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For Middle East Studies the Iran War tests whether its collective judgment beats Washington’s. The Middle East Scholar Barometer happened to be in the field from February 19 to March 11, so a third of its responses came in after the shooting started. Five percent of the scholars polled supported launching the war. One percent thought a broad assault would produce a pro-American democratic government in Tehran. Ninety-four percent had already concluded that the administration’s approach made war likelier. Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami, who run the survey, argue in Foreign Policy that the academics read the cohesion of the Iranian regime and its willingness to absorb costs and hit back better than the policymakers did. Zachary Lockman at NYU makes the same point about the shape of the surprise: American officials appear startled by Iran’s reaction, and anyone who knows the country could have told them what was coming.
In September 2025 the Education Department sent non-continuation notices to every Title VI international education grantee, calling the grants inconsistent with administration priorities, and moved the $86 million to a one-time investment in historically Black colleges and universities. Congress partially restored the money in its most recent budget, but the retrenchment had already started: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill began dismantling its six area studies centers in December, and the University of Texas at Austin folded some of its area studies departments together in February. Osamah Khalil at Syracuse describes Title VI as a sourdough starter, roughly ten percent of area studies funding, with universities supplying the rest. Lockman’s read on why nobody defended the centers: institutions are in austerity, under attack, and want to stay invisible, so funding people the Education Department treats as enemies looks unwise to them.
So the field was right on the Iran War and got defunded in the same year. Anyone who assumes that predictive accuracy buys institutional security should sit with that.
Now the live questions, ranked by how much status they currently generate.
First, what political order exists between the river and the sea. This is where the field’s center of gravity sits, and the Barometer records the vocabulary hardening: the share of scholars describing Israeli actions as genocide rose from 46 percent to 54 percent in one year, with another 32 percent calling them major war crimes akin to genocide, and the share describing the current situation as a one-state reality akin to apartheid rose from 62 to 68 percent. On the postwar arrangements, three-quarters expect the Trump Board of Peace to make a two-state outcome less likely and four in five expect it to raise the odds of Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Sherene Seikaly is the strongest question-framer in this territory because she puts Palestine inside global histories of capital, race, and medicine. What has lost standing is the peace-process specialist who treats two symmetrical national movements as needing better mediation.
Second, how authoritarian orders reproduce themselves. Lisa Wedeen remains the most respected asker here, and the reason is the shape of her question: why do people publicly repeat claims they privately disbelieve, and how do ambiguity and performance do the work of rule. Asef Bayat holds status for social nonmovements, the idea that dispersed ordinary activity changes social life without capturing the state. Both frameworks now get applied to Iran under bombardment, which no one designed them for.
Third, whether “the Middle East” is the right unit. Laleh Khalili converted ports, shipping, oil, and maritime labor into political institutions, and the Strait of Hormuz closures have made that a policy question as well as a scholarly one. Arang Keshavarzian at NYU is the clearest recent gainer: his Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East took the 2025 Roger Owen Book Award. Timothy Mitchell at Columbia remains the single most portable question-framer across the field, with technopolitics, expertise, and carbon democracy traveling far outside area studies. His status is consolidated.
Fourth, what replaces rentier-state theory. Sovereign wealth, migrant labor, logistics, megaprojects, energy transition, and the political consequences of all four. Kevan Harris at UCLA is the model answer-builder here, using welfare institutions and survey data to explain Iranian durability, which the war has just made the most consequential empirical question in the field.
Fifth, how research survives when archives burn, field sites close, and visas vanish. This is methodological and existential at once. Oral history, family archives, remote and collaborative work, and explicit positionality all gain. Narges Bajoghli at Johns Hopkins SAIS bridges the framing and the answering on Iran.
Sixth, race, slavery, empire, and migration inside the region’s own history. The prize record makes this the strongest upward movement in the discipline.
Look at what MESA honored in 2025: Choon Hwee Koh at UCLA for The Sublime Post, on the Ottoman imperial post; Stacy Fahrenthold at UC Davis for Unmentionables, on Syrian American garment labor; Susanna Ferguson at Smith for Labors of Love, on gender and capitalism in modern Arab thought. The political economy prize went to Keshavarzian, with honorable mentions to Nora Barakat at Stanford for Bedouin Bureaucrats and Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky at UCSB for Empire of Refugees. Communications, textiles, land tenure, refugee administration. Almost nothing about the present war.
The field runs on two clocks. Prizes reward archival monographs conceived eight years ago, which means the honors list reflects the safe center of the discipline. The podium, the journal front matter, and the panel titles reflect the present. A young scholar reading these incentives correctly writes transregional history of mobility and paperwork before 1948, gets a Stanford University Press book and a prize, and speaks about Gaza and Iran in venues that do not go on the tenure file. That is a rational response to risk, and it will shape the field’s output for a decade.
There are concept-makers, whose vocabulary other people borrow: Mitchell, Wedeen, Bayat, Khalili, Seikaly, Ussama Makdisi on sectarianism. There are evidence-builders, who construct the surveys and comparative datasets that let you adjudicate: Amaney Jamal and the Arab Barometer, Melani Cammett on welfare and coexistence, Harris on Iranian class structure, Marwa Daoudy on climate policy and vulnerability. And there are conveners, who decide which questions become visible.
The third position has appreciated the most. When asking a question carries professional and legal risk, the person who controls the venue holds more power than the person with the better theory. Lynch can make a question visible to a subfield through POMEPS workshops and volumes. Lara Deeb at Scripps and Heather Ferguson at Claremont McKenna edit IJMES, which sets the terms for the humanities and interdisciplinary core. Seikaly holds editorial position at the Journal of Palestine Studies. MESA’s leadership under Aslı Bâli built an institutional apparatus for academic freedom. Editorial and convening power is cheap to run, survives funding cuts, and does not depend on a dean. Departmental prestige is the weakening currency here, because departments are where money gets lost while journals and networks are where status gets made.
Princeton Near Eastern Studies remains the traditional apex on language depth and archival training. Columbia MESAAS remains the concept apex, and its institutional position tells the real story. Federal officials demanded academic receivership for MESAAS as a precondition for negotiating the return of research funding, and the final deal softened that to a review of regional studies starting with the Middle East. Columbia paid $200 million and promised the review. In February 2026 a provost’s committee recommended new courses that should complement MESAAS while remaining clearly differentiated from it, in the social sciences rather than the department’s humanistic, language-based, transregional approach, alongside hiring in economics, history, and political science. MESAAS chair Gil Z. Hochberg says she took no part in those conversations. She also says nothing was imposed on the department and its academic autonomy was respectfully preserved.
The pressure built a second Middle East studies alongside the first, with its own money, its own hires, and its own faculty, and left the original in place with its autonomy and none of the growth. One university, two fields, no conversation between them. I expect that pattern to spread, because it satisfies the government, the donors, and the AAUP chapter simultaneously by giving each of them something different to point at.
Moving up institutionally: NYU on political economy and the Gulf, UCLA on the strength of Koh and Harris together, GW and POMEPS as the political science network, Georgetown CCAS on the policy-facing questions, LSE’s Middle East Centre and Exeter on Gulf political economy and logistics. Moving down: Harvard’s CMES, and every freestanding area studies center at a public university looking at its budget line.
