1Professor Zachary Lockman is widely recognized as one of the leading voices in Middle East studies in the USA, with a distinguished academic career at New York University (NYU), where he has taught modern Middle Eastern history since 1995. His body of work includes seminal research on Egypt and Palestine, as well as books such as Contending Visions of the Middle East. The Politics and History of Orientalism (Lockman, 2004) and Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States (Lockman, 2016), which critically examine the history and politics of how the Middle East is studied and understood. Beyond his academic achievements, he has also played a significant role in the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), serving as its president from 2006 to 2007 and chairing the wing of its Committee on Academic Freedom that engages with issues of academic freedom in the US and Canada.

2This interview was conducted at NYU on December 16, 2024, after Donald Trump won his second presidential election but before he took office. It is followed by a postscript written by Zachary Lockman in May 2026, reflecting on subsequent developments after Trump assumed office.

Candice Raymond: Professor Zachary Lockman, today I would like to explore your knowledge of MESA, its history, its mission, and how it navigates the complex challenges of academic freedom and scholarship in a polarized world. To begin with, could you tell us about the circumstances surrounding MESA’s founding in 1966?

Zachary Lockman: MESA was one of several organizations established to provide a framework for scholars in area studies, which had begun to emerge in the United States as a distinct academic set of fields from the late 1940s. Some organizations began a little earlier, such as Latin American studies and Russian and Slavic studies, while others started a little later. They were there to provide a common intellectual framework, a forum in which scholars in these very diverse fields (Middle East studies encompasses many disciplines, covering many periods, and a lot of geography) could interact, share their common interests, participate in intellectual life, present papers, and so on. They worked a little differently than the disciplinary associations, which have a much longer history going back, in the United States at least, to the late 19th century. They are similar in some respects, but they are inherently multidisciplinary. That just happened to be the moment when several factors converged to enable the organization of MESA in particular.

CR: What were the main objectives of its founders at the time?

ZL: It was a product of an organization. Its birth was overseen by the Social Science Research Council, which supported research in the social sciences. Its committee dealing with the Middle East responded to a need for a place where scholars studying the Middle East from multiple disciplines and very different perspectives could meet and interact. It began holding annual meetings, where people presented papers, engaged in discussions, and organized plenary sessions–the whole apparatus of how an academic association operates in American academia. The foundation of a journal, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, was a key part of it, of course.

CR: Regarding these objectives, was MESA similar to or distinct from other kinds of learned societies in the North American academic context? You said that it was a bit different from the disciplinary associations. Could you explain these differences?

ZL: It is different in the sense that the study of the Middle East, Latin America, or European studies isn’t a discipline. It isn’t a methodology. It is a geography that forms the basis of area studies. Early on, as I’ve discussed in some of my work, there was a vision that a theory and a methodology specific to studying a particular region would emerge, one that would be interdisciplinary and produce a new kind of knowledge. Such a theory, such a paradigm never emerged. However, it was still helpful to have some form of organization where people interested in the same geographic region could meet. There are common areas of interest within it, but also a great deal of diversity. And yet people find it helpful to meet. For example, I rarely attend meetings of the American Historical Association. I’m a historian, but that association, which dates back much further, has generally focused on American and European history. There are a few panels on the Middle East, a few on China, but these areas are marginal. So I tend to enjoy much more being at the Middle East Studies Association, both because I see people I know and I have interacted with, sometimes for many decades, but also because it is a place where I encounter people who are grappling with some of the same issues, asking some of the same questions, producing work which is relevant to my interests.

CR: How did its initial objectives change over time?

ZL: Well, for one, originally, its founders were very afraid of politics. They were very afraid of the divisive politics of the Middle East, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also of other kinds of issues. And they actually tried early on to prevent any discussion, especially of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This was 1966, and the following year, you had the June 1967 war, the rise of the Palestinian movement, the Israeli occupation and, of course, many other conflicts in the region. And they very much feared that the association would be torn apart by these conflicts. But it proved impossible to suppress discussion of them. So, that gave way over time. Even if the association defined itself as non-political, it fostered discussions of contemporary political issues. And, of course, even historical issues raised political questions for the present. So MESA had to accommodate that.

