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.

“A straight line extended from Harvard and Oxford, Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts directly to a foreign policy bureaucracy that viewed Middle Eastern rulers as rational modernizers, Middle Eastern societies as ready to reconcile with a contrite and philanthropic United States, and the Arab-Israeli conflict as a core dispute which, if resolved, could turn the entire region into Switzerland.”

Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., in “Field of Fire: Fifty Years in Middle East Studies (Part II)"; in “Clarity with Michael Oren,” April 16, 2024. (link to source)
MESA is a pillar of the field, and a constant advocate for the best in scholarship and teaching, as well as the broader principles of academic freedom, with respect to both study and pedagogy,”

Asli Bâl, president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and professor of law at Yale, on MESA’s relocation to the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in Georgetown University’s (GU) Walsh School of Foreign Service; MESA press release, February 21, 2024. (link to source)
More from MEF
Many Iranians Appear to Be Much Less Intimidated by the Regime’s Terror Tactics and Act More Defiant
A Partnership with the U.S.-Led Coalition Would Give Al-Sharaa Another Means to Consolidate Power and Project Legitimacy at Home and Abroad
It Is Exactly the Opposite of What Europe and the West Should Be Doing at a Time of Heightened Danger