Edwardians. Here’s a novel way to mark one year since the tragedy of September 11, 2001: honor Edward Said.
This is the choice of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), and its companion associations in Europe. On the evening of September 11, the First World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES) will confer upon Said the “WOCMES Award for Outstanding Contributions to Middle Eastern Studies.”[1] Said will go to Mainz, Germany, to accept it. The congress is an initiative of MESA (where Said is already one of ten “honorary fellows,” for having “made major contributions to Middle East studies”).[2] Could there be any more telling evidence for the total alienation of this field from the changing realities of the world around it?
Said is the Columbia University celebrity professor who has made a career of accusing all and sundry of misrepresenting Islam. In the process, he has committed not a few acts of misrepresentation himself. For example, in introducing the latest (pre-9/11) edition of his book Covering Islam, Said ridiculed “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners and poison water supplies.” Such talk is based on “highly exaggerated stereotypes.”[3]
On 9/11 and immediately after, Said refused to take media calls. It’s his standard operating procedure after any atrocity that might be traced to Arabs or Muslims. Said ducks the media, then resurfaces when people begin to ponder whether it might really be “our fault.” (His stock answer: of course it is.) But since 9/11, self-recrimination is a hard sell in this country and his city, so Said has been spending more time in Europe, where he finds many more admirers prepared to believe that America had it coming. Two months after the attacks, Said visited London, where a couple of thousand people packed the Apollo Theatre to hear him. There he announced that New York no longer felt like home. “New York is the most interesting city in the world,” he said. But “it’s difficult to be in that atmosphere. I really feel I belong in the old world, not the aggressively new one. Europe attracts me, and the Middle East.”[4]
So it is wholly appropriate that Edward Said should spend September 11, 2002, with acolytes in Europe, at a conference devoted to the aggressively old Middle East. What seems totally inappropriate is the selection of Said for an award for his contributions to Middle Eastern studies. A contribution to an academic discipline usually takes the form of some epistemological breakthrough. Said’s attack on Middle Eastern studies, made in his 1978 book Orientalism, prompted an epistemological breakdown. Yet he never provided a serious alternative, just a kind of floating over-identification with political causes like Palestine, Arab nationalism, and Muslim anti-imperialism. When pressed, he has always pointed out that it isn’t his field anyway, and it isn’t his brief to say anything about the Middle East as it really is.[5] The decadence that pervades Middle Eastern studies today, the complete subservience to trendy politics, and the unlikelihood that the field might ever again produce a hero of high culture—all this is owed to Edward Said.
The most manifest sign of this decadence is the guild’s decision to kneel before its greatest detractor. And in the very depth of that kneel, we find decisive evidence for the complete atrophy of debate in Middle Eastern studies. Said’s selection was virtually unanimous. Fifty-two members of the WOCMES International Advisory and Program Committee (comprising academics from eighteen countries) voted in favor of Said’s nomination. Only three members abstained. No other nomination won support.[6] The outcome was almost Syrian in its unanimity.
Have no doubt: MESA is behind this show. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) historian Philip Khoury launched the idea of a world congress in 1998, when he was president of MESA.[7] He also initiated a fawning tribute to Said at the 1998 MESA conference, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Orientalism. MESA, having conferred every possible honor on Said, has now succeeded in concocting yet another one, making Said into the first internationally canonized saint of Middle Eastern studies.
So don’t believe them when they tell you that Middle Eastern studies have escaped the orbit of Edward Said. The guild can’t bring itself to honor anyone else. And as you stand in silence to mark the anniversary of 9/11, think of those MESAns and their European comrades, standing in ovation for Professor Said.
• • • •
Boycott! Since 9/11, the leaders of Middle Eastern studies have had one aim: to exploit the disaster to expand their empire. More money, more appointments, more students: if we receive more, they have argued, the United States will be better prepared than it was on September 11. Most of the wishes of Middle Eastern studies have come true. In particular, Congress has bestowed a massive increase on Title VI, the Department of Education’s program for funding Middle East centers and advanced student fellowships,[8] a fact that Joel Beinin, the Stanford University historian who presides over MESA, celebrated in a letter to the association’s members: “This is excellent news for MESA and for the future of area studies more generally, and there is good reason to hope that this trend will continue.”[9] .