External closure runs through money, immigration status, and litigation, and it is enforceable. MESA’s Academic Freedom Initiative, funded by Mellon, published its first report on the use of civil rights law to repress campus speech on Palestine and has been building datasets toward a public site. Internal closure runs through the cost of framing. It bans nothing and shapes everything, because a scholar who wants to argue that Islamist doctrine carries independent causal force, or that Israeli security calculations sometimes explain policy better than settler-colonial theory does, or that Gulf monarchies are adaptive, has to spend a chapter establishing standing before making the argument.
The freshest number in this area is the one nobody has written up. Self-censorship on Israel and Palestine has been stable and enormous for two years: 77 percent in the latest round, with 81 percent of those most worried about criticizing Israel, against 11 percent worried about criticizing Palestinians and 6 percent about criticizing American policy. Lynch and Telhami added an Iran question this year to establish a baseline. Before the war, 17 percent said they self-censored on Iran. After it began, that doubled to 33 percent overall and 40 percent in the United States. A second closed topic opening inside four weeks, measured as it happened. If you want one thing to watch in this discipline, watch whether that number keeps climbing, because it shows closure as a process, and it separates the effect of war from the effect of any particular coalition’s preferences.
Funding. Federal language-and-area money went away and came partly back into institutions that had already cut. Two philanthropic streams are growing, and both have positions on the field’s central controversy. The Education Department launched a foreign gift reporting portal in January 2026 under Section 117, and Qatar tops the list of donor countries, though most of that money went to institutions with branch campuses in Doha. The administration has paired the portal with a compliance crackdown framed as national security. On the other side, donor money is building new capacity fast: the Koum Family Foundation endowed a permanent Israel studies program at Stanford after a three-year pilot, NYU launched an antisemitism center with a seven-figure gift and Emory is planning a policy institute under Deborah Lipstadt, and a Contemporary Antisemitism Studies Association launched at the University of Haifa this month with founders from Gratz College and the London Centre.
The result is a field whose material base now consists of two rival philanthropies and a hostile federal government, with its most secure new research program being the study of its own repression. Both sides of the argument claim persecution, both can document some of it, and that is the one topic on which money is available from every direction.
The Sovietologists Got There First: What a Dead Field Tells Us About the One Being Defunded Now
Everything happening to Middle East Studies has happened before, in the same order, to a field that is now gone. Federal money built it for national security reasons. Both political camps accused it of serving the other side. Its funding was cut while officials explained that the knowledge it produced no longer served American interests. Then a crisis arrived, the government discovered it had no bench, and the recriminations ran in every direction at once.
That field was Soviet studies. The record is archival and checkable. It also has the merit of insulting everyone.
How the field was built
David Engerman’s history of American Soviet expertise opens on a striking fact. In 1948, with the Cold War underway, the United States government employed roughly a dozen Russian speakers.
What followed was one of the fastest state-sponsored knowledge projects in American history. The Rockefeller Foundation seeded Columbia’s Russian Institute in 1946. Carnegie funded Harvard’s Russian Research Center in 1948. The Ford Foundation joined in the mid-1950s at far larger scale. The Air Force paid for work at RAND. The CIA used academic research to supplement its own. After Sputnik in 1957, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act and put federal money into area studies and language training, which later moved into Title VI of the Higher Education Act.
Engerman’s summary of what the field was built to do is worth keeping in mind, because Middle East centers were built on the same premise. Russian and Soviet studies was designed to serve, in his phrase, both Mars and Minerva, both the national security state and academic life. That double loyalty was the point. It was also the fault line.
Both camps attacked it, and both had evidence
By the 1960s the field faced accusations from opposite directions.
Cold warriors held that Sovietology had gone soft, that its practitioners had talked themselves into treating the Soviet system as a normal state with normal interests, and that the revisionist historians who challenged the standard account of 1917 were performing apologetics in scholarly dress. Richard Pipes (1923-2018) built a career on that charge and got his chance to press it in 1976, when a review panel including academic Soviet specialists was convened to attack the CIA’s own estimate of Soviet strategic capability as too complacent.
From the other side came the argument that the field was bought. Its centers had been founded with intelligence money and foundation money that answered to the same policy establishment. Its scholars moved between universities and government. Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928-2017) went from Columbia to the National Security Council. On this account the field could not produce honest knowledge about the Soviet Union because it existed to supply an adversary’s profile to the people planning against it.
Both charges had evidence behind them. That is the structural lesson, and it is the one that transfers. A field created by state money to answer state questions will be attacked from both directions, permanently, and neither attack will be baseless. Anyone in Middle East Studies who believes today’s crossfire is unprecedented, or that one side of it is manufactured, should read the Sovietology fights of 1968 to 1978 and notice how familiar the arguments sound.
The decline began long before the crisis
Soviet studies did not collapse in 1991 when its subject disappeared. Engerman dates the decline to the early 1970s. Détente lowered the sense of urgency. The American economy slumped and research money tightened. Government and foundation patrons began demanding more immediate policy relevance from the scholars they funded. The academic job market for Russianists stagnated. Senior figures retired or died without training successors into the positions they vacated. Lower-level government demand for expertise was satisfied by master’s degrees.
By the time the Soviet Union fell, the field had already been shrinking for twenty years. The collapse of its subject finished something that funding and demography had started.
Set that beside the Middle East Studies numbers. Enrollment in Arabic fell 35 percent between 2009 and 2021. Doctoral production at Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies fell from 33 PhDs in the 2000 through 2006 cohort to 17 in 2017 through 2021. Direct entry into tenure-track jobs from that department went from 45.5 percent to 5.9 percent across the same span. All of that predates the funding terminations of 2025. Anyone telling the story as a sudden political attack on a healthy field is telling it wrong in the same way the 1991 story was told wrong.
The reckoning, and who got blamed
After 1991 came the question, put in the tone of an indictment: how did the Soviet experts miss it?
Plenty of specialists had documented economic stagnation, nationalities problems, and legitimacy deficits, and no serious forecasting method available in 1985 would have produced a date. But the recriminations did not wait for that argument. Engerman’s account has the field’s remaining scholars, already diminished in prestige, absorbed back into the disciplines they came from while the blame circulated.
A field built to serve national security is judged by whether it predicted the single event the security state cared about. If it did not, the earlier decades of language training, archival work, and institutional knowledge count for nothing in the verdict.
Middle East Studies is going to face the same test, and the Iran war of 2026 is the exam. The Middle East Scholar Barometer polled specialists in the days around the February 28 attacks. Five percent supported launching the war. One percent thought a broad assault would produce a pro-American democratic government in Tehran. Ninety-four percent had already concluded that the administration’s approach made war likelier. If the war ends the way those numbers imply, the field will have a claim on vindication that Sovietology never had. Whether that claim converts into money or standing is a separate question, and the Soviet precedent says it will not.
The natural experiment nobody talks about
In 1983 Congress passed the Soviet-Eastern European Research and Training Act, known as Title VIII, and declared in the statute that verified factual knowledge of that region was of the utmost importance to the national security of the United States. The program funded dissertation fellowships, language training, and briefings for embassy staff heading to posts in the region. Its alumni include Madeleine Albright (1937-2022), Condoleezza Rice (b. 1954), and Michael McFaul, who was ambassador to Russia while the program was being killed.
