With No Easy Fixes for Middle East Studies, It’s Time for New Programs

As an undergraduate at Duke University over 40 years ago, I took advantage of a major that no longer exists—Comparative Area Studies—to focus on history, religion, and politics in the Middle East and South Asia. In essence, I created my own personal course of study in “Arab and Islamic Studies.” My class on U.S. Middle East policy was taught by a smart, practical, problem-solving army veteran who had served on the State Department Policy Planning Staff and in its Bureau of Intelligence and Research. My year-long seminar on Mughal history was taught by a brilliant, self-effacing scholar after whom the American Historical Association later named an annual prize in South Asian history. My first Arabic instructor regrettably became a vocal BDS advocate but that was many years after I left Durham; when I was there, she kept politics out of the classroom.

My collegiate years coincided with a tumultuous period in America’s engagement in the Middle East. This included the Iranian revolution and the ensuing hostage crisis that gripped the nation as well as the immediate post-Camp David era, when Israel’s Menachem Begin butted heads with both a Democratic and a Republican president. But despite a heated political context, my education was undisturbed by the region’s turmoil. I may have suffered through the worst two seasons of Mike Krzyzewski’s coaching career, but no one on campus blamed either the Zionist entity or a murky Jewish conspiracy for the Blue Devils’ going a combined 21-34 my junior and senior years.

Forty years after my graduation, Duke got fairly high marks for navigating the post-October 7 campus upheaval, but many peer schools failed, some abysmally so. Here, I am not just talking about the ugly violence and uglier anti-Semitism that rocked schools from UCLA to Columbia. I am talking about the debasement of the classroom itself at numerous supposedly elite universities.