I think it also changed demographically over time. It was, to put it crudely, a very WASP organization, partly reflecting the nature of academia, which was generally dominated by male, white people from the United States, typically from the middle or upper-middle class. Sometimes, in certain instances, people had a connection with the Middle East through missionary activities or other avenues. Over the 1970s and 1980s, women came to play a much more significant role. And, of course, this is tied to the feminist movement, with the rise of women’s studies and, later, gender studies in the 1970s and 1980s. You also get much more diversity. Many people of Middle Eastern origin who are based in the United States and studying at American universities enter the field, become increasingly prominent, and, of course, bring their perspectives, interests, and commitments to the organization as well.

Additionally, I think the organization, early on, had individuals who felt it was acceptable to work with intelligence agencies, for example. It wasn’t the organization itself; rather, they themselves had some kind of connection, including some of the organization’s leaders. This stems from the Cold War mentality prevalent in American academia from the 1950s to the 1960s, where it was considered reasonable to put one’s expertise at the service of one’s country. By the late 1960s and 1970s, there was considerable criticism of this. This was the period of the Vietnam War, with a growing sense of critique of America’s role in the world and anti-imperialism. The younger generation that came of age in the late 1960s and 1970s, who entered the field and gradually became a significant part of it, were much more critical of this and rejected that kind of connection with the government, intelligence agencies, the defense establishment, and so on. There were a number of issues that came up, including the use of CIA funding for conferences and various government fellowships tied to some form of government service. These kinds of things came to be seen as worthy of resistance.

CR: In general, were all the scholarships provided by the government, or has MESA had a role in channeling funding?

ZL: No, MESA had no funding whatsoever. But it took a position on some of these issues. The government-funded program that began in 1958, the first to support area studies, didn’t entail any kind of service. But still, it was government funding. Many people benefited from that. It was a way to support oneself in graduate studies. However, there were other programs in the 1980s and 1990s that originated from intelligence agencies or the Defense Department, rather than the Department of Education, which MESA opposed at that time. None of this was directly through MESA. MESA has no government funding whatsoever.

CR: Today, how is MESA organized?

ZL: MESA has a secretariat, a central office, which is now located in Washington, D.C. It was hosted at NYU for a very long time and at the University of Arizona in Tucson for many years. And then it moved to Washington. It has a small paid staff, with an executive director and a small number of employees. There is an editor, for example, of its journal, the International Journal of Middle East Studies. But the board of editors and everybody involved do it on a volunteer basis. All the other work is volunteer, basically.

CR: How many subcommittees do you have, and what issues do they address?

CR: Apart from the Committee on Academic Freedom (which we will discuss later), what types of activities does MESA undertake?

ZL: It publishes a peer-reviewed academic journal, the primary journal in Middle East studies. This journal publishes a very broad range of things, from pre-Islamic poetry to Abbasid culture to modern history to modern political science and everything in between, as well as book reviews, roundtables, etc. There is also the Review of Middle East Studies, which primarily publishes book reviews, a feature also found in the main journal. And a newsletter dealing with issues in Middle East studies or organizational matters. However, the primary venue for people to meet is the annual meeting, which is held in a different city each year. Over the last couple of years, some of those meetings have been held virtually to save money. Not everybody is happy about that because people like getting together. They sit, drink, attend panels, and share meals together. People want to do that, and it is an important function. There is a social aspect to it. It gives people, I think, a sense that they belong to a coherent field, albeit not in a disciplinary sense. Significant numbers of people come. It also includes a business meeting, where members are encouraged to attend to hear reports on the organization, membership, finances, and the Committee on Academic Freedom. There is also an awards ceremony, with a dissertation award for the best dissertation in the humanities and the social sciences, a book award named after Albert Hourani for the best book, a Roger Owen book award in economic history and political economy, and a Fatima Mernissi book award in women’s and gender studies. And in addition, there is a presidential address, in which the president at the time lays out his or her thoughts on whatever he or she chooses to discuss. There are these collective components to the annual meeting, in addition to academic panels and roundtables.

