‘This administration does not want any dissent’: breaking down Trump’s attacks on Middle East Studies programs

Last month, Columbia University made headlines for adhering to a number of demands from the Trump administration.

Trump’s list was issued to the school shortly after the government froze multiple contracts and grants to the university. The ultimatum was ostensibly issued in an effort to combat antisemitism at the school. However, it’s clearly a push to stifle Palestine protests at the campus.

One of Trump’s demands was to put Columbia’s Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies under an “academic receivership.” Then, perhaps in anticipation of a governmental diktat, on March 26 Harvard dismissed the director and associate director of the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Developments like this signal the reinvigoration of a wider war against such academic programs. “Anybody working in Middle East studies now feels very anxious,” said Aslı Bâli, president of the Middle East Studies Association at Yale University, told Insider Higher Ed.

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has put out multiple statements denouncing the Trump administration’s actions and calling on schools to protect their students. Last month, they joined the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to sue the government over its deportation of student protesters.

Laurie Brand is Professor Emerita of Political Science and International Relations & Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California and Chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom at the Middle East Studies Association.

Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke to Brand about the history of attacks on Middle East Studies, the designs of the Trump administration, and the capitulation of universities.

Your organization has put out multiple statements denouncing Trump’s crackdown on academic freedom. You’re also suing the administration. Can you talk about Trump’s moves and MESA’s response to them?

We in the Middle East Studies Association, and the broader community of scholars on the region, have long been on the front lines in attempts by U.S. government or other actors to stifle free speech on Middle East issues. Palestine has generally been the most prominent issue and the one that’s triggered the most and deepest reactions, but it’s not the only one.

Some of our colleagues were also targeted after 9/11 for expressing concerns about the expansion of the national security state, criticism of the U.S.’s response or for attempts to analyze the attacks in their historical and political context.  Since then, the Middle East Studies Association and its Committee on Academic Freedom have increasingly spoken out on academic freedom issues.

For many years, our primary field of intervention was in the region itself, protesting academic freedom violations against our colleagues there. But with the passage of time, we have increasingly taken up cases involving U.S. and Canadian institutions as well as U.S. state and federal government cases. So MESA’s active role, in issuing statements on government actions, letters in defense of faculty and students, advisories regarding threats to our members, and resource guides on current threats is not new. What is new is the increased level of activity and extent of the role of the Association in defense of our field and our community of students and scholars. What we currently witnessing is qualitatively different, far more dangerous and threatening than what we have seen in the past. The attacks on academic freedom have certainly been growing over the years; they intensified and spread after the beginning of the war in Gaza.  But the multi-pronged nature of the assault against higher education as a sector, which has been launched with a terrible destructive vengeance since Trump took office, is, I believe, without precedent in the history of the American academy.  

The beginning of the war in Gaza also saw the intensification not only of government attempts to suppress academic freedom, but also of such attempts by university administrations themselves, in some cases willingly, in others, pressured by pro-Israel members of the campus communities as well as by outside organizations with a pro-Israel agenda  While we saw many examples of cancellations or refusals of permission for programming about Gaza in the early weeks of the war, much more intensified repression came as a result of the spring 2024 encampment movement, as it spread across the U.S. and around the world.  

So the atmosphere on campuses was already becoming more repressive and, in some cases, dangerous, for our Middle East Studies community on campuses under the Biden administration, with the increasing use of campus security forces and police against protesters last spring. The attempts to discredit the protesters by labeling their messages, slogans and actions as antisemitic had already begun under Biden–even though Jewish students and faculty had and continue to have a major presence in the anti-genocide protests. 

Building on the shameful show trials of college presidents that were orchestrated by Republican members of Congress beginning in fall 2023, the Trump administration has instrumentalized the charge of antisemitism – which it equates with any manifestation of Palestine solidarity –turning it into a battering ram, intended to inflict maximum damage on the entire U.S. university system. 

Of course these assaults are not limited to the field of Middle East Studies. They also threaten faculty members and students who are engaged in the study of what this administration labels as DEI, anything from gender studies, to critical race theory to ethnic studies.  The Task Force on Antisemitism’s recent letters demanding university compliance in the face of wide-ranging demands have also included diktats regarding abolishing DEI.  We can expect this repression to expand if the Trump administration continues to be successful in its efforts to intimidate university administrations.

We can also expect the intimidation tactics to extend to include other groups of students as well. We’ve already seen the beginnings of it, with moves against Chinese students. My own university, the University of Southern California, received a request from the Trump administration in March demanding information on nearly 6,000 Chinese students. Given what we have seen so far, it does not take much imagination to figure out what is likely to follow.

So there’s  no reason to suspect this is going to end with Arab or Muslim students. Precisely because our community has been on the front lines for so long, because we have strong associational leadership and because we have sought out, and increasingly found academic and legal allies working to defend academic freedom and First Amendment rights, it’s logical that the Middle East Studies Association would play an increasingly prominent role. 

