The Politics of Middle East Politics

The Middle East field is in a crisis within the broader discipline of political science. A review of major departments of political science reveals surprisingly few that have full professors with the politics of the Middle East as their primary research focus. This lacuna exists at such universities as Harvard, Yale, Michigan, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Chicago, Ohio State, Emory, Brown, Dartmouth, North Carolina, Rice, Pittsburgh, Brandeis, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. Some of these departments have no Middle East faculty at all, others have denied tenure to deserving junior faculty, while still others have an interest in the region but claim to lack resources to make the necessary appointments. The situation is clearly better at institutions such as Columbia, NYU, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Johns Hopkins SAIS, Indiana, UCLA, Texas, Princeton, Georgetown, George Washington, Rutgers, and a few others. Nonetheless, there are problems here too. Some faculty are administrators and do not teach a full load. Others may be nearing retirement and are concerned that they will not be replaced by a scholar who also specializes in the Middle East. Although we can disagree about particular institutions or individuals (e.g., Is so-and-so “really” a Middle East scholar?), it is evident that this field is in danger of being marginalized both in professional recognition by the discipline as a whole, and in political science departments that may appreciate having Middle East politics courses on the books, but not the scholarship of the course instructor. Disregard for the Middle East field can be attributed to an array of political and disciplinary factors with which most of us are familiar. And one could reasonably expand the problem to include all area studies.