CR: How many members are there, and what are their academic status and profiles? If you could make, in very broad terms, a kind of sociology of the membership, what would you say?

ZL: I think in terms of the numbers, they fluctuate between 1,600 and 2,800, depending on the location of the annual meeting. It gathers faculty, of course, assistant, associate, and full professors, and graduate students first and foremost, also some minimal number of undergraduates. And some people who are just interested in the field can also join, even if they are not full-time academics in a traditional sense.

CR: I have absolutely no idea of the total number of faculty in Middle Eastern studies in the USA, but what percentage of them do you estimate is part of the association?

CR: How is MESA funded, and to what extent does it rely on external sources?

ZL: It is essentially funded by its members’ dues, which are the fees that members pay annually to be a part of the organization. It is scaled by salary or income, with the top end being approximately $ 350 a year, but other members pay less. Graduate students pay much less, depending on their income. There are also the registration fees for the annual meeting and the journal. The publisher of the journal helps. Membership includes a subscription to the journal. And it is possible that there is some income from institutional subscriptions. I’m not sure. There is not typically outside funding. Very recently, MESA applied for and received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the development of new staff with the capacity to monitor the increasing assaults on academic freedom. This foundation was concerned about these issues and saw MESA as a vehicle for gathering information, understanding the pattern of what was going on, and considering responses. But that’s not typical. Generally, the organization supports itself.

CR: To what extent, in your opinion, has MESA contributed to structuring the field of Middle East studies?

ZL: I think it has played an important role. There are numerous faculty members scattered across universities around the country, but many others may not have a Middle East Studies Center at smaller colleges. Without such an organization, this would be a shapeless, formless body, making it very hard for people to communicate and exchange ideas. It provides significant structure for the field. It connects people through the journal, annual meetings, and various activities conducted between meetings. It provides a degree of coherence to a field and gives it some shape.

CR: And a sense of community and belonging?

ZL: To some degree, yes. Some people are more involved than others. And not everyone who teaches about or is a scholar of the Middle East is a member. However, I think it provides a sense of community for many people, a good way of putting it – a connection to others who share at least some of the same interests. Plus, the association tries to represent its membership on issues such as academic freedom. I think people feel somebody is speaking for them about issues they care about. And given the role of the United States in the region, this, I think, gives people the sense that there’s a body which understands and reflects their understanding of this region and their concerns about the role of the United States in the region. Not to say that everybody shares the same political views. But you have a group of people who have some common experience, who spent time in the region, who may be from the region themselves, and who share some basic understandings which are generally lacking in American society.

CR: To what extent do you think MESA has contributed to enhancing the field’s autonomy, within each university or from external powers that could influence the direction taken by the field? How do you feel this community supports its own means, its own ends?

ZL: I think it is a body that gives at least some corporate identity to the field, separate from the institutions, colleges, and universities where these things are practiced. Often at these institutions, there is one person or a small number of people focusing on this particular region. And they may be in very distant disciplines. Historians may never encounter the anthropologists or the people who teach literature, languages, or other disciplinary approaches. So, it does provide a sense of coherence to the field that transcends the individual institutions in which people are based, and a sense of perhaps autonomy. I am not sure if in the Bourdieusian sense, but MESA is a corporate body that can claim to represent the common interests of its membership. MESA doesn’t engage in lobbying or trying to change government policy. It speaks out on academic freedom issues, but that is a bit different. In the United States, there is legislation that governs what a nonprofit organization can do in any case. The federal program that supports these area study centers, not just for the Middle East but all of them, is always threatened.

