Live Questions in Philosophy

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

Philosophy has three prestige systems that overlap. Core analytic work in metaphysics, epistemology, language, mind, and logic still buys the most standing inside elite departments. Interdisciplinary work on artificial intelligence, sentience, democracy, and scientific practice draws the funding and the outside attention. Public-facing philosophy buys visibility that converts into book sales. A career can sit high in one system and low in another. Most confusion about who counts comes from mixing the three.

The first live question runs through artificial intelligence, and two questions travel together under that heading. One asks whether a large language model understands anything, holds concepts, acts for reasons, or acquires interests that make it a subject rather than an instrument. The other asks who decides what these systems optimize for, whose claims register in alignment, and whether private firms are becoming governing authorities without any democratic warrant. David Chalmers (b. 1966) frames the first question better than anyone, and has done so for thirty years. His talent is to identify a possibility before the field knows whether to take it seriously, which he did with the hard problem, then with virtual reality, and now with machine consciousness. The NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, which he directs with Ned Block, moved model sentience and machine moral status from the fringe into mainstream philosophy of mind. The literature has since arrived at something like a structural stalemate, where several positions remain defensible.

Seth Lazar at the Australian National University is the most productive answer-builder on the political side. He treats these systems as infrastructure that allocates authority and governs conduct, and his work on algorithmic cities and automatic authorities has reached policy audiences, including a United Nations development report. His MINT Lab joins normative philosophy to computing and institutional design. Raphaël Millière at Oxford is the rising star, with the American Philosophical Association’s AI2050 early-career prize in 2025 and a permanent Oxford post the same year.

The laboratories now hire philosophers. Anthropic runs a model welfare program, Google DeepMind has begun applying scientific theories of consciousness to its own systems, and Meta lists AI wellbeing among its concerns. NYU has hosted sessions on the findings of those corporate welfare assessments. Philosophy has acquired a wealthy patron for the first time since the Cold War funding of logic and decision theory, and the patron has preferences. “Could the model suffer?” and “How should it be aligned?” both flatter the buyer. “Who owns it?”, “Whose labor trained it?”, and “Should this system exist?” do not. Carmody Grey declined a collaboration with Anthropic on close to those grounds, arguing that the industry’s interest in the humanities risks converting critique into branding. One can disagree with her judgment and still see that she named the incentive correctly. This is agenda control rather than censorship, and agenda control has always been the more effective of the two.

The second question concerns where sentience begins. It now covers human infants, cognitively impaired adults, mammals, fish, insects, cephalopods, and artificial systems. Jonathan Birch at the London School of Economics has become the leading answerer. The Edge of Sentience offers a framework for decision under uncertainty instead of promising a theory of consciousness first. His earlier work helped put octopuses, crabs, and lobsters inside British animal-sentience law. LSE launched the Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience in 2025 with four million pounds and Birch as director, which shows how a department well below Oxford in general standing can become the institutional center of one question. Birch is the cleanest case in the discipline of a man gaining status by answering. He built an evidentiary framework, connected it to legislation, and then built an institution around it.

The third question belongs to social epistemology. The old question asked what knowledge is. The live one asks how intelligent people, each responding to evidence, end up in opposed worlds, and what happens when scores and rankings begin to reshape the values they were meant to record. C. Thi Nguyen at Utah is the outstanding framer here. He finds a phenomenon, gives it a name that sticks, and shows that it connects ordinary life to agency, technology, and politics. Echo chambers, games, value capture, and scoring systems all now circulate as vocabulary that other people use. Games: Agency as Art won the APA book prize, and The Score has extended his reach beyond the profession. Kevin Dorst at MIT is the rising answerer, using formal models and experiments to show how ambiguity and reasonable differences in priors can produce polarization inside rational cognition. He took tenure in 2024 and MIT’s Levitan Prize in 2026. Cailin O’Connor at UC Irvine builds the models that give the literature cumulative structure. Utah’s departmental rank stays modest, which tells you how far an individual reputation can outrun the standing of a department.

