The Battle for the University: Why I Chose ASMEA Over MESA

by Tim Orr
October 26, 2025
Read the original article in The Times of Israel - The Blogs.

This is the second year I’ve chosen to attend the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa ASMEA Conference instead of the Middle East Studies Association Conference (MESA). The first time, I made the decision guided by a sense that ASMEA still valued serious scholarship over fashionable rhetoric. This year, that choice feels heavier. With all that is happening, it feels less like a preference and more like a conviction. The fallout from October 7, and the way that tragedy echoed through Western campuses, stripped away for me any illusions I had about academic neutrality. What we once called the “marketplace of ideas” has become a battlefield of ideologies. My decision isn’t simply about where I present a paper. More importantly, it’s about where I place my conscience. I want to stand with people who still believe that reason, not rage, should guide scholarship.

Dr. Charles Asher Small of ISGAP has been warning about this shift for years (Small, 2023). He calls the university “the front line” in the struggle against antisemitism, and he means it literally. Higher education, he reminds us, is where democratic societies shape their moral character. When universities are captured by ideology, the loss isn’t confined to Jewish students—it’s a loss for truth itself. Small’s central insight is that antisemitism today doesn’t spring from ignorance; it arises when learning is twisted to serve resentment. As an educator, I find that both haunting and persuasive. Once the pursuit of knowledge becomes an instrument of politics, civilization begins to unlearn how to think.

When Universities Stop Being Safe for Jews

In the opening remarks before the main lecture, The Genocidal Alliance – Western Intellectuals and Hamas (Small & Rafiq, 2023), Dr. Small describes campus life in terms that are both shocking and heartbreakingly familiar. He tells of students at Columbia and NYU who were threatened by their own classmates—“We’ll do to you here what happened in southern Israel.” Young women were told they’d be raped “like in the entity.” Professors publicly accused Jewish students of supporting the murder of children in Gaza. One honors student, chosen from more than a thousand applicants, fled class in tears and has not returned for weeks. This, Small insists, is not a collection of isolated stories. It is the new academic environment. The institutions entrusted to protect these students have looked away, trapped between fear of controversy and fear of moral clarity.

It’s worth remembering what the university once stood for. It was designed to be a space where inquiry counted more than identity, where every student had the right to speak and to learn without fear. That vision has eroded. On many campuses, Jewish students now find that visibility itself invites danger. A symbol of faith or a few words of solidarity with Israel can make them targets. University leaders issue neutral statements, clinging to procedural language while their students are bullied in the name of justice. The problem is not debate—it’s the abandonment of decency. When students cannot walk across campus without fear, the university has already failed at its most basic task: to educate free people.

The Intellectual Roots of a New Intolerance

The wave of hostility now visible on campus didn’t appear overnight. It grew slowly, often without intention, in the fertile ground of certain academic movements. Dr. Small traces its roots to the intellectual turn of the late twentieth century—to postmodernism, critical theory, and the far-reaching influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism (Said, 1978). What began as an effort to examine Western power eventually hardened into a moral binary: oppressors versus oppressed. Within that binary, Jews—and especially Zionists—were cast as stand-ins for colonial guilt. These frameworks migrated from seminar rooms to lecture halls, and from there into activist slogans. Israel ceased to be a subject of study and became a symbol of evil.

That evolution explains why antisemitism on campus feels both ancient and freshly minted. The hatred is centuries old, but it now speaks in the polished idiom of “decolonization” and “social justice.” It wears the clothes of compassion while singling out one people for perpetual blame. Dr. Small calls this the “intellectual pipeline.” It is where ideas that were once obscure academic debates have become the moral furniture of student life (Small, 2023). Many young people shouting slogans genuinely believe they are standing for righteousness. Yet beneath the language of liberation lies the oldest prejudice in human history—refined, rationalized, and made respectable by theory.