In fiscal 2013 the State Department withheld Title VIII funding. The program’s budget that year was about $3.5 million. Over the same period Title VI money was nearly halved from its 2010 level, leaving regional studies programs across all American universities sharing under $70 million, which one observer at the time compared to the annual cost of running the athletic department at a single large public university.
Russia annexed Crimea the following year. By 2016 the Pentagon had reclassified Russia as a top national security threat and Washington was holding public discussions about its shortage of Russia experts. In 2022 came the full invasion of Ukraine. A 2023 assessment by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies found that 44 percent of surveyed scholars had abandoned or suspended research projects, 36 percent had shifted their interests away from Russia, and 65 percent expected the war to reduce the inflow of Russia-focused doctoral students. Russia banned the association outright. In 2025 and 2026, with a land war in Europe running, reporting describes the Wilson Center shuttered and Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships cut, prompting even wealthy universities to scale back Russia research.
Line the dates up and the proposition is testable. The United States defunded its Russia expertise pipeline in 2013, needed that expertise in 2014, needed far more of it in 2022, and cut deeper in 2025. Regional expertise takes decades to build and a budget cycle to destroy.
What the comparison denies to each side
To the field, it denies the victim account.
Sovietology failed to reproduce itself. Its senior figures did not replace themselves. Its job market decayed for twenty years while the field argued internally in a vocabulary that made its quarrels look, to anyone outside, like a private dispute over who was insufficiently critical of whom. It lost its patrons partly by making itself hard to explain to them. Middle East Studies is doing several of those things now, and the funding attack does not exempt it from the charge. A discipline whose honors go to Ottoman postal administration during a regional war may be doing excellent work, and it is also making a choice about legibility that has consequences it should own.
To the government, it denies the claim that defunding area expertise costs nothing.
The 2025 letters terminating Title VI grants called them inconsistent with administration priorities and said they do not advance American interests or values. The 1983 statute killed in 2013 said the opposite about the same category of knowledge, in law, on national security grounds. One of those two judgments has been tested against events. Whatever one thinks of what Middle East scholars believe about Israel and Palestine, the proposition that a country improves its understanding of a region by dismantling the institutions that teach its languages has a track record, and the track record is bad.
The disanalogies
Soviet studies was never widely accused of disloyalty to the United States. It was accused of naivety and of servility, which are different charges from the one now aimed at Middle East scholars over Israel and Palestine. That accusation has more force in American politics than either Cold War charge had, and it comes with donors, litigation, and immigration consequences attached.
Second, Sovietology had a single adversary state whose collapse settled the scoreboard. Middle East Studies has no equivalent terminal event, which means no comparable moment of reckoning and also no comparable moment of vindication.
Third, Soviet studies had essentially one paymaster. The American government and a small set of American foundations supplied the money and set the terms. Middle East Studies has three: a hostile federal government, a domestic donor class building parallel institutions, and foreign states, with Qatar now the largest single foreign source of funding to American universities. A field with one patron faces capture. A field with three faces something else, and the Sovietology literature has no case to offer on it.
What to do with this
The comparison suggests going to the archives.
Engerman documented the pathway from patron money to research question in Soviet studies: which topics attracted funding, which languages got taught, which questions became careers, and how those shifted as the patrons’ interests shifted. The same pathway can be documented for Middle East Studies, and the documents are public. Title VI grant awards by center and year are federal records. Foreign gift disclosures over $250,000 now sit in a searchable Education Department portal. Dissertation titles, job advertisements, and placement records are on department pages and in archived job boards. Put them on one timeline and you can ask whether money moved questions, in which direction, and with what lag.
That study cuts against everyone. It denies the field the claim that its research agenda is independent of who pays. It denies the field’s critics the claim that defunding produces better knowledge. And it is legible to people who will never read a word about settler colonialism, because it consists of dates, dollars, and counts.
The Sovietologists left a full record of how a field of this kind rises, quarrels, shrinks, gets blamed, and dissolves. Middle East Studies is somewhere in the middle of that sequence. Nobody has laid the two timelines side by side and checked which stage we are at.
Sources
David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford, 2009), and the H-Diplo roundtable on it
Soviet-Eastern European Research and Training Act of 1983, 22 U.S.C. 4501-4508, and the FY2013 Title VIII decision
Title VI reductions and comparison figures
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, The State of Russian Studies in the United States: 2022 (2023)
Carnegie Corporation on the post-2022 crisis in Russian studies
Area studies funding terminations of 2025 and the partial restoration
Middle East Scholar Barometer on the Iran war
Princeton Near Eastern Studies first positions
Nobody Lost at Columbia: Andrew Abbott’s sociology of professions explains an outcome that both sides have misread
In February 2026, a Columbia provost’s committee recommended that the university add Middle East courses in the social sciences, and specified that these should complement the existing department. Hiring would follow in economics, history, and political science. The chair of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies said she took no part in those conversations, that nothing was imposed on her department, and that its academic autonomy was preserved.
Read that as a defeat for the department and you cannot explain the chair’s statement. Read it as a victory and you cannot explain where the money went. Both readings assume a fight with a winner. Andrew Abbott has spent forty years arguing that academic conflicts almost never work that way, and his vocabulary makes the Columbia outcome not just legible but predictable, including what happens to it next.
Three kinds of turf
Abbott’s The System of Professions treats expert work as an ecology: a set of actors, a set of locations, and the process that constitutes both by linking them. Professions do not grow on their own timetable toward their own maturity. They take and lose control of areas of work, and every gain by one opens or closes something for a neighbor.
The crucial move for our purposes comes in his 2005 article on linked ecologies, where he distinguishes three kinds of location. Professions hold jurisdictions, and jurisdiction takes exclusive control as its model: to be the surgeon is to not be the barber. Universities have something looser, which Abbott calls settlements. A settlement can be a faculty, a major, a set of courses, a body of controlled knowledge, or any combination of those. Settlements lack the exclusive character of jurisdictions, and interdisciplinarity is a standing ideal precisely because overlap is normal. Politics has something looser still, which he calls bundles: sets of issues, decisions, and outcomes tied together by action rather than by necessity, and rebundled constantly.
The three differ in how long they last. Jurisdictions are stable for long periods. Settlements turn over faster. Political bundles turn over fastest of all, and Abbott’s example is deregulation, which moved from populist left politics to conservative staple inside a decade.
Hold those three next to the Columbia sequence and it resolves.
What the government asked for, and what the university ecology could give
Federal officials initially demanded academic receivership for the department as a precondition for negotiating the return of research funding. Receivership is a jurisdictional demand. It asks for exclusive control of a location by an actor from outside the department.
That demand failed, and the university produced something else: a review, then a recommendation for a differentiated parallel settlement. This looks like a compromise and is better understood as a translation. The university ecology does not have jurisdictions to hand over. It has settlements, which overlap by design. Asked for exclusive control, the institution supplied the only currency it holds, which is another settlement next door.