CR: Threatened by whom?

ZL: In Congress. In 1958, with the panic around Sputnik, Congress passed a law, the National Defense Education Act, which pumped a lot of money into science, to catch up with the Soviets, etc., but also provided money for area studies to support people studying languages and cultures, which otherwise universities weren’t going to support. Out of that, there ultimately developed around a hundred area study centers; 12 or 13 of them are focused on the Middle East at universities around the country, including public universities, which probably wouldn’t have done this before. These centers offer language programs as well as undergraduate programs. This also helped convince colleges and universities to teach more about the rest of the world at the undergraduate level. And it also supports graduate students. It provides them with fellowships tied to the study of languages. This federal program was called Title VI; it is now part of the Higher Education Act and is always under threat. Because people see that this field generates too many criticisms of American policy. They see it as a hotbed of the left and, as in many other ways, want to defund it. We will see if it survives the second Trump administration. MESA is part of a coalition that tries to defend international education more broadly. And that has been successful so far.

On MESA and Politics

CR: Let’s come now to politics. In its history, has MESA been influenced by U.S. foreign policy concerns, especially during the Cold War? How was it at that time?

ZL: Again, MESA emerged in 1966. As I mentioned earlier, there are certainly scholars in the field who consult for intelligence agencies or are otherwise involved. That continues early on. I think that becomes increasingly unacceptable. It seems to be in contradiction to what scholars should be doing by the 1970s, certainly by the 1980s. So MESA is born just before that turn. Some individuals in MESA’s early leadership had connections. However, there was increasing criticism of this. While you could argue that area studies as such is in part a Cold War phenomenon, with the need of the United States to have more people who know about other parts of the world, I don’t think MESA is directly implicated in that. It has become increasingly critical, as I think much of academia has, of direct connections with policymaking. Meanwhile, the think tanks, these new organizations that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, took on that role directly, with people with academic training producing policy-relevant knowledge, whereas universities did so less directly. There are exceptions, of course, but that’s my understanding. And especially concerning the Middle East, as this has been an area where the United States has played a much more direct role. I think many scholars of the Middle East are not happy with this role, whether it is supporting Israel or intervening in other ways to maintain a certain hegemonic order in the Middle East, which those who have spent time there know is a problem.

CR: What were the major stances taken by MESA, and how were these positions decided within the association?

ZL: MESA generally has not taken stances on political issues. Its charter, its founding document, says it is a non-political association. And as a nonprofit, it can’t do certain things. But it did speak out, criticizing specific fellowship programs or other topics that were much more directly related to the academic world. There is the academic freedom aspect, which began in the 1990s. Since October 7th, MESA’s board of directors has issued various statements. For example, about scholasticide in Gaza and the destruction of universities. It has talked about the repression of student protests in the United States. But it doesn’t take a general stance about the question of Palestine, or the Saudi monarchy, for instance, or those kinds of more general things.

ZL: It did ultimately endorse BDS. It was framed as support for or responding to the complicity of Israeli academic institutions in the occupation. So it is a political stance. But to do that, the charter had to be changed. The term nonpolitical was removed from the bylaws. This was done through a vote of the membership. It is a democratic organization. The board of directors is elected by the membership. And if you want to change something that fundamental, it takes a vote of the membership. So that was done. There was lots of discussion about it. Not everybody was happy with it. But that was a relatively recent change. People began talking about it many years ago, after the call for BDS from the Palestinian organizations in 2005. And people began discussing it, and there were efforts to organize around it. It changed its bylaws, and ultimately, it came to a vote of the membership following a lengthy process. However, a significant amount of work was done to insulate MESA and formulate a resolution that made it clear that Israeli scholars are still welcome and that some continue to attend. The Association for Israel Studies, I think, found this too much for them, although it is a complicated organization in its own right. So yes, you can say MESA has taken more explicitly political stances, including BDS, although generally, it is not commenting, for example, on the character of the Islamic Republic in Iran or the Saudi monarchy or directly on the proper solution to the question of Palestine.