The fourth question moved political philosophy away from ideal institutions and toward domination inside actual ones. When do employers exercise private government? What does political equality require once wealth buys influence? What forms of protest, punishment, policing, and border enforcement remain legitimate under unjust conditions? Elizabeth Anderson (b. 1959) at Michigan is the rare figure who both asks a question that changes the object under discussion and supplies enough theory to make it answerable. Amia Srinivasan (b. 1984) holds the Chichele chair at Oxford and has a gift for exposing assumptions the regular participants in a debate have stopped noticing. Tommie Shelby at Harvard is the strongest systematic answerer, taking ghettos, racial solidarity, punishment, and abolition, reconstructing the best version of the position he opposes, and following the argument. Niko Kolodny at Berkeley works the purely analytic side of equality and authority. Daniel Wodak is the man to watch, since his argument that political equality means equal coauthorship of law reopened a question established egalitarian theory had treated as settled. The leading cluster is NYU, Oxford, Berkeley, and Michigan together.

Philosophy of science supplies the fifth question, about what models explain, when values enter science properly, and why disciplines become conservative. Jenann Ismael at Johns Hopkins asks how temporally situated agents fit into the world physics describes, and she has moved from specialist standing to something larger, with a Guggenheim in 2024 and selection as the 2027 Romanell Lecturer. David Wallace at Pittsburgh sits at the answering pole with his defense of the Everett interpretation, a position committed enough to be wrong. Pittsburgh and Irvine remain the institutional leaders.

The sixth question, grounding and metaphysical dependence, remains alive and has stopped expanding. Kit Fine (b. 1946) is still the supreme framework-builder, with Jonathan Schaffer, Karen Bennett, Ted Sider, and Shamik Dasgupta developing rival accounts. The strongest recent work distinguishes types of explanation or applies the tools to social entities such as money, race, and law. NYU and Rutgers remain its highest-status homes. Metaphysics keeps producing internal prestige and has less external momentum than it did a decade ago.

Population ethics forms the seventh. Derek Parfit (1942–2017) still sets the agenda posthumously, and Hilary Greaves, Johann Frick, and John Broome have produced the serious attempts at answers. This area is moving down institutionally while remaining hard intellectually. Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute closed at the end of July 2025. Longtermism now attracts adversarial scrutiny, which helps the philosophy and hurts anyone whose standing depended on presenting one contested framework as the natural output of impartial reasoning.

The eighth question concerns the discipline. Should philosophy stay organized around the European canon and twentieth-century analytic categories? What follows from treating Chinese, Indian, African, Islamic, and Indigenous philosophy as sources of argument? Sally Haslanger made social structure and ideology respectable inside core analytic work. Edouard Machery helped establish experimental methods. Specialty recognition has grown faster than departmental power, and the prestige hierarchy still rewards familiar analytic strengths.

On the question of who gains from asking rather than answering, philosophy pays differently from the sciences, because its product is partly the question. The highest-yield move is coining a portable phrase. The hard problem, epistemic injustice from Miranda Fricker (b. 1966), racial liberalism from Charles Mills (1951–2021), private government, value capture, the edge of sentience: each name travels into law, medicine, computer science, and journalism, and carries its author’s standing along with it. The currency of hiring stays technical, so the durable careers found a research program that others must then work inside. Chalmers, Fine, Anderson, and Haslanger all did that. Nguyen and Srinivasan are doing it now.

Among departments, Johns Hopkins is the clearest riser, from thirty-first in the previous Philosophical Gourmet Report to a tie for sixteenth, with Ismael, Hanna Pickard, Ian Phillips, and Yitzhak Melamed giving it an identity instead of a collection of stars. Texas at Austin made the largest jump near the top, from seventeenth to a tie for eighth. Berkeley has climbed from fourteenth in 2011 to a tie for sixth. Edinburgh has gone from twelfth in Britain to third. Columbia fell from twelfth to twenty-first. Pittsburgh dropped from fourth to eighth overall while its philosophy of science stayed first tier. Harvard slipped from a tie for seventh to a tie for tenth. Departments are small, so a handful of hires and retirements move them a long way, and these numbers measure reputation inside existing faculty networks rather than intellectual quality. NYU remains the most prestigious department in the ordinary sense. Oxford is the institution best placed to set the interdisciplinary agenda, since its Institute for Ethics in AI runs a continuing program on automated government, content moderation, power-seeking systems, and the distribution of technological power.