Abbott supplies the reason this worked. Administrators, he writes, bend the whole ecology, because the dimensions along which disciplines and professions cut up knowledge, intellectual dimensions first of all, are not important to administrators, who would rather constitute settlements around types of students, types of resources, or types of education. In the university ecology, he adds, the audiences may be merging into the ecology as actors.
That describes Columbia in February 2026 precisely. The provost’s committee did not adjudicate whether settler-colonial analysis or security studies better explains the West Bank. It cut the settlement on a different axis entirely: disciplinary location, course inventory, and new lines. The humanists keep the department, the language requirements, and the doctoral program. The social scientists get the growth. The administration gets to tell three audiences three different true things.
The hinge
Why did differentiation succeed where receivership failed? Abbott’s answer is that a strategy has to work in two ecologies at once, and he calls such a strategy a hinge. A hinge pays different rewards in each ecology, and it can be a fundamentally different type of thing in the two. His formulation is that what is a location in one ecology can be a quality of ligation in another. Medical licensing was a property of ligation for doctors, meaning exclusivity, and a policy, meaning a location, for politicians.
Differentiation at Columbia has that structure exactly. For the political ecology it is a location, an item in a bundle, something an official can point at as curricular reform secured under pressure, useful against his own competitors. For the university ecology it is a quality of ligation, the degree of exclusivity between two adjacent settlements. Because it is a different kind of object on each side, both sides can bank it without either conceding the other’s account of what happened.
Receivership would have required administrators to install themselves as intellectual arbiters, which is a dimension they do not work on, and it would have given the political ecology a prize with no institutional form to hold it. Abbott’s English licensing case is the parallel: a proposal that succeeded in the political ecology and died in the professional one because no version of it paid off in both.
What happens to the new settlement
Abbott’s second concept is the avatar, an attempt to institutionalize in one ecology a copy or colony of an actor from another. The new social-science Middle East settlement is an avatar in that sense, planted in the university ecology under pressure from the political one.
His four case studies of avatars all reach the same conclusion, and it is a conclusion with teeth: the internal competitive forces of the host ecology capture the avatar and drive it somewhere nobody intended. There is no way to build a perfect hinge.
Criminology is the closest case. College faculty training policemen organized themselves in 1941, renamed their group the Society for the Advancement of Criminology in 1947, and renamed it the American Society of Criminology in 1957. Heartland social scientists then took the society over. A heartland academic was president by 1953, and nearly every president since 1963 has been one. The practice side had to start again, founding a new association in 1963. Abbott’s summary of the pattern is academicizing, followed by capture from the academic side, followed by fresh academicizing from the practice side. He notes a second force behind the capture: substantive specialization gave heartland academics shelter from competition in their own crowded disciplines.
Apply that to Columbia. The new lines will be filled by people hired, tenured, and promoted on political science, economics, and history standards. Their reference group will be their disciplines, and their outlets will be disciplinary journals. Within a decade the Middle East will function for some of them as what it has long been for heartland criminologists studying crime, which is a substantive shelter from the crowded center of a discipline. The avatar will be captured by the discipline rather than by the patron who paid for it.
Anyone who expects those positions to produce reliably policy-friendly or reliably donor-friendly scholarship is expecting something the ecology has not produced in any documented case. Anyone in the department who expects the new settlement to fail is expecting something equally unlikely, since undergraduate demand and disciplinary prestige are both on its side.
The second movement
Abbott’s ecology is interdependent: every jurisdictional event for one actor leads adjacent actors into new openings or new defeats. The corollary for area studies is that whenever the state wants forecasts, political science acquires an opening.
The Iran war of 2026 created that demand. Notice which instrument met it. The Middle East Scholar Barometer, fielded in the days around the February 28 attacks, established that 5 percent of specialists supported the war, 1 percent expected a broad assault to produce a pro-American democratic government in Tehran, and 94 percent had already judged the administration’s approach to make war likelier. That is the strongest claim to vindication the field has, and it is a survey instrument, run by political scientists, through a political science network, and published in a foreign policy magazine.
Abbott’s framework says that claims to jurisdiction are ratified by audiences, and that the audiences supply their own reasons. Area studies claims interpretive depth from language and long residence. Political science claims method and measurement. When the state wants to know who was right about a war, it recognizes the claim made in the currency it already accepts. The field’s finest hour is being scored in the discipline’s units, which is a jurisdictional event whether or not anyone in either camp describes it that way.
Four things this predicts that can be checked
The virtue of applying Abbott here is that it produces forecasts.
The new Columbia social-science hires will come predominantly from disciplinary doctoral programs rather than from area-studies departments, and will publish predominantly in disciplinary journals. Doctoral origin and publication venue are both public.
The new settlement will run far more contemporary than the old one. The first measurement already exists in crude form: among recent Columbia dissertations on the Middle East and North Africa that classify cleanly against 1948, 4 of 14 are post-1948, against 3 of 69 for Princeton’s and Chicago’s traditional departments. Those numbers are a settlement boundary showing up in the production record, and the gap should widen as the new lines fill.
The two settlements will differentiate by student type rather than only by subject, because that is the axis administrators prefer. Watch whether the new courses skew undergraduate while the department keeps the language requirements and the doctoral pipeline. Abbott’s typology of heartland, research-only, and undergraduate disciplines predicts the shape.
And the political sponsor will lose interest before the settlement does. Bundles rebundle fast; settlements do not. Within one or two administrations the officials who forced the review will have moved to other issues, while the new positions will be held by people whose careers depend on them. Abbott’s account of medical licensure ends on the observation that permanent licensing arrived once licensing had stopped being a politically useful controversy. The Columbia arrangement is likely to become permanent the same way, by ceasing to matter to the people who demanded it.
What the frame denies to each camp
To the department and its defenders, Abbott denies the wholesale-defeat story. Fields do not lose entire. They lose particular locations and hold others, and both statements about Columbia are true at once: the department kept its settlement and the growth went elsewhere. The chair’s statement about preserved autonomy is not spin. It is an accurate report of one half of a settlement.
To the department’s critics, Abbott denies the theory of action behind the whole exercise. You cannot obtain intellectual outcomes by rearranging settlements, because the people who rearrange settlements do not work on the intellectual axis, and because avatars get captured by their hosts. If the objective was different scholarship, the instrument chosen has a documented record of not producing it.
To everyone, the frame says the arrangement will last because nobody won. A settlement that gave either side exclusive control would have to be defended continuously. One that lets three parties each report something true costs nothing to maintain.
Ecological analysis stops working, Abbott argues, when ecologies lose their separation under an overwhelming number of linkages. His example is the post-Cold-War American military, enmeshed in so many ecologies at once that it cannot move in any direction, and best described by long recitations of interested parties rather than by competition over locations. In such congested, overdetermined zones, he says, ecological models are less useful.
Middle East Studies may be approaching that condition. A federal government terminating grants, a donor class building parallel institutions, foreign states funding branch campuses, litigation under civil rights law, immigration authorities acting against individuals, advocacy organizations on several sides, and trustees intervening in centers: that is a great many linkages for one small field. If the density has passed the threshold Abbott describes, the settlement at Columbia is less a negotiated outcome than a piece of debris, and the forecasts above will fail.