CR: How can the association effectively manage the diversity of perspectives and positions among its members? How does it work concretely?

CR: If we come back to the question of how the association handled the diversity of perspectives, how do you create consensus? How concretely have you reached the majority of voters to get, for instance, the BDS resolution passed?

ZL: People circulated opinions in various ways. There was discussion at the plenary meetings, and ultimately, an online vote was held among the entire membership. So people exchanged opinions. There were people opposed to it as well as people favoring it. But I think that’s somewhat exceptional because it is an exceptional kind of stance that MESA took and, again, the product of many years of organizing and lobbying within the organization.

CR: How has the association responded to external critics, such as accusations of political bias or anti-Israel positions? How has the association defended itself?

CR: You never sued anyone?

ZL: No, you can’t really sue people. Because of the First Amendment people can say almost anything, whether true or not, and it is very difficult to sue them for libel or defamation. People are being accused of being terrorist supporters and have to prove they are not. It is extremely difficult. The legal system is not a very useful way to respond to this, at least in the United States, because free speech is protected, regardless of whether it is true or defamatory. So that’s not really an option. And it is a considerable investment of resources. So largely, as an organization, it just ignored those and got on with its business. Individuals had been attacked long before October 7^th. It goes back to the 1980s when various organizations were circulating lists of allegedly pro-terrorist professors and so on. The invention of the Internet made this process even more efficient and effective. So that continues. And we have seen how this has escalated since October 7th. I am personally listed on these websites, Campus Watch or Canary Mission. The Canary Mission is particularly alarming because it frequently targets undergraduate students. It is explicitly designed to make it more difficult for them to secure jobs upon graduation. Because the first thing an employer does is Google somebody. And this is the first thing that comes up often, that they are a terrorist supporter or antisemitic. As faculty, we have tried to discuss the issue with our university and explore potential solutions, but they haven’t responded effectively. However, it poses a threat to these students. There are people who are out to defame them and make it difficult for them to get a job. Now it is accusations of anti-Semitism, which has been weaponized since October 7th.

MESA and the Defense of Academic Freedom

CR: You chaired the North American wing of MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom. The subcommittee focuses on issues related to academic freedom within North America. MESA has played, throughout its history, and continues to play an active role in defending academic freedom in the United States and abroad. What are its means of action in this area?

ZL: We have limited means. Primarily, the Committee on Academic Freedom writes letters, mainly to governments in the Middle East, regarding specific individuals who have been arrested, dismissed from their positions, persecuted, or driven into exile. And here in the United States, we primarily write to colleges and universities, where someone’s academic freedom or freedom of speech is threatened or violated, or sometimes to government agencies. When the governor of the state of New York issued an executive order stating that the state would not do business with anyone who endorsed a boycott of Israel, we wrote a letter because, on freedom-of-speech grounds, people should be able to choose what they want to boycott or not. At that point, MESA hadn’t endorsed BDS, but we said people should be able to advocate for or against boycott. They can choose with whom they want to do business or whom they want to invite. Sometimes we write letters to state legislatures when we find a law problematic for academic freedom. We’ve been doing this for a very long time. Sometimes it has an impact; sometimes, it doesn’t.

CR: Can you tell us about a few examples where it had an impact in other countries?