The hardest closure of questions now comes from governing boards and legislatures. Texas A&M’s regents restricted teaching on race, gender, and sexuality, and Martin Peterson was directed to remove selections from Plato’s Symposium from a course on contemporary moral issues. He resigned a tenured chair and moved to Southern Methodist University. Texas Senate Bill 37 has the University of Houston reviewing roughly forty percent of its core curriculum. Wyoming is dropping its philosophy major for students entering in 2027. Dundee plans to end philosophy as a named degree, Hertfordshire is eliminating it, Monmouth College is closing its major, Ohio legislation ended the major at Toledo, and Georgetown has suspended doctoral admissions. British humanities faculties have shed close to four thousand posts. A MacArthur-funded project now exists to count the shrinkage.

Inside the discipline, sex and gender remains the clearest case of soft closure, and both sides have built literatures, which turns it into a philosophical dispute about the ethics of inquiry. Talia Mae Bettcher argues that there may be ethical limits on which questions particular philosophers ought to raise. Her opponents argue that classifying a disputed position as activism permits professional sanction without answering the argument. No elite department announces that it closes questions. The work gets done by referees, hiring networks, conference invitations, and shared assumptions about which positions are respectable, all of which make some questions expensive to ask.

Rankings close questions too. The Gourmet Report measures reputation inside existing networks. It has no way to register a department that has identified an important question the established field failed to notice. Once hiring committees consult the measure, the measure starts shaping the activity it claimed to describe. Nguyen built his reputation on that pattern. His own profession supplies as good an instance as any he has published.

Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026) died on March 14, 2026, at ninety-six. He held a kind of authority that came from a public rather than from a department, and nobody inherits it.

The discipline is moving from isolated puzzles toward systems. The rising work asks how minds, machines, markets, scientific communities, and measurement regimes create the conditions under which men act, know, dominate, and suffer. Analytic technique remains the price of entry. The status goes to those who carry the technique into a domain where something is at stake, and who name what they find there in words other people can use.

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The List Problem

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

American economic nationalism has found its economist in Friedrich List (1789-1846), and the choice makes sense. List denied that the existing international division of labor was natural or permanent. He separated a nation’s present wealth from its productive powers, meaning its skills, its technical knowledge, its transport, its schools, its firms, and its capacity to make things it had never made before. A country could trade consumption today for capability tomorrow. A country that accepted free trade while its industries remained immature might never acquire the machinery, the trained workers, the suppliers, the engineers, or the commercial institutions needed to compete with an established leader. It might instead settle into permanent supply of raw materials to a manufacturing rival and call the arrangement efficient.

That argument is serious, and the profession has spent two centuries either ignoring it or rediscovering it under other names. The infant-industry case, learning by doing, agglomeration, path dependence, and most of the recent literature on industrial policy are List translated into the language of models.

The trouble with the American use of List is not that he was wrong. The trouble is that his own scheme assigns the United States to a different chapter.

The National System of Political Economy (1841) is built on a sequence of stages. A nation passes from hunting to pasturage to agriculture, then into manufacturing, then into manufacturing and commerce together. List attaches protection to one passage in that sequence, the transition into manufacturing, and he attaches it under conditions. The duties should be moderate. They should be temporary. They should cover industries with a plausible prospect of standing on their own. They should not extend to agriculture. They suit a country with sufficient territory, population, and coastline to support a full industrial system, and they are useless to a country that has no such prospect. Protection carried too long, List wrote, produces indolence in the firms it shelters.

Then he describes the nation that has reached the top of the sequence. That nation, he says, has an interest in free trade, and it preaches free trade to its rivals for that reason. His model of the case was England. England had climbed behind Navigation Acts and prohibitions and colonial monopoly, arrived at supremacy, and then announced that supremacy was the reward of open competition. List’s charge against Britain was hypocrisy, and Ha-Joon Chang (b. 1963) revived the charge under a better title in Kicking Away the Ladder (2002). But the charge only works because List agreed with the British about what a leading manufacturing nation should do. He expected Germany to arrive at the same place and adopt the same policy.