You mentioned the aftermath of 9/11 and the attacks on Middle East Studies back then. At the time we saw groups like Daniel Pipes’s Campus Watch target departments. They were pushing the idea that the departments were condoning terrorism. 

Who is pushing these attacks this time around and what are the similarities or differences to that period?

Yes, after 9/11, we saw the emergence of Campus Watch, and then somewhat later, Canary Mission, as well as some less well-known but shadowy groups.  Initially, the targets were overwhelmingly faculty, but Canary Mission significantly expanded its “coverage” to include harassment and doxing of graduate and undergraduate students as well. 

Their goal is to label anyone who engages in criticism of Israel or Israeli policies as antisemitic or anti-American. There is basically no way that one can support Palestinian rights or engage in any Palestine solidarity work without risking their profiling you as antisemitic, a supportive of terrorism, doxing you, etc.   

After 9/11, the central issue was opposition to U.S. policy and the U.S. response to the attacks of 9/11. Of course, this was all framed within a context in which, thanks to government policy and prevailing discourse in this country, terrorism had already generally been associated with the Middle East. So if one sought to contextualize or historicize the analysis, you were deemed a terrorist supporter. I think that’s still the framework for a lot of what we see now. When scholars speak about the Middle East, when they talk about militant or resistance groups and try to put them into historical or political context, they risk being labelled as supporting terrorism.

Opposition to repressive states or occupation regimes backed by the U.S. are all put into the basket of terrorism without any distinction about who the groups are or what their goals are. This is a particular problem for the discussion and study of Palestine and the Palestinians. The Middle East Studies community has struggled with this issue for years. Attempts to place developments context end up being vilified by government officials and other actors who are supportive of the state of Israel. They have a vested interest in preventing the explanation of historical, political, and socio-economic context, in trying to reduce any and all resistance actors to stereotypical terrorist caricatures. That brings us to what we are witnessing now. A U.S. government official or spokesperson can claim that opposition to Israel is equivalent to support for Hamas and that that is then equivalent to support for terrorism.

In recent years, pro-Israel organizations have come to see colleges and universities as an increasingly threatening locus for the kinds of open discussions of Palestine and Palestinian rights, the occupation, apartheid, and now war crimes and genocide that one generally does not encounter elsewhere in the US.  Relatedly, we have also seen the expansion across campuses of organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, one of whose primary goals is working to promote BDS. 

Obviously, supporters of Israel are committed to combating BDS, and so they have pushed to delegitimize or even criminalize the adoption of it.  We see this in legislation in a number of states, and even in some city governments.  At the same time pro-Israel activists have tried to force the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism on various levels of government as well as a range of institutions, including universities, as we now see in some of their responses to the Trump administration’s demands that they crack down on antisemitism.   

I’m not under any illusions about the American university system. It has a number of serious problems: over bureaucratization, corporatization, diminished levels of meaningful faculty governance, and dependence on and obeisance to wealthy donors. These schools have often failed to champion free expression; that said they remain important centers of critical inquiry and knowledge production.

And it is that basic mission that the Trump administration is keenest to suppress. The current administration is not interested in encouraging critical analyses of any of the aspects of empire, whether it is occupation, genocide, war crimes, racism, or militarism. So you have a powerful combination of forces at work. You have the Trump administration’s fascism, its desire for complete control and its unwillingness to brook any kind of criticism or opposition, and then you also have other forces who may or may not agree with the administration completely on other issues, but which are eager to see pro-Palestine speech suppressed.

Your organization has called on schools to protect their students, but we’ve seen multiple universities immediately comply with Trump’s demands. What have you made of these capitulations and how should we understand them?

First, I would say that, yes, MESA has certainly called upon universities to protect their students. It is the most basic demand we can and should make. Universities, given their mission, have a solemn responsibility to do so.  But not all universities subscribe to such a responsibility.  Indeed, we see that in Florida, shockingly, at least 10 public universities have recently struck agreements with ICE, authorizing campus police to question and detain undocumented immigrants. When universities welcome agents of repression onto their campuses, cultivate a climate of fear, or when they allow themselves to be deputized by local, state or federal officials to harass or detain their own students, they have surrendered or betrayed the very reason for their existence, their mission and identity as places of learning, the free exchange of ideas, of critical analysis and of knowledge production.  

But the anti-immigrant and anti-Palestine solidarity policies of the Trump administration have not been limited to persecuting students. Indeed, if one looks at the demands that have been made of Columbia and Harvard, for example, they range from interference in departmental hiring, academic programming, curricular offerings, student disciplinary procedures and so on.  These demands target the most basic tenets of academic freedom and independent governance for the entire university community.    

