About Campus Watch

Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North America, with an aim to improving them. The project mainly addresses five problems: analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students. Campus Watch fully respects the freedom of speech of those it debates while insisting on its own freedom to comment on their words and deeds.

Middle East studies have a special importance due to its many subjects at the heart of the public debate, such as Islamism in the Middle East and West, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iran, Qatar, and others. Specialists have an extensive but subtle influence on the way North Americans see this range of topics. They:

• Write books and articles that influence the way the region is seen.
• Set the tone for how the Middle East is regarded on campuses across North America.
• Teach graduate and undergraduate students.
• Contribute to the public debate via activism, social media, podcasts, lectures, panels, articles, teach-ins, quotations in media outlets, and appearances on radio and television.
• Influence government by helping candidates formulate positions, advising intelligence agencies, or providing help to congressional staffers writing briefs.
• Conduct outreach activities in local communities.
• Serve as expert witnesses in court cases.
• Act as informal U.S. representatives when lecturing abroad, especially on State Department-sponsored tours.

• Gathers information on Middle East studies from public and private sources and makes this information available on its website, https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/.
• Produces analyses of institutions, individual scholars, topics, events, and trends.
• Makes its views known through social media, podcasts, opeds, radio interviews, television interviews.
• Invites student complaints of abuse, investigates their claims, and (when warranted) makes these known.
• Works with MEF Action, MEF allies on Capitol Hill and state capitals, and allied groups and individuals to encourage reform.

Campus Watch will continue its work until the problems it addresses are resolved.

Campus Watch seeks to have an influence over the future course of Middle East studies through two main avenues:

• Engage in an informed, serious, and constructive critique that will spur professors and administrators to make improvements. We look forward to the day when scholars of the Middle East provide studies on relevant topics, an honest appraisal of sensitive issues, a mainstream education of the young, a healthy debate in the classroom, and sensible policy guidance in a time of war.
• Alert university stakeholders (administrators, alumni, trustees, regents, parents of students, state/provincial and federal legislators) to the problems in Middle East studies and encourage them to address existing problems. We challenge these stakeholders to take back their universities and not passively to accept the mistakes, extremism, intolerance, apologetics, and abuse when these occur.

• Contribute to these efforts via two frequently-updated informational pages:

  • Recommended Professors.
  • Professors to Avoid.

The universities of North American are treasured institutions that build on the work of many generations. They are a trust that in no sense - not legally, not financially, and not morally - belongs to the academics who happen to administer and serve them at present. Stakeholders have not merely a right but an obligation to safeguard these vital institutions from being harmed. We call on the society at large to take an active interest in developments at the university in general, and in Middle East studies in particular.

John Dewey of Columbia University and Arthur Lovejoy of Johns Hopkins University came together with other educators in 1915 to found the American Association of University Professors, an organization designed to preserve the integrity of the academy from a donor-driven agenda.

Their 1915 Declaration of Principles set standards that we believe remain valid today:

Campus Watch calls upon Middle East studies specialists to recognize their “correlative obligations.”

Unfortunately, Middle Eastern studies specialists responded to the launching of Campus Watch with a campaign of vilification and distortion. Lest there be any confusion, we wish to make explicit several points in response:

• Campus Watch supports the unencumbered freedom of speech of all scholars, regardless of their views.
• Campus Watch takes no position on individual academic appointments.
• Academic freedom does not mean freedom from criticism; to the contrary, no one enjoys privileges in the free marketplace of ideas.
• The charge of “McCarthyism” has come up so often that we address this in a separate study which demonstrates why the charge is ignorant, intolerant, and ultimately self-serving.
• We challenge scholars of Middle Eastern studies to abandon the crude resort to insults and engage Campus Watch on the substance of our analysis.

¹ Reprinting published in Academic Freedom and Tenure: A Handbook of the American Association of University Professors, Edited by Louis Joughin, Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967. Appendix A., pp.155 - 176.