The United States now occupies the position List assigned to England. It is a mature, high-wage economy at or near the technological frontier in semiconductors, software, aerospace, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, finance, advanced energy, and scientific research. It issues the currency that made up roughly 57 percent of official foreign exchange reserves in early 2026. It has lost sectors, not a civilization. Its problem is selective industrial erosion inside an advanced economy, not national industrial infancy.

Citing List to protect the leader inverts his stage theory. That does not make protection wrong in 2026. It means the movement is invoking an authority who prescribed something else for its situation, and it has not noticed.

The second difficulty concerns what List wanted protected and how.

His unit of analysis was productive power. He counted engineers, schools, apprenticeships, roads, canals, patents, banks, and firms that could design as well as assemble. He would not have recognized the bilateral goods balance as an object of policy. A deficit tells you nothing about whether a country can build a machine tool, train a die maker, or bring a new chemical process from a laboratory to a plant. The movement has substituted an accounting figure for the thing List cared about, and the substitution is convenient, because the figure moves with a tariff schedule and productive power does not.

His practical career points the same way. From 1819 List served as the organizer of the German commercial association, and his first campaign was the abolition of the internal tariffs that divided the German states from each other. He wanted the Zollverein, which arrived in 1834. He promoted the national railway network and helped bring the Leipzig-Dresden line into existence. He wrote about technical education and public credit. The external duty was one instrument among several, and the several were the expensive ones, requiring a state capable of building things and teaching people.

So the first act of nineteenth-century German economic nationalism enlarged a market. A general duty against forty-six countries contracts one.

The American precedent runs on the same asymmetry. Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) submitted the Report on Manufactures in December 1791 and argued that bounties, meaning direct subsidies tied to output, were superior to prohibitions and preferable to high duties. Congress declined the bounties and kept the tariff. The American System took the cheap half in 1792 and takes the cheap half now.

The uncomfortable comparison is not nineteenth-century Germany. It is Edwardian Britain.

Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914) launched the tariff reform campaign at Birmingham on May 15, 1903. His premise was that Britain’s early industrial lead was gone, that Germany and the United States had built larger industrial systems behind protective walls and continental markets, and that British free trade had stopped being a neutral doctrine. It exposed British manufacturers to foreign protection while enriching the shippers, insurers, bankers, and holders of overseas assets who lived off an open system. His remedy was duties on foreign goods and preference for goods from the Empire, a protected commercial bloc large enough to sustain British production, fund social provision, and answer the continental rivals.

Read Chamberlain’s speeches next to American Compass and the resemblance is close enough to be awkward. Cheap imports conceal the destruction of capacity. Free trade has become an ideology serving finance. Industrial weakness threatens military power. National cohesion requires national production. A protected bloc can replace dependence on competitors.

The campaign split his own party. Arthur Balfour (1848-1930) tried to hold both wings and held neither. The Unionist free traders defected. And the argument was lost at the grocery counter, on the price of bread, where the free traders campaigned with a big loaf and a little loaf and asked which one the voter preferred. The 1906 election destroyed the Conservative and Unionist position in the Commons. Chamberlain suffered a stroke in July of that year and never returned to active politics.

The sequel is the part American nationalists should sit with. Britain did eventually get protection. The Import Duties Act of 1932 imposed a general tariff, and the Ottawa agreements of August 1932 delivered imperial preference. Britain’s relative industrial decline continued.

Tariffs were not the cause of that decline, and free trade was not the cause either. Britain faced rivals with larger home markets, carried the costs of empire and two wars, returned to gold at an overvalued parity, and held early leads in industries where the early lead had left aging plant and settled methods. The instructive diagnosis comes from Alfred Chandler (1918-2007). Scale and Scope (1990) traces British underperformance to what he called personal capitalism: family firms that declined to invest in the managerial hierarchies, the distribution networks, and the in-house research that American and German competitors built. British firms stayed small, stayed owned by families, and stayed out of the three-pronged investment that made a first mover durable. Add the technical education deficit that British commissions documented for fifty years and did little about.

