The accelerating assault on Middle East Studies - and higher education.
Plus: a new blog format for perilous times
The assault on Middle East Studies has taken center stage in the Trump administration’s broader war on higher education and civil liberties. Campuses across the country had already under tremendous pressure from the government, the media and external advocacy groups over last spring’s protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. As predicted, that has escalated dramatically as part of the Trump administration’s wholesale attack on higher education — closing down grants from NIH, NSF and the Pentagon’s Minerva Program, changing overhead rules on grants in ways that would cripple research universities, firing half the staff of the Department of Education, and so much more. A cascade of universities and colleges are announcing hiring freezes and laying off staff amidst profound uncertainty about the future of the federal funding which has long been the engine of research universities.
Last week, higher education felt very much like February 2020 on the eve of COVID — though in this case the crisis was not a global natural event but one entirely intentionally inflicted by a Trump administration seemingly determined to cripple and destroy the American state. Now it feels more like March or April, with everyone understanding how much worse everything is probably about to get but seemingly helpless to stop it. The Middle East, after being ground zero for the campus wars last spring, was initially just one part of the broader Trump catastrophe. That’s changed. The last week has seen:
the appalling arrest and disappearance of Columbia University protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, not even for any alleged crimes but on Secretary of State Rubio’s personal determination that his presence in the US is contrary to American foreign policy interests — an astonishingly vague and abusive formulation which circumvents legal protections for free speech and which could and will be applied broadly, as Trump and his administration officials openly promise more deportations and arrests (see Heba Gowayed and Adam Serwer for more on this)
reports of an impending new travel ban targeting primarily Muslims and people from the Middle East, with reporting suggesting that visa bans and deportations will be in part based upon social media postings or other protected speech related to Palestine or Israel;
the cancelling of $400 million in government grants from Columbia directly over its supposed failures in confronting antisemitism (despite carrying out one of the most violent and draconian crackdowns on protestors in the country), with the clear implication that other institutions will face similar targeted pressure
the announcement of a DOJ federal task force on alleged antisemitism which immediately launched investigations of ten universities over alleged antisemitism (even as the administration has essentially ended civil rights enforcement on every other form of racial or gender discrimination);
the subsequent listing by the remnants of the Department of Education of 60 universities and colleges warning of potential enforcement action for alleged failure to meet their obligations to protect against antisemitism;
the reported closing of the International and Foreign Language Education office which administers Title VI and FLAS programs as part of the firing of half of the Department of Education’s staff.
the shuttering of USAID and most foreign assistance programs which directly and indirectly impacts a wide range of academic programming and research institutions in the Middle East.
Even if many of these moves are thrown out by courts — as they obviously should be but is not a sure thing, given this Supreme Court and the political environment, as well as uncertainty as to whether this administration will actually comply with court rulings — the long term damage will already have been done. Nathan Brown and Zaha Hassan nicely lay out what’s new:
“First, the tools are so much more punitive and extensive. The wholesale cutoff of grants and contracts is completely unprecedented, but that is just part of the story. The activity is coordinated across the federal government, led sometimes by the Department of Justice and sometimes Homeland Security. Criminal prosecution and expulsion are now replacing negotiated agreements as the instrument of choice. Second, there seems to be no sign of much fact-finding—the officials involved seem to have made up their minds without any investigation. Third, Islamophobia is no longer something that leading government officials see as a problem. And finally, and perhaps most significantly from the perspective of higher education, this comes as part of a broader set of efforts undermining the entire basis for federal relations with institutions of higher education. Every single research university in the United States has to worry about what tomorrow will bring on a wide variety of fiscal, legal, and regulatory fronts.”
In response to this unprecedented assault on higher education, as well as the dizzying pace of events inside the Middle East itself, I am going to adapt the format and pace of this blog slightly. Instead of posting longer pieces once a week with a tight focus on academic publications, I am going to post multiple times a week with a broader mandate of regularly rounding up key news and opinions. It’s too easy for things to get lost in the sound and fury of constant, relentless bad news — and too easy for the region itself, from Syria’s difficult transition to Israel’s escalations in the West Bank to the whole panoply of regional politics, to get lost in the domestic American turmoil. Don’t worry, I’m going to continue to collect and feature new academic publications and post my own pieces regularly. I’m just going to post more frequently, link to a wider range of publications and formats, host some short guest essays and conversations, and try to help us all keep track of the issues we care about amidst all the chaos. Hopefully you will find it useful.
That’s all coming soon. For now, please enjoy two online contributions of mine from last week: my podcast conversation with Alissa Walter about her Stanford University Press book on modern Baghdad, and my webinar with CIWAS about my Cambridge Element What is the Middle East? Check them out!
First up, last week’s Middle East Political Science podcast featured Alissa Walter’s absolutely fascinating new book, Contested City: Citizen Advocacy and Survival in Modern Baghdad. Walter is one of the leading scholars producing innovative scholarship in part through the systematic examination of the Ba’ath Party archives captured in the 2003 war and made available to scholars at the Hoover Institution (she talks about the ethical and practical issues with using that archive in the book and on the podcast). She convincingly describes a surprisingly decentralized form of governance in Saddam-era Baghdad, as neighborhood level officials became the primary point of contact for citizens. By reviewing citizen petitions and demands on these local officials, Walter offers an account of Iraqi politics which accords far more agency and resilience to citizens navigating economic hardship and authoritarian rule. And those times were tough indeed: building on the pathbreaking work by Dina Khoury, Walter shows the individual and social effects of the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf war, and the post-1991 sanctions regime — and how women, war veterans, families of martyrs and others were able to press their demands on the state. It’s a wonderfully written, deeply researched, and highly original contribution to our understanding of Iraqi politics. Check out our conversation here!
Next up: last week I had the pleasure of being hosted virtually by the Center for Islamic and West Asian Studies at the Royal Holloway University of London for a conversation with Mohammad Kalantari about my recent Cambridge Element What is the Middle East? The Theory and Practice of Regions. I’m embedding the video here for anyone interested — and while the open access window has closed, please do feel free to reach out if you’d like a free PDF if you’re interested in reading or assigning.
I’ll be back soon with more from the MENA Academy, regional politics, and the crisis of higher education.