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| September 11, 2008 5:00 AM
Sidestepping the Sandstorm?
Reforming Middle Eastern and African Studies.
By Joseph Morrison Skelly
Entrenched special interests. Inflexible ideologues. Influence peddling. Bloated bureaucracies. These maladies, at first glance, seem to depict life inside the Washington beltway. Readers of NRO know, due to its excellent blog Phi Beta Cons, that these ailments also afflict large swaths of American higher education. But just as both presidential candidates this year promise to challenge the status quo in our nation's capital, a dedicated core of professors and administrators has worked tirelessly to reform academic life on our college campuses. They have sought to return the American university to its original purpose: liberal education, not ideological indoctrination. They have challenged the political correctness that asphyxiates intellectual inquiry in academia. Progress has been made, yet much work remains.
Several organizations have played a prominent role in this campaign of renewal, including the National Association of Scholars, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. Other reform groups have focused on specific disciplines, such as the Historical Society and the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. Their members understand that the desultory state of scholarship in these two subjects is a manifestation of the larger syndrome plaguing higher education throughout the nation.
One field long notorious for its orthodoxy is Middle Eastern studies. In 2001, Martin Kramer detailed this state of affairs in his investigative account, Ivory Towers on Sand, describing how the pressure to hew to the party line — all problems in the Middle East are the direct result of Western imperialism, for example — represents the antithesis of a genuine academic culture. A subtle conformity has long permeated the flagship professional body, the Middle Eastern Studies Association. Complicating matters in recent years is the influx of agenda-driven foreign funding, particularly from Saudi Arabia, whose Prince Alwaleed Bin-Talal donated $20 million each to Georgetown and Harvard in 2005 to establish centers of Islamic-Christian understanding (ably documented by NRO’s Stanley Kurtz). It seems, at times, as if the vista of Middle Eastern studies is more clouded by an intellectual sandstorm than open to the light of rational inquiry.
ASMEA
This hazy university landscape has meant that much serious thinking about the region has previously taken place in private think tanks, such as the Middle East Forum and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. But reform has finally come to campus in the shape of a new scholarly group, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. Like its counterparts in history and literature, ASMEA offers a dynamic alternative for scholars. It is, according to its mission statement, “a non-partisan, non-profit organization that promotes the highest standards of academic research and teaching in Middle Eastern and African studies and related fields, through programs, publications, and services that support its members, the international community of scholars, and interested members of the public.”
ASMEA is committed to defending academic freedom. It promotes the free exchange of ideas. It is avowedly apolitical and interdisciplinary in nature: its members approach the Middle East and Africa from the perspectives of women’s studies, literature, economics, anthropology, history, political science, national security studies, and related disciplines. Importantly, it supports the professional development of undergraduate and graduate students. It offers an array of services to its membership. It hosted its first academic conference in April, 2008, and the proceedings will be published in the late spring of 2009. It will soon launch a scholarly journal, a monograph research series, an interactive website, book awards, and various campus events.
Unique to ASMEA is its strong focus on Africa. This is the first scholarly organization to include both the entire continent of Africa and the Middle East within its remit. J. Peter Pham, director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University and ASMEA’s vice president, notes that this makes sense, since “most scholars see linkages between the two geopolitical spaces of the Greater Middle East and Africa, e.g. Somalia.” He observes that “[c]urrent events remind us of how these two regions have historically been — and remain — very much linked.”
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