As The Harvard Crimson reported toward the end of last month, the director and associate director of Harvard University’s interdisciplinary Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) were summarily ousted from their positions midterm. Cemal Kafadar, a scholar of the Ottoman Empire and member of Harvard’s Turkish-studies department, and Rosie Bsheer, a historian of Saudi Arabia, were dismissed by interim social-science dean David M. Cutler, an economist. Why?
No one’s saying. Some events at the center had drawn criticism, including from former Harvard president Larry Summers, who accused a panel on Israel’s war in Lebanon of antisemitism. Summers also suggested that Derek Penslar, a Harvard historian of Jewish history, ought not to remain co-chair of Harvard’s antisemitism task force unless he severed ties with CMES. According to The Crimson, the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors alleges that in conversations with faculty members, Cutler explained the firing of Kafadar and Bsheer by citing the Lebanon panel as well as another panel, “Attacks on Children in Gaza.” (Cutler rejects this characterization, according to a spokesperson: “David Cutler, Interim Dean of Social Science, disputes the characterization of his conversations with CMES faculty leadership, including the claim that two recent CMES events were ‘singled out’ as problematic. Dean Cutler raised the issue of ensuring more voices are heard in the study of the Middle East. He explicitly disputes any portrayal of him attempting to limit certain points of view.”) And in May of last year, a report issued by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Association (HJAA) accused CMES of disproportionately focusing on Israel and Palestine to the exclusion of other regional topics, a disproportion implicitly due to antisemitism. In a section of the report subtitled “Harvard, Through Its Curriculum and Faculty, Planted and Spread the Seeds of Hate Well Before October 7,” the HJAA offered this bill of ill health:
- Last school year (2022-23), close to 20% of CMES events (10 of 56) addressed the Israeli/Palestinian conflict — the same number of CMES events on Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt combined. During the same period, CMES held no events on the genocide in Sudan.
- CMES gave equal focus to only one other topic: the Ottoman Empire (which lasted 600 years and spanned Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa).
- In 2015, the bloodiest year of the Syrian civil war when 110,000 people were killed, CMES held only 3 Syrian-focused events.
- From October 7, 2023 to April 2024, CMES sponsored 17 events on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, 25% of all of its events.
Moreover, “after October 7th, CMES joined a collaboration of other universities and Birzeit University to organize fourteen ‘teach-in’ sessions to put ‘Gaza in context’"; CMES has announced that ‘Palestine’ will be one of its two themes for its 2024 - 2025 visiting research program"; and “CMES also has an office in Tunisia.” (Why a Center for Middle Eastern Studies shouldn’t have an office in Tunisia goes unstated.)
Criticisms like the HJAA’s were evidently behind Harvard dean of arts and sciences Hopi Hoekstra’s letter to all Harvard center heads asking them to consider the “goals of diversity of and exposure to different ideas, perspectives and topics” when planning programming, as Vimal Patel reported in The New York Times. Given the Trump administration’s pressure on Harvard — last week, it conditioned $9 billion of federal funding on a series of demands including “oversight and accountability for biased programs that fuel antisemitism” — it is reasonable to suppose that changing the leadership of CMES was meant to send a signal of compliance to the government. Certainly that’s what the political scientist Irvin Cemil Schick assumed in a letter he sent to Cutler expressing disappointment that Harvard lacked “the moral courage to rise above the threats emanating from Washington.”
In his response to Schick, Cutler denies that the change in leadership is a response to federal pressure. It is instead an action meant:
to expand the ability of all voices to participate in discussion. We have University-wide as well as School-specific leadership on this, and we are committed to following through. Third, I caution you against assuming that any action taken by Harvard is because of “threats emanating from Washington.” Of course, all of higher education is under threat from the current administration. But that does not mean that Harvard’s actions are driven by any real or perceived threat.
I asked Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art history at the University of Michigan, what she made of Kafadar’s abrupt ouster. She called Kafadar “a true scholar’s scholar” who avoids “political wrangling both in the USA and in his native Turkey.” But, “ironically enough,” his being removed from the leadership of CMES has given rhetorical ammunition to some Islamists who want “to claim him as a hero for their cause. This double-bind caused by Harvard’s upper echelons is simply unconscionable.”