ZL: In other countries, it’s the kind of thing that Amnesty International does. It puts the country, at least the government, on notice that somebody’s paying attention. Someone is in prison, in detention, under house arrest, or has been dismissed from their university position. At least they know somebody is paying attention. They may or may not care, but there have been instances where, even if we can’t claim it’s because of our wonderful letter, somebody has been released. Of course, in many other cases, nothing has happened, and the person remains in prison. Ahmed Mansoor is still in prison in the United Arab Emirates for his advocacy of democracy and human rights. We’ve written several letters. We have some connection to NYU Abu Dhabi, but they clearly don’t care. Similarly, here in the US, we’ve written a large number of letters since October 7th. It seems to have helped. People have been brought up on charges of promoting anti-Semitism or creating a hostile climate for Jewish students. That intervention has been useful, as the college or university has either dropped the charges or investigated and found no issue. In other cases, it doesn’t matter. We wrote a letter to New York University today, as a protest took place in the library last week, and some people were arrested. We don’t think the police should be brought onto campus as a matter of principle. They also declared a number of faculty persona non grata, effectively suspending them without any due process, which is unacceptable. This is particularly concerning because they unilaterally suspend faculty and prohibit them from entering buildings. We protested that. They also appear to have rounded up some students who weren’t involved in the protests, simply because they perceived them as activists. Somebody wrote some graffiti that clearly terrified them. There’s no evidence that the students they investigated had anything to do with it. It was a stupid thing to write. 20-year-olds, as we know, sometimes do stupid things. I wish they were a little smarter sometimes. It clearly upset the university administration. But still, it’s a very bad precedent. We’ve also written to them about the definition of the use of the term Zionist as a “code word”. In September, NYU adopted a new non-discrimination and anti-harassment policy. You can’t harass people because of their religion, ethnicity, race, etc. All good. But they included a phrase that said something like, using a code word like Zionist may also subject you to investigation. We objected to that because Zionist may sometimes be a code word for Jew, it may have an anti-Semitic piece to it, but who decides? And that seemed to suggest it’s always a code word. And we objected to that. It’s a dangerous thing to do. Zionism is a political ideology. You should be able to criticize it or agree with it, as you see fit. But to frame it as a code word because some Jews identify with Israel, that’s a very dangerous thing. These are recent examples of letters we’ve written to many universities.

CR: And you succeeded?

ZL: At NYU, they haven’t changed their policy. The MESA Committee on Academic Freedom wrote to them, and we also met with the faculty of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and with a number of other departments, along with the provost and others, to explain that we were unhappy about this. We teach about Zionism, I teach about Zionism all the time, and that potentially exposes me to criticism or investigation. I don’t think they understood the message. They brought in the lawyers, and the lawyers seemed surprised that anyone could read it that way.

CR: So, it means that you have a Damocles’ sword hanging over your head now?

CR: How many people are on the committee?

ZL: We are happy to share ideas and build up alliances, for sure.

CR: Have you or MESA been part of the discussions about IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism and the drafting of an alternative definition?

ZL: I wasn’t part of the Jerusalem Declaration, although they did a good job. It is a much more reasonable approach. But we’ve been critical of the IHRA definition for 10 years, since it first took shape. We wrote protest letters to Congress against various bills that would incorporate it. The Trump administration required federal agencies in 2019 to start referring to it, not necessarily using it. So it is not a new issue to us, but the scale of what has happened since October 7th and the weaponization of allegations of anti-Semitism is unprecedented. And the campaign to delegitimize pro-Palestinian protest and repression, calling the police in, shutting things down, and firing people, terminating people, or sanctioning faculty and students, that scale is unprecedented. We’ve been doing what we can to combat it. We write letters. Additionally, we had a meeting today of MESA’s task force established to fight the Muslim ban, the Task Force on Civil and Human Rights, which had been inactive but is now being remobilized. MESA was a party to the lawsuits that stopped the Muslim ban in its first versions. And I assume it will do similar things for the next version of the Muslim ban or whatever Trump is planning. That’s not a narrowly academic freedom issue; that’s a broader human civil rights issue, which is why that’s a separate body within MESA. The scale of things is unprecedented, and the failure of universities and colleges to uphold their commitment to academic freedom has been shocking. We haven’t had a president or a leader of a major American university to stand up and say, “This is unacceptable.” So we do the little we can to push back. The other academic associations, to be honest, don’t want to touch this. We’re very much alone. The American Historical Association doesn’t want to say a word. The American Political Science Association neither. And the American Council of Learned Societies, which groups all the humanities, doesn’t want to hear about this.

