzeit University in Ramallah. The decapitation of the Center for Middle East Studies appears to have been in response to complaints by some faculty and alumni about some of its programming, rather than to a federal list of demands. A comprehensive New Yorker article in early May asked “will Harvard bend or break?” I think now we can say that Harvard broke. And it didn’t even save them: yesterday, the Trump administration announced that it would review $9 billion in federal grants to Harvard despite all of its efforts. Perhaps this can be a moment for everyone to finally acknowledge that none of this pressure on universities is really about antisemitism, and never really has been — it’s about forcing submission and breaking higher education. The letter sent by Harvard President Alan Garber to the community in response — focused almost completely on the institution’s efforts on antisemitism — suggests not.
Columbia’s president’s memo laying out its responses to the Trump administration’s demands was appalling across the board, but one item jumps out at me since it was not part of the original list of demands by the Trump administration: a commitment to hire faculty in Economics, Political Science and the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) to be jointly appointed in the Institute for Israeli and Jewish Studies. This pairs rather directly with the move to put the current Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department into receivership and initiate a comprehensive review of courses and programming on the Middle East. As Middle East Studies faculty are sanctioned, pressured, and even dismissed, their courses can be replaced with Israel Studies faculty who have been airdropped into tenured or tenure track positions in academic departments — most likely with ideological expectations of acceptable candidates (I don’t expect they are looking to hire leftist Israeli critics of Gaza) and top-down constraints on the ability of those departments to vet candidates to the standards they would ordinarily expect in faculty searches (will departments be able to say no to a candidate the president/board of trustees wants even if they lack the publication record otherwise expected for tenure?). That’s what has happened at various conservative institutes established at state universities in places like Ohio and Florida. Ironically, I warned, to some skepticism, that such a move was likely the next move in the campaign against higher education during a talk I gave at the end of February at… Columbia.
The state of Ohio officially adopted SB1, the controversial bill which had failed in several earlier iterations. This isn’t specifically about the Middle East, except that it is. SB1 eliminates DEI, requires that syllabi be posted online (to be scrutinized by non-expert partisan groups), effectively eliminates tenure protections, and restricts how faculty can discuss politically “controversial” topics. Ann Wainscott has a good overview of all the many problems with SB1, which she describes as “gross overreach into higher education by lawmakers.” It’s not just a crippling blow to Ohio higher education — it’s likely a model, like Florida and Texas, for other states and the federal government to emulate as they expand their campaign to conquer and destroy American academia.
The Trump administration escalated its campaign to deport international students. The shocking arrest of Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Oztur by unmarked ICE agents over an anodyne op-ed she had co-authored received the most attention, likely because her abduction off the street by random, ununiformed secret police was captured on video. See this excellent piece connecting Trump with Turkish repression by Howard Eissenstadt, Lisel Hintz and Nick Danforth. ICE arrested Iranian graduate student Alireza Doroudi at the University of Alabama without any evidence of protest participation or political views at all. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that he had revoked more than 300 visas from international students, based solely on his personal view that their presence in the United States was contrary to American interests. All of this will profoundly impact the willingness and ability of international students to enroll at American institutions — a catastrophic financial outcome and loss for American soft power which for the Trump administration is probably the goal. The lawsuit backed by MESA and the AAUP against these deportations has never been more necessary.
The Podcast
Last week’s Middle East Political Science podcast featured Scott Williamson’s book The King Can Do No Wrong. Williamson develops a theoretical approach to the differential ways in which autocratic leaders can avoid public accountability by delegating authority on tough issues to disposable officials (prime ministers, cabinet officials, special commissions, etc). He argues that monarchs are more able to play this card than other types of autocrats, and that this strategy helps to explain the longevity of monarchies in places like Morocco and Jordan (the primary research site for the book). Listen to our conversation here:
Around the Journals
Finally, a few new articles published last week which might be of interest. Rachel Beatty Riedl, Jennifer McCoy, Kenneth Roberts, and Murat Somer have guest edited a special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences on Democratic Backsliding. Seems kind of relevant. It includes 15 case studies from across the world — read all of them here. They summarize the findings and argument here in my old haunts at Good Authority, which has been doing essential work lately and deserves a follow.
Majd Abuamer, “Disinformation as an authoritarian strategy: the populist playbook in Egypt and Tunisia,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (March 2025). ABSTRACT: Political leaders often resort to populist rhetoric that attracts people’s emotions, framing a binary opposition between ‘the people’ (us) and the traditional establishment or elites (them), while rejecting facts, and disseminating disinformation. As a result, populism and disinformation strengthen each other, creating a cycle of manipulation that weakens democratic systems. This article compares the rhetoric of Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and Tunisia’s Kais Saied to argue that authoritarian populists use four key tactics rooted in disinformation to suppress the opposition and secure legitimacy: (1) constructing the notion of ‘the people’ by constructing an enemy; (2) targeting the media and undermining democratic institutions; (3) fabricating a false narrative by exaggerating successes; and (4) using conspiracy theories and disinformation to justify inability to meet promises.
Guy Eyre, “Quietist Salafism and survival: pious politics in Morocco and Algeria,” Democratization (March 2025). ABSTRACT: Why do Islamic Salafi actors – one of the most influential contemporary Islamic ideologies – decide to maintain or modulate their long-standing disavowal of democracy, electoral institutional and oppositional politics, and (Islamist) political parties as “un-Islamic”? Scholarship emphasizes institutional openings in driving Islamic social movements to support electoral institutional politics (“moderation”). Typically through single-country studies, scholarship on Salafis in the Arab world specifically argues that, following the “Arab Uprisings,” large political openings driven by revolutionary protests and regime change (Egypt, Tunisia) pushed Salafis to support democratic and oppositional politics. Nevertheless, via cross-country comparative study this paper argues that, despite regime survival and limited, non-revolutionary protests in Algeria and Morocco in 2011, only Moroccan Salafis began to support democratic institutional and oppositional politics, and only sought full participation in elections from 2013. Accordingly, the paper argues that only the Salafi pursuit of organizational survival, understood in light of individual Salafis’ subjective readings of political opportunity structures and their experiences of discrete histories of state repression and co-optation, can fully explain the divergent trajectories of Salafism in both countries since 2011.
Irene Weipert-Fenner, Nadine Abdalla and Jonas Wolff, “The political economy of implementing IMF reforms: evidence from Egypt and Tunisia,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (March 2025). ABSTRACT: In recent years, research on International Monetary Fund (IMF) programmes has focused on the question of whether the IMF has moved away from neoliberal austerity and on the socioeconomic consequences of such a potentially adjusted IMF agenda in recipient countries. This article puts forward a well-established, yet currently under-researched third issue: compliance with IMF conditions. We analyse the implementation of IMF programmes in two recent cases, Egypt and Tunisia between 2016 and 2020. In contrast to the IMF, which portrayed the Egyptian authoritarian regime as top reformer, while criticizing Tunisia’s democratically elected government, a systematic analysis of the IMF’s own reports as well as further sources reveals remarkably similar patterns of partial reform implementation in both countries. These similarities, we argue, can be explained best by joint features of the domestic political economies such as the power of domestic veto players (army, business, labour).