But in the various departments of the U.S. government, there are no illusions. Expanding Middle Eastern studies won’t make America more secure if this expansion fails to produce graduates willing to serve government, who also possess the high-level language skills crucial to effective diplomacy, defense, and intelligence. The typical product of a degree program in Middle Eastern studies doesn’t fill the bill. And so Washington has come up with a new idea: campus-based, government-funded language centers, offering intensive language training. The ideal student in such a center would aspire to a government career and would receive a government fellowship in exchange for a service commitment. The program is called the National Flagship Language Initiative (NFLI), and in May it accepted its first applications from universities. Centers are to be established for eight languages, including Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. The program is funded through the defense budget but is administered by the National Foreign Language Center, University of Maryland.[10]
Enter MESA. Many of its members, while delighted to pocket taxpayers’ money for themselves, shudder at the thought of training students who might serve the U.S. government. Who knows what evil things such graduates might do with their Arabic? The field is pervaded by hostility to American aims, interests, and power in the Middle East, and peopled by tenured radicals who think of the United States as the incarnation of racist imperialism—the anti-Islam itself. Pick the pocket of the beast? Sure. Train its servants? Never!
At its spring meeting, MESA’s board declared a boycott of the NFLI. MESA is “uneasy” about “the direct link that [the NFLI] envisions between academic programs and government employment.” It is “apprehensive” that the program will link all language students “by association” with the Defense Department. MESA fears that the program “may foster the already widespread impression that academic researchers from the United States are directly involved in government activities.” And MESA “deplore[s] the channeling of funds for education through defense or intelligence agencies.” Bottom line: “We recommend that MESA members and institutions not seek or accept funding for the NFLI as presently defined, constituted, and administered.”[11]
Consider the paradox. The students, stirred by 9/11, are eager and ready. Undergraduate applications for fellowships from the National Security Education Program (NSEP), the parent program of the NFLI, are up by half, and graduate applications by a third. Arabic has had the sharpest rise; a fourth of all applicants want to study the Middle East.[12] The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, historically strong in Arabic (especially the vernaculars), would be a prime location for an NFLI Arabic center—and some students want it. One of them wrote this letter to The Michigan Daily, the campus newspaper:
As a major in the Near Eastern Studies Department, and as someone in an Arabic language course, I would fully support the department working with NSEP to grant scholarships to help people study Arabic. This goal in no way conflicts with what the NSEP is, namely a program to help people who want to use it to learn Arabic. It is the individual’s choice whether to participate, and I for one most likely would. I see it as a chance to help pay for my education and to give something back to my country.[13]
Is it even the business of Bardenstein to speculate about what her students might do later with their Arabic? Here is the same arrogant paternalism evident in MESA’s statement: we have to protect “our students"—from their own government. Bardenstein herself spent at least four years as a graduate student on the federal dole.[15] At taxpayers’ expense, she did a thesis on an obscure nineteenth-century Egyptian translator of French literature. Why did the United States pay for such extravagance?Congress voted to bankroll her (and others) on the assumption that somehow, some way, their knowing Arabic might serve the national interest—for example, by their teaching Arabic to a few students who “want to give something back to [their] country.” Is that such a burden on Bardenstein’s conscience? If it is, then she probably shouldn’t be teaching Arabic to Americans at all—and certainly not in a public university.
Michigan didn’t apply for an NFLI grant. Who knows how many other institutions were deterred from applying by the MESA decision? The boycott is a blot on the association, but it’s also a window on the bizarre world of its leaders, who somehow imagine themselves to be living in no-country-in-particular. In the last week of November 2002, MESA will convene its annual conference in Washington. Some of the MESAns will trawl Capitol Hill, arguing that their enterprise serves the nation’s interest and deserves federal support. They should be shown the door. As long as the boycott of the NFLI stands, the U.S. government should boycott MESA in return.
• • • •
MESA’s fingerprints. There’s more. Since February, MESA’s board has issued a blizzard of statements. In 2000, the board didn’t issue any, and in 2001, just a single (problematic) one on 9/11. This year, in addition to the NFLI boycott statement, there have been three more.[16] One calls for the reinstatement of Sami al-Arian, a dismissed engineering professor at the University of South Florida (neither a MESA member nor an instructor of the Middle East). The second statement protests passage of a new border security and visa reform law, and the third urges that Attorney General John Ashcroft abandon the idea of photographing and fingerprinting visitors from Middle Eastern countries. None of these issues has a clear or even remote bearing on the advancement of Middle Eastern studies—the purpose for which MESA was founded.