As for responses by universities to what one can only characterize as the unprecedented, outrageous and in some cases clearly illegal demands made of an increasing number of universities by this newly formed Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, we saw Columbia University, the first target, acquiesce relatively quickly in the face of threats to pause or terminate $400 million in federal funding. The university administration probably thought that agreeing to basically all these demands would satisfy the Trump administration, and that it would then back off.  But for the vast majority of us watching this extortion attempt unfold, our first reaction was, if you give in to them, this will not be the end. Not only will the administration not be satisfied, but the craven acquiescence will empower and embolden them to demand more, and to then move on to their next target. And, of course, that is exactly what has happened.   

Trump’s Special Task Force on Antisemitism is investigating 10 or 11 universities, and there is a list of 60 universities under investigation by the Department of Education for purported DEI-related violations.

I happen to be a political scientist, but you don’t need to be one to see that many of these demands are illegal and that if you fail to fight them in court, you open yourself up to additional demands for increasingly destructive concessions. The statements by the presidents of Princeton and Wesleyan have been courageous. It has also been encouraging to see moves by a number of universities in the last couple of weeks to establish mutual defense pacts, to ward off further authoritarian interventions and support each other—legally, financially, etc– in the event one is attacked. Some of these initiatives have come out of faculty senates or other groups of concerned faculty. The AAUP has also been actively engaged in organizing to mobilize faculty within and across campuses to step up and resist the dangerous assaults that are underway. 

Harvard’s decision to refuse to further capitulate, even in the face of threats of the loss of billions of dollars in federal funding, also marks a critical juncture, and hopefully a turning point.  That said, it’s important to point out that the Harvard School of Public Health had already recently suspended its research partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank, The leadership of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) was removed in late March following complaints of purported unbalanced programming regarding Israel and related topics.  Harvard’s Divinity School paused its “Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative,”–which had focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—following criticism for allegedly lacking ideological diversity. And Harvard recently adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which has been widely criticized for its potential to restrict pro-Palestinian speech and academic freedom.

In other words, Harvard had already taken several significant steps in repressing or diminishing Palestine content in its programs and programming before announcing its intent to hold the line against (the rest of) the Trump administration’s outrageous demands.   

The Trump administration says they are trying to deport student protesters because they allegedly threaten U.S. foreign policy. Is there something similar going on with the attacks on Middle East Studies programs? What makes the study of this region so threatening to the government?

It’s more than a bit of a stretch for the most powerful country on earth to claim that students engaged in what were overwhelmingly peaceful protests against the genocide in Gaza threaten U.S. foreign policy.  If the administration is serious, then the empire is far closer to collapse than they would otherwise have us think. 

The detentions and threats of deportation are instead part of a broader program aimed at suppressing dissent of all sorts, and they see universities as places where that kind of dissent often emerges.  But that is not new and it is no surprise. That’s part of their mission: they’re places of critical inquiry.  

Despite what some members of the Trump administration might contend, it’s absurd to contend that professors indoctrinate their students to criticize U.S. foreign policy. It’s just that in undertaking university studies, students will hopefully be confronted with different perspectives, and out of that, some will develop a more critical approach toward what the U.S. does abroad.  When it comes to U.S. policy toward the Middle East, the record is far from glorious, so a student engaging in serious study is likely to come away with serious concerns and critiques.  

It goes beyond what the U.S. does abroad, though. This administration does not want any dissent, and it is targeting such dissent in various ways. When it comes to those who study and teach about the Middle East, accusations of antisemitism are one way to attempt to ruin someone’s career.   

The charge of antisemitism has been such a weighty and such a dangerous charge over the years precisely because of the historical record of the Holocaust. The cry of  “never again” has had deep resonance in Western societies –although as we have seen with the genocide in Gaza, moral outrage can be selectively invoked–Therefore, it’s easy to draw on that reserve of rejection of antisemitism to mobilize public opinion against universities, faculty, or students who are charged with a failure to combat it or worse, having engaged in it. The problem is that the Trump administration and those who support it in this assault are deliberately conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism. Any criticism of Israel and any support for Palestinian rights or criticism of the genocide is labelled antisemitic. It’s important to note here that there has been no concern shown by this administration – nor its predecessor – with the harassment and intimidation of Jewish students engaged in Palestine solidarity work. The concern with Jewish students begins and ends with those who are pro-Israel. All others are marginalized or simply rendered invisible by this administration’s definition of antisemitism. And of course this conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is particularly pernicious, especially in the context of a U.S. administration with a base or supporters that includes significant numbers of traditionally antisemitic white Christian nationalists.  The contradiction is glaring, but it is a contradiction that supporters of Israel are willing to accept: their concern begins and ends with Israel.  

It’s important to mention here, before we end this discussion, that there has been zero concern manifested by this administration with the massive numbers of documented cases of anti-Arab racism, anti-Palestinian racism, and Islamophobia on campuses and beyond. The Biden administration at least performatively included Islamophobia in many of its statements, but this administration has eliminated any pretense of equal concern.  To the contrary, it has made clear its intent to intimidate, harass, detain and potentially deport them.