That is testable too. If the new settlement develops the way the criminology avatar developed, the ecology is still working. If it develops in no pattern at all, Abbott’s overdetermination warning has caught up with the field he never wrote about.
Eighty-Six Million Beats Six Billion: Why the Arguments About who Funds Middle East Studies are Counting the Wrong Thing
Two stories about money dominate the argument over Middle East Studies.
The first says that Gulf states have bought American scholarship on the Middle East. Qatar sits at the top of the foreign funding table in the Education Department’s new disclosure portal, with figures in the billions across two decades. The conclusion offered is that the scholarship follows.
The second says that the termination of federal area studies grants in September 2025 was a bookkeeping matter dressed up as an emergency. The Education Department sent non-continuation notices to every Title VI international education grantee and moved $86 million to a one-time investment in historically Black colleges. Osamah Khalil at Syracuse puts Title VI at roughly a tenth of area studies funding, with universities supplying the rest. If a tenth vanishes and nine tenths remain, the argument runs, the field is being dramatic.
Both arguments reason from volume. Volume is the wrong variable.
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald R. Salancik (1943-1996) published The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective on the premise that it is the organization’s dependence on its environment that makes external control of its behavior nearly inevitable.
Their contribution was to specify what makes dependence bite. Three determinants: the importance of the resource, the concentration of control over it, and the discretion the controller holds over its allocation and use.
The first of those has two dimensions. One is the relative magnitude of the exchange, meaning what share of total inputs it represents. The other is criticality, meaning whether the organization can continue functioning without it. These come apart. A supplier providing 2 percent of a manufacturer’s purchases holds enormous power if the item has one source and the line stops without it. A supplier providing 40 percent of purchases holds almost none if six competitors sell the same thing.
Concentration is the second determinant. Dependence requires the absence of alternatives. Money from one source that cannot be replaced constrains; money from a market does not.
Discretion is the third. It asks who decides where the resource goes and on what terms, and whether that decision can be made unilaterally.
Score the two funding stories on those three and they invert.
Title VI: small, critical, single-sourced, discretionary
Magnitude, roughly a tenth of area studies budgets. On volume alone, trivial.
Criticality is where it turns. Federal area studies money paid for Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships, instruction in less commonly taught languages, outreach coordinators, and library acquisition in scripts nobody else buys. Those are the inputs to a pipeline with a decade-long lead time. A student who begins Arabic as a sophomore reaches research competence in manuscripts eight or ten years later, and only if third-year and fourth-year instruction exists in the intervening years. No other buyer exists for fourth-year Uzbek. Losing that line does not reduce output proportionally. It stops a process that cannot be restarted quickly, which is the textbook definition of a critical resource of low magnitude.
Concentration: one source, the United States Department of Education, with no substitute in the market. Universities can raise money for a chair. They do not raise money for the fifth student in a Persian class.
Discretion: total, and demonstrated. The notices arrived as a unilateral judgment that the grants were inconsistent with administration priorities.
Low magnitude, high criticality, single source, unlimited discretion. On Pfeffer and Salancik’s criteria that is close to the maximum-dependence case, and the field’s behavior since has followed the theory rather than the dollar totals. The University of North Carolina began dismantling six area studies centers in December 2025. The University of Texas at Austin folded some area studies departments together in February. Congress partially restored the money, and the retrenchment had already happened.
Resource dependence also explains the part of this that has puzzled people, which is the silence of the universities.
Zachary Lockman at New York University put it in terms of institutional self-protection: universities are in austerity, under attack, and want to stay invisible, so defending people the Education Department treats as enemies looks unwise.
Dependence is a property of a specific organization, and the two organizations here had opposite exposures. For the area studies center, Title VI was critical and unsubstitutable. For the university, it was a rounding error against research budgets in the billions. An actor with no dependence has no incentive to bear costs on behalf of an actor with total dependence. The center could not defend itself because it controlled nothing the university needed, and the university would not defend the center because it was not exposed to the loss.
That asymmetry, not cowardice and not ideology, is the whole story of December 2025 at Chapel Hill. It also predicts where the next cuts land: at every unit whose funding is concentrated in one external source that the parent institution does not need.
Gulf money: large, peripheral, replaceable, contractual
Now run the other case.
Magnitude: very large, the largest single foreign source in the disclosure records.
Criticality to the intellectual core: low, and the disclosure data show why. Most of the Qatari money went to institutions operating branch campuses in Doha. That money buys the operation of satellite campuses, which is a service contract. Close the Doha campus tomorrow and Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies doctoral program, Chicago’s language training, and Columbia’s dissertation production continue without interruption. None of them depends on it.
Concentration: low. A branch campus is a business line. Universities entered them for revenue and prestige and have exited them before. The alternative to Gulf operating revenue is a smaller international portfolio.
Discretion: constrained by contract and now by disclosure. Specific gifts for named purposes, filed in a public portal, are the least discretionary form the money can take.
High magnitude, low criticality to the core, substitutable, low discretion. On the theory’s own criteria, the constraint should be weak where the volume is largest.
None of that means Gulf states hold no leverage over what gets written about the Gulf. It means the leverage does not run through the money.
What resource does a scholar of Saudi Arabia or the Emirates need, that has one supplier, that cannot be replaced, and whose allocation is entirely at the supplier’s discretion?
Access. A research visa, permission to conduct interviews, entry to an archive, and the safety of local interlocutors are all controlled by a single actor with unlimited discretion and no alternative supplier. A scholar who loses a grant applies elsewhere. A scholar who loses the country loses the research program, the next book, and the case for tenure.
If access is the binding dependence, the literature should show a hole matching the sponsor’s sensitivities, regardless of who funds the department. Work on Gulf finance, energy transition, and macroeconomic policy should be plentiful, because it can be done from published sources and does not require asking anyone awkward questions inside the country. Work on labor conditions, migrant recruitment, prisons, policing, and domestic dissent should be thinner, and the strongest examples of it should come disproportionately from scholars outside the access system, working from ports, shipping records, court filings, labor recruitment chains, and diaspora interviews.
Laleh Khalili’s work on maritime labor and logistics is the obvious case. It is done from Britain and built on infrastructure and documentary sources.
In the American case, what is the critical, concentrated, high-discretion resource for an untenured scholar working on Israel and Palestine? It is institutional protection during a controversy: the decision whether her department chair, dean, and provost stand behind her when a complaint arrives. One supplier, no alternative, complete discretion. That predicts the Barometer’s self-censorship numbers, including the 98 percent figure among assistant professors in 2023.
Pfeffer and Salancik spend much of the book on responses. Organizations diversify sources, co-opt the people who control them, and act to change the environment.
Every current move in this field fits one of those categories.
The Middle East Studies Association took Mellon Foundation money to build an academic freedom initiative and a database of pressure on scholars. That is diversification, and a shrewd version of it. The association replaced a hostile patron with a philanthropic one, on the one subject where every faction claims injury, which makes the new dependence unusually safe.