Why this irresistible urge to issue political statements? Are Middle Eastern studies so secure that their officers can afford to indulge in politics under MESA’s name? The question misses the point: at least some of these people treat their office precisely as an amplifier for their political views.
Consider, for example, Joel Beinin, MESA’s president, someone who is proud of his radical politics. The letter to Ashcroft went out over his signature. “I think it is extremely naïve to argue that scholarship has nothing to do with politics,” he recently told a journalist. “That is taking scholarly activity outside the realm of normal social interaction and giving it some special status, which I think it does not deserve.”[17]
But there is a difference between politics, which are inevitable, and politicization, which is not. It’s this rampant politicization that threatens academic freedom, precisely because it denies academe the “special status” that ensures it. The MESA letter to Ashcroft, for example, is gratuitous politicization. Nor is it very politic, since it won’t change U.S. policy, yet it leaves MESA more vulnerable. After all, if MESA can send letters to Washington complaining about who is fingerprinted, then there’s really no reason why Washington shouldn’t send letters to MESA complaining about what is taught. You don’t need a Ph.D. in political science to understand that politicization can cut both ways—and usually does.
• • • •
Will rise again. The Tar Heels are ready for the leap: they want to establish a Middle East center at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill. For some strange reason, all of the internal memos surrounding this effort have gone up on the Internet, where they provide a fascinating picture of professors on the make.[18]
The South has never had much in the way of Middle Eastern studies. Emory University in Atlanta has an undergraduate National Resource Center; otherwise, in the expanse between Washington and Austin, the landscape is pretty bare. At Carolina there are significant pockets of faculty interest and a few standing seminars. The idea of the Carolina entrepreneurs is to establish a “Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations” and a degree concentration. The goal: to secure university support, then a slot as an undergrad Title VI center.
The final draft of the “strategic plan” makes the boilerplate case for the enhanced importance of the Middle East, post-9/11. Carolina’s expertise on Islam tends to be spread (thinly) into south and southeast Asia, a structural liability that the plan tries to turn into an asset: “If al-Qa‘ida terrorists move from Saudi Arabia or Yemen to Pakistan or Malaysia, must Middle East studies stop studying them?”[19]
No, but Middle Eastern studies never studied al-Qa‘ida terrorists in the first place; certainly no one on the Carolina faculty has ever written anything about them. Closer to home, I don’t know that any of the faculty had anything interesting to say about the Hizbullah cell that stood trial and was convicted this year in Charlotte. And don’t look for the UNC crowd to establish ties to the government’s terrorist tracers. At an early stage, Carolina’s strategists ruled out an application for NSEP funds: “too dangerous for our researchers.”[20] But when you’re on the make, it doesn’t hurt to hint that you’re going to be tracking down America’s most wanted. They can run (between Yemen and Malaysia), but they can’t hide, at least not from the Tar Heels.
The smartest thing in the whole “strategic plan” is the idea of “hiring a well-known senior scholar with a primary mandate to build our program,” someone with “considerable name recognition."UNC won’t get anywhere without a big name, a scholar-entrepreneur willing to homestead the place and get the center’s name in the press—and not just in Charlotte and Raleigh. To find one, they’d better start building a substantial war chest now. And here’s a bit of advice: keep the faculty radicals at arm’s length. UNC doesn’t want to get press clippings like this letter from an irate citizen, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal last fall:
Shortly after Sept. 11, I attended a “teach-in” at the University of North Carolina. I expected a program where different opinions would be expressed. Instead, the faculty presented a diatribe against U.S. foreign policy. The public was not informed that faculty members who held similar political viewpoints organized the panel. A member of the university’s Middle East Studies Department [sic] dominated the presentations and launched into anti-Israeli speeches.[21]
For the folks up in Washington, the question is this: is North Carolina suited for a Title VI Middle East center? Such centers exist in Utah, Arizona, and Washington state. North Carolina seems no less worthy. Would they do things any differently in North Carolina than in the other centers? It’s very unlikely. All National Resource Centers for the Middle East are selected through the same peer review system, and so they all strive to conform to the same dubious ideal. One might best regard them as franchises—the McDonald’s of area studies. They simply duplicate one another, in different markets.