No tariff schedule supplies a managerial hierarchy. No duty trains a chemist. Chamberlain proposed to change the price of imports in a country whose deficiency lay in how its firms were owned, organized, and staffed. Aaron Friedberg’s The Weary Titan (1988) shows how hard British officials found it to see their own position accurately, which is the more general warning. A nation in relative decline reaches for the instrument it can operate rather than the one that addresses its condition.

The second comparison is import substitution.

Import substitution began from a real problem and a competent argument. Raúl Prebisch (1901-1986) and the economists at the Economic Commission for Latin America, founded in 1948, held that countries specialized in primary exports faced deteriorating terms of trade, unstable prices, chronic foreign exchange constraints, and technological dependence. Hans Singer (1910-2006) reached similar conclusions. Domestic industry was the route out. Judged against passive specialization in minerals and agriculture, the policy accomplished a great deal. Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina built factories, technical cadres, urban employment, infrastructure, and domestic firms that would not otherwise exist.

The failure came later and had a precise shape. Albert Hirschman (1915-2012) described it in 1968 in his essay on the political economy of import-substituting industrialization. The process ran backward. It began at the last stage of production, final assembly of consumer goods, using imported machinery, imported components, and imported technology. It skipped the learning. The entrepreneur who assembled radios behind a tariff wall never acquired the capability to design a radio or build the machines that made one. Substituting the final good left the demand for foreign exchange intact, because the inputs still came from abroad. The easy substitutions ran out. What remained were the hard ones, requiring capital, scale, and technical depth that the sheltered market had given nobody a reason to develop.

Then the politics closed around it. Anne Krueger (b. 1934) named the rent seeking in 1974 and Jagdish Bhagwati (b. 1934) generalized it. Tariff structures became negotiated rather than designed. Firms learned that a good relationship with the ministry paid better than a productivity gain. The infants aged without maturing. Capacity was visible, so capacity got mistaken for competitiveness. A government could point at factories and payrolls, and neither established that the protected sector could survive competition or earn the foreign exchange to pay for its own imported inputs.

The debt crisis of the 1980s had many causes and it would be careless to hang it on industrial protection. The durable lesson is narrower: a country can build industrial capacity while failing to build productivity growth or export competitiveness, and it can go a long time without finding out.

Here the American position produces an unexpected danger. The United States faces no comparable payments constraint. It borrows in its own currency and the world wants its assets. Argentina learned within a decade that its protected industries could not earn the exchange to buy their own machinery. The United States can finance an uncompetitive industry for thirty years out of an enormous domestic market, federal borrowing, protected procurement, and foreign demand for Treasuries. The privilege the movement wants to preserve is the same privilege that would hide the failure from view. America may escape the crisis and reproduce the underlying productivity failure in a slower and more politically durable form.

The standard answer to both comparisons is East Asia, and the answer has force. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan protected industries, directed credit, promoted investment, and coordinated technological development. Chalmers Johnson (1931-2010) described the apparatus in MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982). Robert Wade (b. 1944) documented Taiwan in Governing the Market (1990). Industrial policy worked.

Alice Amsden (1943-2012) identified the feature that made it work. In Asia’s Next Giant (1989) she described Korean support as reciprocal. Firms received cheap credit, protection, foreign exchange, and licenses, and in exchange they accepted performance standards that the state monitored and enforced: output targets, investment commitments, technological upgrading, and above all exports. The export requirement supplied a test the domestic market could not. A company can persuade its own ministry that it is strategically vital. Persuading a foreign purchaser to buy an inferior product at a higher price is harder.

The recent quantitative work supports a qualified version of the story. Nathaniel Lane’s study of Korea’s Heavy and Chemical Industry drive finds that targeted sectors expanded, developed new comparative advantage, raised productivity, and held the gains after the temporary support ended. Plant-level work by Minho Kim, Munseob Lee, and Yongseok Shin finds that the same program worsened the allocation of resources among firms inside the targeted industries. A real achievement, purchased at a cost.

Which puts the institutional question where it belongs. Protection is easy to start. Discipline is hard to sustain.

