I’ve got a new Campus Watch article up at The American Thinker on a Stanford University symposium I attended earlier this month on the “state of Middle East studies.” Speakers included Columbia University’s Hamid Dabashi, UC Berkeley’s Minoo Moallem, and the University of Washington’s Arzoo Osanloo.
The symposium ended up being a primer on all that’s wrong with the field Middle East studies today. And in some respects, the results turned out to be more ridiculous than ominous. As I put it:
A paranoid fixation on imagined American and Israeli “empire"; the refusal to accept legitimate criticism; an insulated, elitist worldview; an inability to employ clear, jargon-free English; and a self-defeating hostility towards the West: these vices and more were made clear at “The State of Middle East Studies: Knowledge Production in an Age of Empire.”
To read the rest, click here or go to Campus Watch Research.