CR: Do they have a committee on academic freedom as you have?

ZL: Most of them don’t. We are pioneers in many ways among both area studies associations and disciplinary associations. We’re one of the few. And we’re often alone on this. Because people don’t want to deal with the Middle East. They don’t want to deal with Palestine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s too scary for them and too internally divisive. So they stay away from it. But from our perspective, this is an assault on academic freedom and higher education. The right doesn’t want to hear about diversity. They don’t want to hear about critical race theory. They want to remake these institutions and silence people whom they don’t like. And Palestine is the wedge. However, we don’t often see university leaders with the courage to say this.

CR: One last question to conclude on a broader note. What do you believe has changed for MESA in this new geopolitical and academic context? And what are the major challenges that MESA faces today?

ZL: Some of the challenges it may face are the challenges faced by the whole of higher education. The neoliberal university, as well as the reduction of tenure or tenure-track positions, is a key concern. Most teaching at colleges and universities is conducted by contract and contingent faculty. I have a very hard time advising anyone to pursue an academic career in the United States these days. This impacts higher education and, by extension, academic associations.

CR: In this regard, do you feel that Middle Eastern studies are more in danger in the current context than other area studies or other disciplines? The crisis in secure employment is at the same level as in any other field, or is it more severe?

ZL: Some of the situation threatens everybody. The parts that may threaten people in Middle East studies have more to do with politics. Things had gotten much better over the years. When I was a graduate student, people were circulating files on certain professors to try to prevent them from getting jobs, myself included. You couldn’t use the word Palestine or Palestinian; people would argue with you. Are there any Palestinians? Those kinds of stupid things. And if you studied Palestine or discussed it, it made it much more difficult to secure a position. That has changed over the last 30 years. Many universities have hired wonderful people to teach about Palestine, and the students have become increasingly aware of Palestine. In a way, they were not very aware of it even ten or five years ago; there has been a sea change. It is not due to MESA so much, nor to scholars of the Middle East, because some people who now teach about Palestine didn’t know where Palestine was a few years ago. In American studies, Indigenous studies, and across various fields, Palestine has become a symbol for something and a way to discuss certain kinds of issues that may seem unrelated, which I think is a good thing. On the other hand, this is the only area studies field in the United States that is under attack in this way. One can draw a parallel with the China scholars who were attacked in the late 1940s for “losing China” to the communists. Now we have something akin to the Red Scare of the 1950s resurfacing in various forms. There is now significant pushback and repression, and this is likely to escalate. I don’t worry about myself, but I do worry about the graduate students and the younger people in the field who are vulnerable. And there is a broader crisis in US higher education. Its golden age has passed, and it’s now under threat. Turkey had an outstanding higher education system, which the Erdogan regime trashed. And there’s the danger of this happening here. Everywhere, they’re underfunded. In France, as in the UK, they’re massively underfunded compared to some point in the past, which is economically and socially disastrous, but also politically very dangerous. I had a dissertation defense this morning with one of my students who wrote a brilliant dissertation on Iraqi history. People are doing wonderful things, which is lovely to see. However, it will be a struggle for them to find employment. And these things have a chilling effect. People watch what they say and have to be careful. It doesn’t stop people from being outspoken, in some ways even more outspoken, but they understand that if they want to get or keep a job, they have to negotiate this carefully in the current atmosphere, which is likely to worsen.