When the Watchdogs Become the Problem

The decline of the university’s moral purpose doesn’t end in the classroom. It extends into the very institutions that once safeguarded scholarship. The Middle East Studies Association—known as MESA—was, for many years, a respected space for serious and open intellectual exchange. That changed dramatically when the organization voted to endorse the academic boycott of Israel (MESA, 2022). With that decision, it turned away from its founding ideals and its tradition of open inquiry. This scholarly association became something else entirely, which is a political instrument dressed in the language of academia. In taking that step, MESA effectively declared that Israeli academics were no longer full participants in the international community of research and teaching. The vote did more than make a political statement—it undermined the very principle that sustains the academy: that the pursuit of knowledge must remain open to all, regardless of nationality or ideology. That stance strikes at the heart of what universities are meant to represent—the belief that the pursuit of knowledge must remain open to everyone, regardless of nationality or ideology. When scholars are judged by their passports rather than their ideas, something vital has already been lost.

I’ve watched this shift unfold, and it mirrors what I’ve seen on campuses. Panel discussions that should have been nuanced became political rallies. Complex history was reduced to moral theater. Scholars who declined to recite the orthodox line soon discovered that silence was safer—or that it was time to move on. MESA’s decline is only one symptom of a larger academic malaise. The custodians of academic freedom have, in too many cases, become its enforcers. As Dr. Small reminds us, antisemitism doesn’t survive simply through open hostility; it survives because respected institutions find ways to explain it away (Small, 2023).

Why ASMEA Represents a Different Path

ASMEA — the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa — was created precisely to offer an alternative. Founded by Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, ASMEA sought to restore balance and intellectual honesty to a field that had lost both (Lewis & Ajami, 2007). What I find at ASMEA is what the academy used to prize: rigorous debate grounded in respect. What I value most at ASMEA is the freedom to think aloud. You can take issue with Israeli policy without denying Israel’s place in the world, and you can examine Western mistakes without lapsing into moral confusion. The discussions can be spirited, even sharp, but they rest on facts, not slogans. For those of us who have spent too long in rooms policed by ideology, it feels like oxygen—sharp, bracing, and necessary.

Two years of attending ASMEA have reminded me what scholarship can be when it refuses to bend to politics. The panels include Jews, Muslims, Christians, and secular thinkers, all arguing from conviction but without malice. Disagreement is not dangerous there — it’s the point. You leave a session with more questions than you arrived with, which is exactly how intellectual life should work. ASMEA is not perfect, but it still embodies a faith in the possibility of reason. In an era when shouting is easier than thinking, that faith itself has become an act of courage.

The Campus as a Mirror of Civilization

Dr. Small often repeats a warning he once heard from a Persian Jewish refugee: “When the universities are lost, it is the beginning of the end” (Small, 2023). He is exactly right. This statement should not be misconstrued as a metaphor. This is because universities should be societies where we train future leaders to distinguish truth from falsehood. However, when those institutions lose their compass, the confusion spreads outward. The antisemitism we see in our lecture halls is not an isolated problem. Instead, it is a reflection of a civilization doubting its own moral inheritance. The Western university was built on the conviction that reason and moral order are inseparable. Abandon one, and you will eventually lose both.

History makes that point grimly clear. In 1930s Germany, universities were among the first institutions to fall (Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 2003). Professors during that era rationalized hatred by giving bigotry the appearance of scholarship. Once they surrendered to this motive, the rest of society followed. That is why Small’s warning resonates so deeply: intellectual collapse always precedes moral collapse. When a culture can no longer distinguish criticism from cruelty, freedom from fanaticism, the decline has already begun. The fight for the soul of the university is therefore a fight for the soul of democracy itself.

Choosing Integrity Over Conformity

Every scholar eventually reaches a crossroads. You can let the current of fashion carry you along, or you can stand where the university was always meant to stand—on the side of truth. My decision to return to ASMEA is a small act of resistance, but it matters. I will not lend my name to institutions that have allowed scholarship to curdle into ideology. My choice is me making a simple statement, which is that truth should never be subordinated to politics, and that decency still belongs at the center of intellectual life. Dr. Small’s insistence that the campus is the front line has never felt more urgent. The classroom, the conference, even the committee meeting—all are theaters in which the integrity of scholarship is being tested.

For my part, I choose to stand with those who will not let hatred hide behind the mask of virtue. I stand with Jewish and non-Jewish colleagues alike who believe that academic freedom means freedom for everyone, not just those with the correct opinions. Returning to ASMEA is my way of saying that scholarship must serve truth, not ideology, and that silence in the face of prejudice is complicity. The battle for the university is the battle for the West’s conscience. If we lose it, we lose not only our campuses but our ability to think. And that is a loss no civilization can survive.

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