Donors are building parallel institutions. The Koum Family Foundation endowed a permanent Israel studies program at Stanford after a pilot. New York University launched an antisemitism center. A Contemporary Antisemitism Studies Association launched at Haifa in July 2026. In the theory’s terms this is the creation of new organizations whose dependence runs to the donor from the start, which is far easier than acquiring influence over an organization whose dependence runs elsewhere.
Trustee interventions in centers, and the demand for oversight of departments, are co-optation attempts running in the opposite direction: efforts to place the controller inside the organization’s governance. Pfeffer and Salancik would predict these succeed at controlling budget and structure and fail at controlling content, because the resources that determine what a scholar writes, meaning peer review, disciplinary reputation, and job market standing, are supplied by neither trustees nor donors.
Anyone arguing that Qatari volume determines American scholarship has to explain why a small concentrated grant bites and a large peripheral contract does not. The mechanism has to run through something, and it cannot run through operating revenue for a campus in another country that the home department does not use.
Anyone arguing that the Title VI termination was trivial has the same problem in reverse. If a tenth of the money is negligible, explain the six centers closed at Chapel Hill in a single month. Explain why the State Department’s decision to withhold $3.5 million from the Title VIII Russia program in fiscal 2013 preceded a documented shortage of Russia expertise by 2016, and a worse one by 2022, when the country needed it.
Both objections dissolve the same way. Constraint tracks criticality and concentration.
The virtue of this frame is that its predictions are countable, and three of the four data streams are already public.
If criticality runs through the language pipeline, the first observable effect of the 2025 terminations appears in enrollment in third-year and fourth-year less commonly taught languages, then in dissertations requiring archival language competence, with a lag of years. It does not appear in the political content of published work. Anyone expecting the cuts to change what the field argues has misread what the money bought.
If concentration is what matters, the closures should cluster at institutions where area studies funding was most concentrated in Title VI and least supplemented from other sources, independent of the political character of the programs. Grant awards by institution are federal records and the closures are public.
If access is the binding Gulf constraint, dissertations and books on the Gulf should divide by method rather than by funding source, with document-based and diaspora-based work carrying the sensitive topics and permission-based fieldwork carrying the safe ones. Titles and methods are codable from abstracts.
And if institutional protection is the binding domestic constraint, self-censorship should track contract security and institutional type rather than political position or department. That requires a survey question nobody has asked yet, and the people who run the Barometer are the ones who could ask it.
Criticality is the hard variable. Magnitude can be read off a ledger. Criticality is a judgment about whether operations can continue, and it is tempting to assign it after the fact to whatever turned out to matter.
Pfeffer and Salancik show the difficulty. Their empirical tests in the book used magnitude as the measure. They examined whether Israeli managers would sacrifice returns to invest in a government-designated development area, and whether American defense contractors complied with affirmative action requirements, and in both cases the correlate was the proportion of the firm’s sales that went to government. Proportion is volume. The theory says criticality should dominate, and the authors reached for the number they could get.
Anyone using the frame owes an operational definition, and three questions supply one. Is there another supplier of this input? How long would replacing it take? Does any activity stop without it? Fourth-year Persian instruction answers no, a decade, and yes. Operating revenue from a Doha campus answers yes, immediately, and no.
That is the whole argument. What it replaces is a decade of people shouting sums at each other.
Sources
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald R. Salancik, The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective (Harper and Row, 1978; Stanford Business Classics, 2003), on resource importance, concentration of control, discretion, and the management of dependence through diversification, co-optation, and political action.
Area studies funding terminations, the $86 million reallocation, the Chapel Hill and Austin closures, and the Khalil and Lockman comments
Title VIII and the Russia expertise sequence
Middle East Scholar Barometer on self-censorship
Nobody Knows What the Field Thinks
A survey that was already running when the war started produced the one number in this argument that behaves like evidence.
The Middle East Scholar Barometer went into the field on February 19, 2026. The United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28. The survey closed on March 11. This produced something the study of academic speech almost never gets: a measurement taken across a shock, using the same instrument, on the same population, weeks apart.
Before the war, 17 percent of respondents said they self-censored professionally on Iran. After it began, 33 percent did, and 40 percent among those based in the United States. The figure doubled inside four weeks.
Two bodies of theory speak to a number like that.
Timur Kuran’s Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, published in 1995, is built on preference falsification: the misrepresentation of one’s wants under perceived social pressure. Kuran models the choice as a tradeoff. A person weighs the intrinsic benefit of the outcome he favors, the reputational cost or benefit of being seen to favor it, and the expressive satisfaction of saying what he actually thinks. Each person has a threshold, meaning the level of visible opposition at which speaking becomes worth its price, and a society has a distribution of such thresholds.
Three consequences follow. Unpopular arrangements persist, because everyone underestimates how much company he has. Public discourse gets distorted, since the arguments available for use are only the sayable ones. And over time, private belief drifts toward public speech, because people learn what to think from what they hear, which means falsification can make a lie true in the next generation.
The famous implication is about surprise. Because thresholds are hidden, the same small shock produces nothing in one configuration and a cascade in another, and no observer can tell which he is looking at. Kuran applied this to Eastern Europe in 1989 in an article titled with the point: now out of never.
Lisa Wedeen’s Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria, from 1999, studies the personality cult around Hafiz al-Asad in Syria and starts from a question: Why would a regime spend scarce resources on claims that are obviously false, that nobody believes, and that the people producing them know to be absurd? Asad was praised as the country’s father, its gallant knight, its premier pharmacist.
Wedeen’s answer is that the cult produced what she calls a politics of public dissimulation, in which citizens acted as if they revered the leader. The compelled performance did the work: it enforced obedience, induced complicity, isolated Syrians from one another, and set the guidelines for what could be said. Elisabeth Wood’s summary of the argument is exact. Participation in regime rituals helped constitute the regime’s power by demonstrating mass conformity despite mass disbelief.
For Kuran, falsification works because others are deceived. The engine is misperception of the distribution of private views, which is also why cascades happen: people discover they were never alone.
For Wedeen, nobody in Syria was deceived. Everyone knew the cult was fiction and everyone knew that everyone knew. Power could not have been running through misperception, because there was none to run through. It ran through the performance, which demonstrated the regime’s capacity to compel and made each participant complicit in the demonstration.
Those look incompatible until you notice the third item on Wedeen’s list. The cult isolated Syrians from one another. Isolation is precisely the condition that produces misperception in Kuran’s model. Wedeen locates it as an effect of compelled performance; Kuran treats it as the mechanism sustaining the equilibrium. Read that way the two are sequential rather than opposed. Enforced public speech isolates, isolation breeds uncertainty about what others think, and that uncertainty is what makes the arrangement stable and its collapse unforecastable.
Kuran is an economist whose institutional account of Middle Eastern economic history is contested inside Middle East Studies, which makes his framework an awkward instrument to turn on the field’s own scholars.
In late 2023 the Barometer found 82 percent of United States respondents self-censoring on Israel and Palestine, with 98 percent among assistant professors. In the 2026 round, 77 percent reported self-censoring, and of those, 81 percent were most worried about criticizing Israel, against 11 percent about criticizing Palestinians and 6 percent about criticizing American policy.
On the field’s own report, the speech being withheld is criticism of Israel. Anyone reaching for Kuran to argue that Middle East scholars privately hold views friendlier to Israeli policy than they let on is contradicted by the only evidence available, which points the other way by a factor of seven.