But there is one thing they do in Chapel Hill that is different. They collect documentary films about the Middle East. Ellen-Fairbanks Bodman is a librarian who has been collecting films for years. Back in 1980, she published a kind of “Union Catalogue” of films (16 millimeter—this was before the spread of video). A few years back she published a new filmography covering the video era (since 1980), and an updated edition is forthcoming. She also organizes the annual film fest at the MESA conference—the best part of the meeting (offense intended). Sure, she goes on about the orientalist “gaze,” but who doesn’t these days? This is someone with a collector’s bug, and as a result, UNC has an unrivalled collection of documentary films on the Middle East. All things being equal (or equally abysmal), I say give the Tar Heels a shot.
• • • •
Awesome prof. Bruinwalk.com is an Internet portal for the UCLA community, and it has a mischievous feature: “Professor Review,” a forum for students to rate and review their professors—anonymously, and very much in public. The database includes ratings and reviews for 2,800 instructors. Of course, all of it has to be taken with a grain of salt. Students write these evaluations for one another, as practical advice on whether or not to enroll in courses. That advice can be pointed. (“GET OUT WHILE THERE’S STILL TIME!!!” warns one student about a course taught by a veteran member of UCLA’s Middle East faculty, who happens to be a former president of MESA.)[22] All reservations now duly stated, “Professor Review” makes for entertaining and occasionally instructive reading.
No faculty member in Middle Eastern studies has received as many reviews as James L. Gelvin, associate professor of history and a specialist on the Arab lands in the late Ottoman period.[23] This is because Gelvin taught an introductory course on the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict during the fall quarter, 2001. Enrollment must have been sizeable: he had four teaching assistants. Gelvin is a versatile instructor, an engaging lecturer who has won awards for his teaching, and a workhorse who almost single-handedly teaches the entire range of courses on Middle Eastern history, post-1500. So how did he fare at “Professor Review”? (Reader beware: in the coming quotes, you will encounter grammatical oddities.)
There seems to be no disagreement that Gelvin gave well-paced lectures, peppered with sarcastic asides and funny jokes. “This man is simply amazing,” writes one. And another: “He is the perfect professor and my absolute favorite!!!” “Awesome prof,” agrees a third: “He likes to make these weird jokes and chew on his pipe a lot. He’s one of the most entertaining profs out there. I can totally see him as the pimp in his free time.” (Hey, it’s LA.) The course readings, when they are mentioned, also receive praise for their “balance,” and the grading is described as fair but easy.
But the consensus breaks down once the reviews move from lecturing and logistics to substance. There is some disagreement over what transpired on the first day of class. Apparently Gelvin made some sort of disclaimer or declaration. “He announces his view against Israel on the first day of class,” alleges one student. According to another, Gelvin “has an agenda, and he makes no secret of it, actually he tells you this the first day of class.” A third student recalls no explicit disclaimer: “The only thing he told us was that his wife is Palestinian. Was I supposed to assume that since he is married to a Palestinian his lectures would be one-sided?” But a fourth student banishes any doubt: Gelvin taught “a good class. Even though it’s true he’s biased, he has a little disclaimer on the first day, so all those who complained shoulda just dropped!” As for the course itself—well, read the postings. Opinions differ.
Nothing in these student evaluations establishes that Gelvin should not teach the Arab-Israeli conflict. Someone’s got to do it, and it’s impossible to please everyone. Who knows what he really said in class? Perhaps there was a good reason three of his four teaching assistants turned out to be Palestinians. (They were not as popular as Gelvin: “some of his TAs are hell hounds—seriously.”) Who can say whether Gelvin is even an exception at UCLA? One of Gelvin’s student defenders, doubtless speaking from experience, points out that “there are many teachers at UCLA that are biased; Gelvin just doesn’t hide it like the others.” And to judge from other reports, Gelvin probably teaches the Arab-Israeli conflict the way it’s taught in dozens of universities across America.
But Gelvin did something in the spring that should dissuade his department from assigning him this class again. He put his name to a petition calling on the University of California to divest from Israel—one of only a dozen members of the UCLA faculty to do so.[24] Whatever one thinks of the divestment campaign, there can be no doubt that joining it constitutes a clear-cut, unambiguous, and public choosing of sides—the Palestinian side—in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “In no way should it be interpreted that any of us signing this petition support the suicide bombers,” Gelvin told the Daily Bruin.[25] But signing the petition, in the very midst of Palestinian suicide bombings, made Gelvin’s preference even more unequivocal. There is no bar to a professor choosing one side of the issue. But there is every reason such a professor should not be enlisted to teach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has two sides.