The American state has formidable promotional capacity. It funds basic research, builds infrastructure, guarantees loans, writes tax credits, and creates markets through procurement. Defense, aerospace, computing, biomedicine, and energy all carry its fingerprints. Its terminating capacity is another question. Congress represents districts and states, not a national production function. Once a subsidized plant exists, its continuation becomes a local interest with two senators attached. Once an industry is designated vital to national security, withdrawal of support becomes an argument about patriotism. Concentrated firms lobby better than diffuse consumers. A politician gains from announcing an investment and loses from closing a failed one nine years later.

The CHIPS program shows that conditions can be attached. It carried milestones, reporting requirements, restrictions on expansion in countries of concern, and clawback provisions. It also shows the limits of the technique. A national security condition is verifiable, because you can determine whether a company built prohibited capacity in China. A commercial performance condition requires someone to decide whether an American plant has become productive enough, innovative enough, or cheap enough to justify continued support, and to say no. Nobody has yet had to say no. The conversion of unpaid Intel grants into a federal equity stake in 2025 moved in the opposite direction, toward ownership, which is a relationship that makes exit harder rather than easier.

This is the core of the List problem. The case for protection rests on the state eventually exposing the protected firm to judgment. The politics of protection give both the firm and the state reasons to postpone the judgment forever.

The third complication is automation, and it separates two promises the movement makes together.

The first promise is restored industrial capacity. The second is restored industrial employment. A modern plant can deliver the first while disappointing the second, and the incentive runs that way by design. A firm that brings production into a high-wage country has every reason to substitute capital, software, and robotics for labor.

The CHIPS numbers are the available evidence. Against roughly $53 billion in authorized support, Bilge Erten, Joseph Stiglitz, and Eric Verhoogen estimate about 15,000 to 16,000 direct jobs in semiconductor production and equipment, and 28,000 to 35,000 indirect jobs in upstream industries and construction, with measurable wage gains in the affected counties. Those are real jobs, skilled and well paid. Beside the scale of public money and private capital, and beside the promise of restoring the industrial Midwest, they are small.

Which does not mean the program failed. Semiconductor fabrication is capital deep and always will be. Its justification is that advanced chips sit underneath military systems, communications, artificial intelligence, transport, and most of the modern economy, and that a country without domestic capacity holds a hostage relationship with Taiwan and South Korea. The honest defense is insurance. The dishonest defense is employment.

The contradiction is unavoidable. A program built to maximize productivity and competitiveness automates and hires few. A program built to maximize headcount preserves labor-intensive, low-productivity firms that will need protection permanently. The movement has not chosen, because choosing costs it either its economics or its voters.

And a factory is not a social order. Restoring steel, machine tools, ships, pharmaceuticals, or semiconductors does not restore affordable housing, stable families, local commerce, technical schools, solvent municipalities, or a household supported on one industrial wage. Those outcomes came from a settlement that included unions, regional banks, regulated utilities, restricted foreign competition, employer benefits, a young population, and a different balance between capital and labor. Industrial policy can contribute to regional reconstruction. It cannot substitute for it. The men who voted for reindustrialization heard a promise about their towns, and the policy addresses their supply chains.

Underneath all of this sits an arithmetic problem the movement discusses only in the abstract.

Reserve currency status draws foreign capital into American assets. Those inflows are the accounting counterpart of the current account deficit. Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis set the argument out in Trade Wars Are Class Wars (2020): the imbalance originates in savings and investment decisions, many of them made abroad, and the trade balance adjusts to accommodate the capital account. On that account a tariff redirects trade among foreign suppliers without touching the underlying relationship.

So the program as stated wants incompatible things. It wants the productive structure of an industrial nation, the consumption possibilities of a free-trading nation, and the financial privileges of a reserve-currency hegemon. Reducing imports while preserving unrestricted capital inflows, dollar supremacy, elevated asset prices, cheap consumer goods, and the global organization of American corporations describes a set of goals that do not fit together.

The test is available and simple. Pettis’s diagnosis implies capital-account measures: taxes on inbound portfolio flows, tolerance of a weaker dollar with higher long rates, and a willingness to give up some part of the reserve privilege. American Compass has adopted the diagnosis. Watch whether anyone in the movement proposes the medicine. Watch whether any elected nationalist tells the holders of dollar assets what reindustrialization would cost them. Until then Pettis is decoration, and the industrial program is being sold as an addition to the American order rather than a subtraction from it.