If preference falsification is operating, then self-reports about its direction are themselves subject to it. A scholar who withholds a view has reason to withhold the reason. So the 81 to 11 split cannot fully settle the question it appears to settle, and no survey of self-reported silence ever can. What it can do is establish which direction the respondents are willing to name, and in a field routinely accused of the opposite, they name criticism of Israel. That is the fact on the table, and any use of Kuran here has to start from it.
On Iran, the direction is unknown.
The Iran figure doubled in four weeks. What nobody can say from the published data is which way the silence runs.
Read one: the silenced view is support for the strikes, or a harsher assessment of the Iranian regime than the field’s consensus permits. The Barometer established that consensus in the same round. Five percent of specialists supported launching the war. One percent expected a broad assault to produce a pro-American democratic government in Tehran. Ninety-four percent had already judged the administration’s approach to make war likelier. A scholar holding the minority position on a question that unanimous faces exactly the cost structure Kuran describes, and the pressure comes from inside the discipline.
Read two: the silenced view is opposition to the war, or criticism of American and Israeli conduct in it, withheld against external pressure. The 40 percent figure among United States respondents supports this reading, since exposure to American institutional and legal risk is what distinguishes that group from the rest.
Both readings fit the aggregate. They imply opposite things about where power sits in this field, and the difference matters more than anything else in the Barometer’s recent output. If Iran self-censorship runs inward against a disciplinary consensus, Kuran’s mechanism is operating inside the field, and the field’s own account of itself as a victim of outside pressure is incomplete. If it runs outward against government pressure, the Israel and Palestine story has simply extended to a second country, and the critics’ account of an internally enforced orthodoxy gains nothing.
The published data cannot distinguish them. One survey question could: ask which view respondents are withholding, and from whom. The Barometer already asks that about Israel and Palestine. It did not ask it about Iran, because the Iran item was added mid-crisis.
Kuran’s core claim is that thresholds are private, so the distribution is unobservable, so the response to any given shock cannot be known in advance. That is a claim about the limits of prediction. What it licenses is narrower and still substantial. An equilibrium sustained by falsification is more fragile than its stability suggests, because the stability is not evidence of agreement. Nobody knows the true distribution, including the people inside it, which means confident statements about what the field really believes are unfounded from every direction. And small changes in the cost of speaking can produce disproportionate effects, in a direction nobody picked.
There is one prediction with a date attached that follows from Kuran’s third mechanism. If public discourse shapes private belief over time, then a cohort that spent its entire training and probationary period inside a high-self-censorship environment will hold different views, having learned what to think from what was sayable. That is testable across cohorts, and it predicts that the effect shows up most strongly among people who entered graduate school after 2023.
Wedeen’s account makes a different forecast, and it is the one I would bet on.
If nobody is deceived, there is no misperception to correct, so no cascade is coming. Everyone in this field has a reasonable idea what his colleagues think. What changes under pressure is the boundary of the sayable.
If Wedeen is right, the field’s publications should show more hedging, more procedural language, more citation of consensus positions as though they required no defense, and fewer arguments constructed to persuade someone who disagrees. The prose changes before the beliefs do. That is codable from journal articles across the last five years.
Two limits.
Wedeen wrote about a police state that tortured and disappeared its citizens. American universities do not. Anyone who takes this frame as an equivalence has abandoned the argument for a rhetorical convenience, and the comparison collapses the moment a reader notices. What transfers is the analytic point about publics, performance, and compelled speech. Nothing about the severity transfers, and the essay that pretends otherwise deserves the reception it gets.
The measurement needs a caveat too. The 17 percent baseline and the 33 percent figure come from different respondents answering at different moments, not from the same people measured twice. That makes it a between-subjects comparison across a shock rather than a panel, and if the pre-war figure was collected retrospectively rather than contemporaneously, it carries recall problems on top. The survey’s designers can settle which it was in a sentence, and anyone building on the number should ask them first.
So: Ask the field which view it is withholding on Iran, and from whom. That single item separates internal from external pressure.
Ask whether self-censorship tracks contract security once beliefs and subfield are held constant, which is the question the employment data makes possible and which distinguishes precarity from ideology.
And read the prose rather than the surveys. Kuran predicts that beliefs eventually follow speech, Wedeen predicts that speech narrows while beliefs persist, and the two make different predictions about what published arguments look like after five years of pressure. The journals are open. Nobody has looked.
Sources
Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Harvard, 1995), and “Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989,” World Politics 44:1 (1991).
Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago, 1999), and Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (Chicago, 2019).
Elisabeth Wood, “Implications of Wedeen’s Ambiguities of Domination for the Analysis of Political Violence,” in the 2021 symposium marking the book’s twentieth anniversary: [https://politicalscience.yale.edu/node/16360](https://politicalscience.yale.edu/node/16360)
Middle East Scholar Barometer, the 2026 round on the Iran war, self-censorship, and the expert-policymaker disconnect: [https://criticalissues.umd.edu/feature/iran-war-deep-disconnect-between-experts-and-policymakers-latest-mesb-poll](https://criticalissues.umd.edu/feature/iran-war-deep-disconnect-between-experts-and-policymakers-latest-mesb-poll)
Middle East Scholar Barometer archive, including the 2023 self-censorship findings: [https://criticalissues.umd.edu/middle-east-scholar-barometer](https://criticalissues.umd.edu/middle-east-scholar-barometer)
Why the Prizes Went to the Ottoman Post
A study of how review panels actually reach agreement explains the strangest fact about Middle East Studies in 2025
In November 2025 the Middle East Studies Association met while its members were arguing about Gaza, an American funding attack on their departments, and the war with Iran that would begin three months later. The program was full of that. The journal’s editors had published an unambiguous account of genocide and ethnic cleansing. The association had an academic freedom initiative and a database of pressure on scholars.
Then it gave out its book awards. They went to Choon Hwee Koh at UCLA for a history of the Ottoman imperial post, to Stacy Fahrenthold at UC Davis for a study of Syrian American garment labor, to Susanna Ferguson at Smith for a book on gender and capitalism in modern Arab thought, and to Arang Keshavarzian at NYU for a history of how the Gulf was constructed as a region. Honorable mentions went to Nora Barakat at Stanford for Bedouin land administration and to Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky at UC Santa Barbara for Ottoman refugee resettlement.
Communications, textiles, land tenure, refugee paperwork. Almost nothing about the present.
Two clocks run in this field. One governs what gets honored, and it points backward. The other governs what gets said, and it points at today. Nobody has explained the gap, and the available explanations are weak.
Three explanations that do not work
Lead time is the obvious one and it is partly right. A prize-winning monograph was conceived eight years before it won, so honors always describe the field of the past. But lead time explains only the lag. It cannot explain the composition. Books about the 1990s Middle East, about oil politics, about Islamism, about the second intifada were all conceived long enough ago to be eligible, and they are not what won.
Cowardice is the second, and it fails on its own terms. This is an association that endorsed a boycott, whose journal editors published a political statement, and whose president is a law professor who spends her time on academic freedom fights. A body prepared to do those things is not too frightened to give a prize to a book about Gaza.