Why should UCLA’s students be subjected to an instructor who warns them of his partiality and signs radical petitions on the very subject they wish to study? The chair of the history department might take this student posting to heart: “Professor Gelvin is a great professor and lecturer, but he is better suited for a subject that he is not personally biased toward and can maintain impartiality.” “Gelvin is a very knowledgeable yet very biased man,” writes another. “You should avoid Gelvin if there is anyway you can take this class with another prof.” For this purpose, UCLA needs another prof. Its students deserve an instructor who might earn the kind of “Professor Review” old Leonard Binder got:"He can argue both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict, in Arabic or Hebrew, never letting his true feelings on the situation come out. He presents you with both sides of the conflict, a talent that many professors don’t have, I won’t name any names...Prof. Gelvin.”[26]
Gelvin has a repertoire of strengths—and a weakness. His department should steer him away from teaching his weakness.
• • • •
Divestment roll call. The signature of a professor of Middle Eastern studies on a divestment petition has far more weight than the signature of a biology professor. The Middle East “expert,” regardless of his or her exact expertise, purports to understand the region where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unfolds. Petition organizers especially cherish the signatures of Middle East faculty members, who are reputed to enjoy special insight. During the spring term, petitions circulated at Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and the University of California.
To their credit, the vast majority of Middle East scholars did not sign. The missing names include dozens of academics whose sympathies and writings have always resided with the Palestinians. Perhaps they’ve understood—unlike UCLA’s Gelvin—that credibility depends on a formal posture of professional neutrality.
Alas, a minority could not resist the tug of (one-sided) conscience or the desire to strike a fashionable posture of political engagement. I thought it might be useful to collect the names of Middle East scholars who signed these petitions.[27] After all, some teach aspects of Israel, and even those who don’t may one day administer departments or centers where Israel is taught. Caveat emptor.
University of California (all campuses). Rutie Adler, Wali Ahmadi, Hamid Algar, Daniel Boyarin, Magda Campo, Beshara Doumani, Robert K. Englund, John Foran, Nancy Gallagher, James L. Gelvin, Sondra Hale, John Hayes, Mark Juergensmeyer, Chana Kronfeld, Margaret M. Larkin, Laura Nader, Stefania Pandolfo, Gabriel Piterberg, Carol Redmount, Sonia S’hiri, Muhammad Siddiq, Sherry Vatter.
Harvard. Steven Caton, Ayman El-Desouky, William A. Graham, William Granara, Paul D. Hanson, Thomas Mullins, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Laila Parsons, Abdulkarim Soroush, Robert Wisnovsky, Nur Yalman.
MIT. Susan Slyomovics.
Princeton. Nancy Coffin, Firoozeh Khazrai, Shaun Marmon, Negin Nabavi, Samah Selim, Robert Tignor.
• • • •
Cole mine. “I could support the divestment campaign at some American campuses, aimed at university investments in Israeli firms, because the business elite in Israel is both more powerful and more entangled in government policy than the academics.” The words belong to Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, and former director of its Middle East center.
Cole backed divestment in an op-ed arguing against the boycott of individual Israeli scholars. “It seems especially inappropriate to punish academics for the actions of a government they largely oppose,” wrote Cole in the Chronicle of Higher Education.[28] But the “business elite”? (And, presumably, the entire society that depends on them?) Divest ‘em. In fact, it’s the call for divestment that’s the point of the op-ed. Hardly anyone in America takes seriously the notion of a boycott of Israeli academics. It’s a straw man.
Professor Cole is entitled to his opinion—a radical one by American standards. He is also deserving of close scrutiny, for his mode of analysis. Consider, for example, his piece, “It’s Time for Sharon to Go.”[29] In it, Cole repeats the familiar case against Ariel Sharon, dwelling on Sabra and Shatila, and adding Jenin. There is nothing new here—and clever Cole wants to level a charge that no one else has leveled before. So how about assigning Sharon a measure of responsibility for 9/11? Here’s how it’s done:
Among the mysteries of September 11 is why an engineer from a secular middle class family in Lebanon, Ziad Jarrah, would have hated the United States so much as to hijack United Airlines flight 93 [which crashed in western Pennsylvania]. Jarrah was eight years old when he lived through the brutal invasion of his country by America’s ally, Ariel Sharon. Despite his promises, Sharon’s iron fist and reckless disregard for innocent life have yielded no end to violence.
