The University of Washington’s Middle East Center (MEC) recently became the focus of a minor dispute when internal emails sent out concerning the center’s future, highlighted a period of restructuring following the center’s loss of federal funding two years ago.
“It is with great sadness that I must report that after 50 years as one of the leading Middle East Centers in the U.S., MEC will be closing its doors,” Interim Director of the MEC Paula Holmes-Eber said in an email to the MEC listserv April 29.
Holmes-Eber’s statement was refuted in an email from Danny Hoffman, director of the Jackson School of International Studies and upcoming interim director of the MEC, three hours later. Hoffman said that he believes the incident was a misunderstanding about what the center’s next steps would be after losing their main source of funding.
“Without Title VI funding, we cannot and should not attempt to replicate the old model of how the MEC was staffed and structured,” Hoffman wrote. “We need to make changes that will allow us to sustain and grow the MEC, with or without Title VI support. That does not mean that we are closing its doors.”
According to the MEC website, the center’s aim is to educate students and community members about the Middle East through instruction, research, and outreach across the country. The center specifically supports Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish language instructor salaries as well as courses focused on the study of the Middle East at UW, and engages K-12 teachers and local community groups with Middle East-focused presentations and training.
The MEC also oversees the Middle East Studies program, which offers an undergraduate minor and a master’s degree in Middle East Studies, according to its website.
The MEC was established in 1974. It formerly received federal funding via Title VI of the Higher Education Act, which authorizes the federal government to allocate grant money for foreign language and international studies programs in the U.S.
Title VI funds these programs in multiple ways including the merit-based Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships (FLAS) and National Resource Centers (NRCs), such as the MEC, which support the teaching and study of foreign languages and world affairs.
In 2022, the Jackson School was given $10.6 million from Title VI to support their work in five global and area studies centers and programs. The Middle East Center was not among them.
“In the last round, only the Middle East Center lost its NRC funding,” Hoffman wrote in an email. “Two centers, the Middle East Center and the Center for Global Studies, lost FLAS funding.”
However, losing federal funding is not necessarily a new experience for these programs and centers.
"[T]he UW has lost Title VI funding for centers in the past,” Hoffman wrote. “The Center for Western European Studies and the Ellison Center for Russian, East Europe and Central Asian States both had Title VI funding in the past.”
According toprofessor Reşat Kasaba of the Jackson School, Title VI funding is not permanent for all schools that house these types of centers and universities must reapply every four years to once again get funding to support them.
The Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania also lost federal funding in the most recent Title VI cycle, according to The Daily Pennsylvanian. In response, the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn decided to financially support the center’s operations until the next federal grant application cycle.
Kasaba explained that these funding allocation decisions are not up to anyone at the University of Washington, but rather are government choices that can often have unclear reasoning. However, there is some speculation as to why shifts in funding for these centers occur.
“Around the country a number of Middle East Centers lost their Title VI at the same time,” history professor Arbella Bet-Shlimon said. “We think it’s because of a pivot to Eastern Europe because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Often there’s these immediate political reasons for the funding. A lot of funding went into Middle East centers right after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.”
Hoffman said that the Jackson School’s regional centers are funded in a variety of ways. Private philanthropy and organizations that award grants to higher education initiatives are other ways centers can receive funding. Concerns about the reliability of federal funding and government oversight of academic programs are not new.
“I think as we rebuild centers and programs, we want to do it in a way they’re built on lots of different kinds of funding, and that they don’t live or die by whether you get Title VI,” Hoffman said.
A critical inquiry in 2019 by the Department of Education into the Middle East studies center jointly led by Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill identified certain programs as diverging from the national security and economic interests behind Title VI and advancing ideological positions instead. The letter from Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education Robert King raised concerns felt by some in academia of the federal government curtailing academic freedom, according to Inside Higher Ed.
The recent lapse in funding for the center at UW has directly impacted the MEC’s operations, making paying for full-time staff who can facilitate the center’s needs more difficult, as well as cutting off funds for fellowships normally awarded annually to students studying Middle Eastern languages.
“Without full time staffing we can’t plan events without funds, we can’t attract students,” Bet-Shlimon said “So [now] the Middle East Center is a website with a list of names on it, saying, here’s all the people who study the Middle East and very little else. It’s a shell without Title VI funding.”
Distinguished endowed chair in Jewish Studies Liora Halperin, professor of history and international studies, said that recent events including the pro-Palestinian encampment on the Quad and other protests have shown that student interest in the Middle East is higher than ever.
“I was concerned to learn that there was some doubt or uncertainty regarding the status of the center and especially regarding its funding for the coming years,” Halperin said. “And I really would hope that the administration of UW can step in to really offer robust support to make sure that the study of the Middle East on this campus is robustly funded.”