Ideological gatekeeping is the third, and it fails in the opposite direction. If a committee wanted to reward political alignment, the winning list would look nothing like Ottoman postal administration.
Michèle Lamont (b. 1957) published a study in 2009 that supplies a better answer.
How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment is built on eighty-one interviews with panelists, chairs, and program officers across five multidisciplinary competitions: the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, a society of fellows at a major research university, and an unnamed social science foundation.
Her central claim is that excellence is the output of a social process rather than a property waiting to be detected. Disciplines carry distinct evaluative cultures, meaning different senses of what good work is, different criteria, different relationships between the judge and the object. Economists want models. Historians want evidence of a particular kind. Philosophers do not mind if only philosophers follow the argument. English departments, she finds, cannot agree internally on excellence at all.
When people carrying incompatible standards have to award a single prize, they do not resolve the incompatibility. They adopt what Lamont calls customary rules of deliberation, which make the process feel fair. Defer to the panelist who knows the field. Respect expertise. Practice methodological pluralism. Bracket your own stake. Above all, engage in what she names cognitive contextualization, which means judging a proposal by the standards appropriate to its own discipline rather than your own.
She also documents what panelists do not admit. Reviewers favor work resembling their own more than they know. Evaluation runs on emotion and interaction as much as on argument. Panels reward displays of moral qualities in applicants, hard work above all.
One result from Lamont’s data has been noticed by reviewers. Awards on these multidisciplinary panels tended to go to historians. Their kind of work, as one reviewer of her book put it, can be appreciated right across the disciplines. English applications fared badly, because the discipline supplies no shared standard for anyone to apply.
The reason sits in a remark from one of her panelists, a medievalist making the point that even a scholar who cannot stand a particular approach can usually recognize a strong instance of it. That is craft. Archival depth, three languages, a collection nobody has worked, years visibly spent. It is the one standard that survives translation across evaluative cultures, because recognizing it does not require sharing the object.
Now put a MESA book committee in Lamont’s frame. It is a multidisciplinary panel by construction, seating historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, and political scientists who disagree about what the field is for. Under the customary rules, the winner will not be the book that best satisfies any one of those cultures. It will be the book that violates none of them.
An Ottoman postal history in three languages built on an untouched archive clears that bar from a standing start. The literary scholar, the anthropologist, and the political scientist can all recognize it as excellent without agreeing on anything else. A book about Gaza cannot clear it, because the criteria for judging such a book are precisely what those disciplines disagree about, and because assessing it activates exactly the commitments that the customary rules exist to set aside. A panelist who says the Ottoman book is superb is describing craft. A panelist who says the Gaza book is superb is understood to be taking a position, which the rules of deliberation treat as the thing to be bracketed.
Lamont’s material on moral qualities adds a second push in the same direction. Panels reward evidence of labor. An archive displays labor in a form anyone can see. A book about an ongoing war, however good, looks to a skeptical panelist like something that could have been assembled from available sources, and that appearance costs it.
Two decision rules, not two politics
This reframes the two clocks entirely.
The prize committee needs consensus among people with incommensurable standards, and that requirement selects for craft, which travels. The journal editorial, the invited lecture, the program committee’s theme, and the association’s public statement need no such consensus. A small number of people, or one editor, can express a position without translating it into anything a political scientist would accept as a criterion.
Same association, same members, same year. Two decision rules producing opposite outputs, with nobody changing his mind about anything. Lamont’s argument is that the machinery of evaluation does work that participants attribute to their own judgment, and this is as clean a case as the field offers.
The prize record measures what survives cross-disciplinary translation.
The frame produces claims that can fail against public records.
The two-clock gap should be roughly constant across decades rather than opening after 2023. If the selection pressure is structural, MESA’s prize winners should skew toward craft-legible, archive-heavy, deep-period work in the 1990s and the 2000s as much as now. Code thirty years of winners for period and evidence type. A constant gap supports Lamont. A gap that widened after 2023 means something else is happening and this essay is wrong.
Committee composition should predict winner type. Under cognitive contextualization, panelists defer to whoever on the committee owns the subfield. A humanities-weighted committee has nobody positioned to advocate for a contemporary political science book, so such books should lose at higher rates on such committees. MESA publishes its committee memberships and its winners.
Single-authority venues should behave the opposite way. Journal editorials, keynote invitations, and association statements have no consensus requirement, so they should track the present closely and immediately. The same institution running two rules should show the divergence year by year.
And the craft standard has a funding consequence that links this to the other argument about area studies money. Craft is expensive. It requires years of language training, travel, and time in collections, which is exactly what Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships paid for. If the standard that wins prizes is the standard that federal language money underwrote, then defunding language training reduces the supply of prize-eligible work with a lag of about a decade. The first observable effect appears in enrollment in third-year and fourth-year language instruction, and the honors record registers it around 2035.
To critics who hold that the field has abandoned scholarship for activism, the honors record says the opposite, and Lamont explains why it must. The books this discipline crowns are the ones with the most archival labor in them.
To the field, you cannot point at the prize list as evidence of where your intellectual center of gravity sits, because the prize process selects on a criterion that has little to do with the questions you spend your conferences arguing about. The list shows what travels across a committee, and nothing more.
To everyone, the awkward part. If the young scholar reads these incentives correctly, and she does, the rational career move is transregional history of mobility and paperwork before 1948, with the languages, from a good archive, and to speak about Gaza and Iran in venues that never reach the tenure file. Nobody designed that. It falls out of a committee trying to be fair across disciplines that do not agree, which is the most Lamontian conclusion available.
Four limits.
Lamont studied fellowship panels judging proposals for work not yet done. A book prize judges finished work, which removes feasibility from the criteria and changes the mix. Her findings transfer by analogy rather than directly, and testing them on book prizes is a real extension rather than an application.
Her fieldwork dates from the mid-2000s. Whether the customary rules survive a period in which panelists face public consequences for their judgments is an open question, and the 2023 test above is partly a test of that.
The prize pool is filtered upstream, and Lamont does not study that filter. Books reach a committee because a publisher submits them, and university press acquisitions editors made those decisions years earlier under their own incentives. Some of the two-clock effect may be an acquisitions effect rather than a deliberation effect, and separating them requires submission lists that associations do not publish.
The numbers are small. Six awards a year with honorable mentions cannot support fine distinctions, which is why the thirty-year test matters more than any single cycle.
Lamont’s research program defines itself partly against accounts of disciplinary conflict that treat competition as the engine and miss what she calls the bridge-building work that evaluative cultures do. If she is right about that, the interesting thing about a prize committee is that they built a procedure for agreeing when they cannot agree, and that procedure has a bias nobody chose.
Sources
Michèle Lamont, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Harvard, 2009), on evaluative cultures, customary rules of deliberation, cognitive contextualization, homophily among reviewers, and the recognition of craftsmanship across disciplines
Grégoire Mallard, Michèle Lamont, and Joshua Guetzkow on epistemological styles and cognitive contextualization, drawing on the same eighty-one interviews
MESA book awards and honorable mentions
Middle East Scholar Barometer, for the field’s contemporary commitments during the same period
