Middle East studies faculty at Georgetown University have a reputation as the most radical and intolerant in the United States. |
PHILADELPHIA – December 4, 2017 – A new Campus Watch report details how Georgetown University’s Middle East studies faculty has radicalized in recent years to include not just the fellow travelers of previous decades but actual Islamist professors. Islamists, Apologists, and Fellow Travelers: Middle East Studies Faculty at Georgetown University by Campus Watch, a project of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, exposes this alarming increase in anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-Western biases among professors, some Saudi funded, in the heart of the American capital.
“Georgetown’s decades-long reputation as ground zero for apologists for Islamism is well deserved” said Winfield Myers, director of academic affairs at the Forum and head of Campus Watch. “But our research reveals alarming trends in its recent hiring and promotion of actual Islamist professors who propagandize for Islamist goals in their teaching and scholarship,” Myers added.
As advisors to policymakers and politicians, Georgetown’s faculty consistently misread the Middle East, as when John Esposito argued that Islamism was the surest path to democracy in the region, a theory proved false by events, for example in Egypt and Turkey. The report concludes that “the permeation of postcolonial theory and aggressive Islamism into academia has given rise to politicized scholarship that yields little useful expertise to policymakers.”
To read the full report, click here.
To read an article in today’s Georgetown Review featuring the report, click here.
Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North America, with an aim to improving them.
For immediate release
For more information, contact:
Winfield Myers, Director of Academic Affairs and of Campus Watch
Myers@meforum.org