List gave a rising nation permission to protect its infant industries for a period, moderately, selectively, and on the way to something else. He gave the leading manufacturing nation a different instruction. And the parts of his program that required a competent state, the customs union that enlarged the market, the railways, the technical schools, the public credit, are the parts the movement has left on the shelf.

A policy he might recognize looks unlike a general duty. It would enlarge markets among trusted countries rather than tax them, because no advanced economy reproduces every mineral, chemical, component, machine tool, and subsystem inside its borders, and the relevant production unit is a bloc. It would spend on apprenticeship, technical education, and engineering capacity, which is where Britain lost and Germany won. It would attach performance standards to support and an export test where competitiveness is claimed, and it would say openly that capacity purchased for military reasons is defense procurement rather than economics. It would protect industries without protecting every incumbent inside them, and it would fund new entrants against the firms that already have the lobbyists. It would name, in advance, which privileges of the current order the country is prepared to trade away.

None of that is impossible. All of it is harder than a tariff, which is why the tariff is what exists.

The nationalists are right about the things that made them necessary. Industrial structure has consequences that consumer prices do not capture. National power cannot be reduced to the cost of a television. Markets that cross jurisdictions are shaped by states, currencies, security arrangements, and political choices, and the discipline that treated the global allocation of production as presumptively efficient was making an assumption rather than a finding.

What they have not done is explain why the United States escapes what happened to Britain, to Argentina, and to every protected sector that aged without maturing. They have not shown how a duty at the border overcomes the financial incentives created by the dollar. They have not shown which official will one day tell a subsidized firm in a swing state that its support is ending. They have not shown how an automated plant restores a town. And they have not decided what they will sacrifice.

List climbed those questions before he answered the tariff question. His American admirers have taken the answer and skipped the climb.

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Fred Luskin: Forgive for Good

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

I can’t think of a book that has helped me more over the past decade than Fred Luskin’s Forgive for Good.

I also can’t think of a book I’ve recommended more.

I can’t think of a book that is likely to be useful to the average man.

Frederic Michael Luskin (b. 1954) came to national attention in a lounge at Encina Hall in late January 2001 when eighteen people from Belfast finished a week of instruction under his direction.

The room filled with Northern Irish accents as the group came out of its final session. People headed for the deck to smoke and talk. Luskin stood among them, tall and thin, shaggy, running late, dressed in sweats and sneakers, his hard New York consonants carrying over the brogues. He was forty-six. A visiting reporter thought he could pass for a graduate student fifteen years younger.

Patricia Magee lived in Belfast. In 1992 her brother Martin was beaten to death by loyalists. The men who killed him went to prison and then came out under a prisoner release tied to the peace agreement. They lived near her family. She saw them on the street. For ten years she had not spoken about Martin outside her home, and she had never spoken about him at all without weeping.

Her new friend Florence Watts walked up. Watts was Protestant. The Irish Republican Army had killed her husband twenty years earlier. Magee touched her hand and said the two of them had each told their story that Sunday without crying, for the first time.

The man who had taught them the technique had learned it because he was not invited to a wedding.

Luskin was born in New York City on May 5, 1954, to Phillip Luskin, an accountant, and Barbara Luskin, a homemaker. He took a B.A. from SUNY Binghamton in 1976 and an M.S. from San José State in 1987. In between he co-owned a vegetarian restaurant. Then came the school psychology years, which read like a map of Bay Area and Long Island districts hiring on short contracts: San Benito High School in Hollister, Northport, Millbrae, Hollister again, San Mateo-Foster City, Woodside. He picked up a certificate in educational administration from Hofstra in 1993 and taught integral health studies as an adjunct at the California Institute of Integral Studies in 1995 and 1996. This is the resume of a competent man in his late thirties with no institutional standing and no research career.

The rupture came around 1990. A close friend, the man who had stood as Luskin’s best man, cut him off. The friend married and did not invite him. Luskin spent years turning the slight over, telling the story again, unable to accept that the friendship had ended. He had read in Eastern religion for years and began applying meditation and visualization to his own case. When he entered Stanford’s School of Education in 1996 for a doctorate in counseling and health psychology, he built the dissertation out of what he had done to himself.