Postscript by Zachary Lockman, May 2026

3Soon after taking office in January 2025, the second Trump administration launched an unprecedented offensive against institutions of higher education across the United States. The federal government withheld, or threatened to withhold, billions of dollars in funding for research at universities unless they complied with the government’s demands with regard to admissions, curricula and governance. The field of Middle East studies was specifically affected later in 2025 when the federal Department of Education terminated funding for the program that, since 1958, had been providing support for area studies centers and for fellowships to study many non-European languages; this has put the viability of at least some Middle East studies centers into question, especially in a period when most universities are implementing austerity budgets. But the assault that has most directly and egregiously affected scholarship, teaching and activism related to the Middle East, particularly Palestine, at US universities has been the Trump administration’s wholesale weaponization of allegations of antisemitism in order to silence criticism of Israel and of Zionism.

4To achieve this, the federal government distorted the original intent of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits institutions (including colleges and universities) receiving federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race, color or national origin. The Trump administration embraced and expanded longstanding efforts to delegitimize and punish criticism of Israel and Zionism, and opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza, by conflating them with antisemitism. A recent report issued jointly by the American Association of University Professors and MESA documents how the Trump administration declared that universities were violating Title VI if they allegedly tolerated a “hostile climate” for Jewish students by not suppressing pro-Palestine speech and activism, or by not submitting to other government demands regarding admissions, curricula, student discipline and campus activism.

5Federal investigations launched under Title VI, or the threat to launch such investigations, often in response to spurious complaints by pro-Israel faculty and students, coerced many institutions into imposing their own tightened restrictions on free speech and protest so as to avoid or deflect government scrutiny and sanction. While many colleges and universities had engaged in a great deal of repression of pro-Palestinian speech and activism even before Trump returned to office, with students and others who engaged in protest against Israel’s war on Gaza arrested, suspended or expelled, adjunct faculty fired and in several cases even tenured faculty terminated for social media posts critical of Israel, the scale and scope of the repression on campuses, and the chilling effect on what perspectives could safely be expressed, expanded significantly after January 2025.

7In this bleak context, MESA has to its great credit been active in resisting the government’s campaign to silence pro-Palestine speech and universities’ compliance with it, through its Committee on Academic Freedom but also through its reinvigorated Task Force on Civil and Human Rights, whose Academic Freedom Initiative tracks and analyzes threats to academic freedom. In addition, in the spring of 2025 MESA partnered with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to file a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s policy of trying to deport noncitizen students who had protested or criticized the Gaza war, among them Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi and Rumeysa Ozturk.

8The lawsuit, litigated by the Knight First Amendment Institute, argued that the government’s deportation policy was unconstitutional, both because it violated the First Amendment free speech rights of noncitizens living in the US and because it deprived US citizens of the opportunity to hear the perspectives of noncitizens silenced by the threat of deportation. In the course of the trial, in federal court in Boston, State Department and Department of Homeland Security officials were compelled to explain how they had chosen the targets of the deportation policy. Among other things the trial revealed that government officials had been ordered to rely on pernicious and inaccurate websites like Canary Mission to identify people to deport and that many of those officials deemed protest against Israeli policies and advocacy for Palestinian rights as inherently antisemitic.

9In his September 2025 ruling, Judge William Young, an 85-year-old Reagan appointee, forcefully denounced the Trump administration for violating the First Amendment by singling out pro-Palestinian activists for deportation, and he later provided some protection for noncitizen AAUP and MESA members threatened with deportation. The government is appealing the ruling, but it stands as a strong judicial endorsement of the view that noncitizens enjoy the full protection of the First Amendment and cannot be deported solely because they hold political views the government does not like.

10MESA continues to look for effective ways to counter the current wave of repression and defend the academic freedom of its members, indeed of all scholars, students and their institutions. It has tried to partner with other groups to defend scholarship and expertise as key values in a democratic society, along with the independence and integrity of US institutions of higher education, in the face of efforts by the authoritarian Trump administration to impose its extreme right-wing agenda on higher education and punish or silence those who refuse to submit to its dictates. That said, this is clearly a very bleak moment for Middle East studies and for academia in general in the United States, especially as the model of higher education that has prevailed for half a century seems to be failing, with no clear notion of what might replace it.