Well, you might say, everyone is entitled to one over-the-top op-ed. Perhaps. But in Middle Eastern studies, this isn’t deemed to be over the top. To the contrary: MESA president Beinin recommended Cole’s Sharon op-ed to all directors of Middle East centers and programs, as a model of “reasonable[ness]” they might wish to emulate.[30] And Cole himself is MESA’s chief arbiter of scholarly standards. Since 1999, he has been the editor of MESA’s flagship journal, the International Journal of Middle East Studies (known as IJMES). One would think that someone entrusted with this sensitive position—involving the publication of articles and reviews concerning Israel, the Palestinians, and the conflict—would strike a public posture of studied neutrality. One would think it—if one didn’t know MESA.
Cole’s advocacy and Beinin’s enthusiasm for it are still more evidence that MESA is a professional association only during office hours. The rest of the time, it’s a combination of popular front and ethnic lobby. In the post-9/11 climate, the feverish attempt to be all of these things provides MESA’s critics—myself included—with endless opportunities to embarrass it. Do the MESAns get it? On the top deck: not at all. Down in the galleys: who knows?
MESA’s annual conference meets from November 23 through 26, Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Washington, D.C. Be there.
Does something on your campus or hallway deserve comment? Notify this column: mideast@columnist.com.
Martin Kramer is editor of the Middle East Quarterly.
[2] Honorary fellows list at http://fp.arizona.edu/mesassoc/honoraryfellows.htm
[3] Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. xi.
[4] Interview with Edward Said, The Independent (London), Dec. 15, 2001.
[5] “I have no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are.” Afterword to 1994 edition, Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 331.
[6] Private communication from WOCMES organizers.
[7] Philip S. Khoury, “Global and Local Perspectives,” MESA Newsletter, May 1998, p. 3.
[8] Martin Kramer, “Arabic Panic,” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2002, pp. 88-90.
[9] President’s letter, MESA Newsletter, May 2002, at http://fp.arizona.edu/mesassoc/PresLetter.htm.
[10] National Flagship Language Initiative—Pilot Program, at http://www.nflc.org/flagship/application/announcement.htm.
[11] MESA board of directors statement, Apr. 27, 2002, at http://fp.arizona.edu/mesassoc/boardletters.htm#427NFLI-P.
[12] NSEP press release, Mar. 8, 2002, at http://www.ndu.edu/nsep/newsrelease02.htm.
[13] Letter from Matt Randall, The Michigan Daily, Oct. 25, 2001.
[14] Quoted by Jodie Morse, “No Spooks, Please. We’re Academics,” Time Magazine, Oct. 15, 2001.
[15] She received three years of Title VI fellowships (including one year spent in Cairo), and a year of dissertation research abroad on a Fulbright/Hayes grant. Her resume is at http://www.umich.edu/~neareast/faculty/bardenst.htm.
[16] All at http://fp.arizona.edu/mesassoc/boardletters.htm.
[17] Quoted in Beth McMurtrie, “An Attempt to Isolate Israeli Scholars Draws Flak,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 26, 2002.
[18] At http://www.unc.edu/mideast/.
[19] Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations: Strategic Plan, at http://www.unc.edu/mideast/Strategic.html.
[20] Planning meeting, Mar. 1, 2002, at http://www.unc.edu/mideast/Meeting_020301.html.
[21] “See No Terrorism, but See Evil: Ours,” letter from Sarah Kane Marlow, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 29, 2001.
[22] At http://www.bruinwalk.com/professors/profile.asp?ID=824.
[23] At http://www.bruinwalk.com/professors/profile.asp?ID=821.
[24] At http://www.ucdivest.org/petition.php?facnames=1#sigs.
[25] “165 UC Professors Petition for Divestment from Israel,” Daily Bruin, June 25, 2002.
[26] At http://www.bruinwalk.com/professors/profile.asp?ID=1456.
[27] The list includes signatories as of July 1, 2002, who hold appointments in departments of Near or Middle Eastern studies, are faculty affiliates of Middle East centers, or are members of MESA.
[28] Juan Cole, “Boycott the Boycott,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 26, 2002.
[29] Juan Cole, “It’s Time for Sharon to Go,” History News Network, July 8, 2002, at http://hnn.us/articles/842.htm.
[30] Joel Beinin, e-mail circular to Middle East center and program directors, July 16, 2002, at http://www.geocities.com/ivorytowersorg/Beinin.htm.
