Trump’s war on Columbia comes for Middle East studiesby Gabby Deutch The field of modern Middle Eastern studies was born at Columbia University in the 1970s under the influence of Edward Said, the prominent Palestinian-American literature scholar and political activist. Now, the discipline as it currently exists may die there, too, as President Donald Trump seeks to rein in a field that has come under immense scrutiny following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks — an event that some ideologues in Middle Eastern studies departments at Columbia and other elite institutions praised as “resistance” against the “settler-colonial” Israeli state. Critics of the field have long alleged that it teaches students a one-sided history of the Middle East, flattening the region’s complexities into an overly simplistic story in which Israel is the perpetual villain. In a letter to Columbia’s president and trustees last week, the Trump administration issued a set of demands that it described as a pre-condition for beginning talks about Columbia’s “continued financial relationship with the United States government,” after $400 million in federal grants and contracts were pulled in response to Columbia’s alleged inaction against antisemitism. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that Columbia was close to agreeing to meet Trump’s demands, which include banning masks, creating stronger campus disciplinary procedures, giving campus police more power and — most controversially, at least according to academics — putting the school’s Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department under something the Trump administration described as an “academic receivership.” Doing so would be an unusual step, with management of the department transferred from its faculty to an external figure. Receiverships are already extraordinarily rare within academia; to have one mandated by the federal government is unprecedented. Whether that person would come from inside Columbia, from another academic institution or from the government is not clear; spokespeople for Columbia, the White House and the Education Department declined to comment on Wednesday. The push to put the department under receivership has lit a fuse under academics, many of whom — including some who are deeply critical of the increasingly radical tilt of the Middle Eastern studies field — worry that the move reeks of government censorship. One prominent Jewish studies professor at an East Coast university said it rivaled Joseph Stalin’s rewriting of Russian history. “When a government steps in to say what an institution of higher education can be teaching, that is, to me, a signal of authoritarianism and fascism, actually not only on the right, but also this is exactly what the communists did in terms of the Soviet Union,” said the professor, who requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions. But after a year and a half of prestigious institutions like Columbia failing to take the concerns of Jewish students and faculty members seriously, even some skeptics of Trump’s meddling in higher education acknowledge that it might take unprecedented action to jolt universities leaders into action. “I don’t think this is a great solution because it creates this adversarial situation,” said the writer Dara Horn, who has a doctorate from Harvard and served on Harvard’s antisemitism task force in late 2023. “I would like these institutions to change without outside pressure. But I don’t see that happening.” A 2024 report from the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance took aim at the school’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and other academic departments for taking the view that “the Palestinian people are innocent victims of Jewish (white) oppression and that known terrorist groups are simply ‘political movements.’” Miriam Elman, a former political science professor at Syracuse, expressed concern that last week’s letter from the Trump administration made the receivership sound like “a hostile takeover.” But that may be the price Columbia must pay for its handling of campus events since Oct. 7, Elman conceded. “I always come back to this — that if the universities don’t get their house in order, internally on their own, the outside will come for them,” said Elman, who is now the executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, which organizes faculty to oppose anti-Israel trends on their campuses. The Trump administration’s letter to Columbia last week made the argument that government scrutiny is necessary because “taxpayers invest enormously” in American colleges, so federal officials have a duty to make sure the money is spent responsibly. Given the way some Columbia faculty members have described the Hamas attacks — such as Professor Joseph Massad, who called the scenes of violence on Oct. 7 “awesome” — Asaf Romirowsky, a Middle East historian who is a longtime critic of the broader Middle Eastern studies field, described the receivership as a necessary course corrective, taken with national security concerns in mind. “I see no problem at all,” Romirowsky said. “This is not a violation, to my mind, of free speech. It’s a matter of looking at national security matters that are taking place here, given how these departments and how these institutions have allowed terrorism to thrive in lieu of scholarship and legitimate education.” David Myers, the chair of Jewish history at the University of California, Los Angeles, conceded that the field of Middle Eastern studies is “highly politicized” and that it should be “more open to diversity of perspectives.” But he doesn’t think Trump’s proposal is the way to fix that. “Does the malady merit this proposed remedy? I really don’t think so,” Myers said. “It’s really saying, ‘We the government can and should have control over not only your teaching agenda, but really about how you conduct research.’” The impact of what will happen next with Columbia’s Middle Eastern studies department will extend far beyond the Morningside Heights campus and the confines of a single academic discipline. Those watching closely include not just other academics in the field of Middle East studies, but professors and researchers across all disciplines, wary that their funding may come under threat, or that their writings and syllabi may be subjected to an additional, unexpected degree of scrutiny from government officials. “Is our assumption that money is so fungible that to the extent to which I’m at all financially supported by the federal government, then Uncle Sam owns that much piece of whatever I’m doing across the board? That seems to be the implicit argument here,” said a Zionist Middle Eastern studies professor at a New England university. “For an administration that touts the virtues of the free market, it’s a little totalitarian.” |