He was forty-two, starting a Ph.D., in a program run by a man whose own career had begun with a death.

Carl Edwin Thoresen (1933-2020) was born in San Francisco to a Norwegian immigrant father who cooked for the Army. His father died of a heart attack when Thoresen was nineteen. Thoresen rowed at Cal, took a history degree, and spent five years teaching physical education in San Jose middle schools before a chance meeting with a counseling scholar redirected him. He came back to Stanford in 1967 and stayed on the education faculty thirty-one years.

Beginning in 1973 he worked with the cardiologist Meyer Friedman on the Recurrent Coronary Prevention Project, which followed 1,013 heart attack survivors for four and a half years to see whether Type A behavior could be modified. Thoresen designed and ran the psychological treatment. Recurrence dropped to 13 percent from 21 percent or higher, and after the first year the counseled group also died less often.

Anger entered American clinical science as a cardiac risk factor. By the time Luskin arrived, a Stanford professor had already spent twenty-five years proving that you could change how a man handled provocation and thereby change whether he had a second heart attack. Forgiveness training is Type A intervention with the vocabulary swapped. Luskin’s contribution was to notice that the swap could be made and to build the curriculum.

The money arrived at the same moment. During the late 1990s, with the Soviet collapse, Mandela’s election, and the Northern Irish ceasefire fresh, the John Templeton Foundation issued a call for proposals on forgiveness. Twenty grants followed, then a nonprofit called A Campaign for Forgiveness Research funded eight more, and the total reached nearly $10 million. The count of published studies went from 58 in 1997 to more than 1,100 by 2005. The initial tranche was roughly $3 million to about twenty teams in 1998, the same year Martin Seligman launched positive psychology from the presidency of the American Psychological Association.

Everett Worthington of Virginia Commonwealth
ran the Campaign and told a reporter in 2001 that perhaps fifty studies existed and that the field’s time had come. A field of fifty studies with ten million dollars behind it will produce eleven hundred studies. Whether it produces eleven hundred findings is a separate question, and the honest answer in 2026 is that nobody has settled it.

Luskin’s pilot used fifty-five Stanford students and reported a 15 percent average drop in self-assessed anger. On the strength of it, Thoresen won the Templeton grant in 1999 and became principal investigator of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, with Luskin as project director. They recruited 259 adults who described themselves as upset about an incident and unable to forgive.

Two facts about that recruitment.

The first is that they could not find men. Enrollment ran heavily female until Thoresen changed the advertising language from forgiveness to grudge and grudge management. Then the men came. Thoresen’s reading was that forgiveness sounded feminine and a grudge sounded like a job. A single noun substitution altered the sex ratio of a Stanford clinical trial. Anyone who designs public health messaging should keep that in a drawer.

The second is the exclusion criteria on the pilot. Students whose injury involved violence or physical or sexual abuse were kept out. Everyone admitted had to answer yes to a screening question asking whether they could at least imagine learning to feel differently about the matter they brought. The method was therefore validated on people who had already conceded the premise. That does not make the results false. It does mean the population most often invoked in praise of forgiveness research is the population the early research excluded.

A person suffers, in Luskin’s account, when he insists that another person obey a rule he has no power to enforce. The friend must invite him. The wife must understand. The father must apologize. The employer must recognize what he is worth. Luskin calls these unenforceable rules and teaches people to convert them into preferences, wishes, and goals. The demand may be just. Justice does not confer jurisdiction.

He taught it with a cactus. When a woman in a workshop described her frustration with a difficult partner, Luskin told her some people are like cacti, sharp by nature, and that throwing yourself against a cactus and getting jabbed is not the cactus’s doing. “It’s just standing there being a cactus.”

The second idea is the grievance story. A grievance story begins as an account of what happened and hardens into a rehearsed and slanted performance with a villain at the center. Luskin’s line was that these stories fix attention on the other person and what he will not do, and that this hands him power he should not have. Repeating the story raises blood pressure, dumps cholesterol into the blood, shortens the breath, and triggers the fight-or-flight response to an injury seven years old. So he taught breathing, attention on the area around the heart, gratitude for available goods, and a rewritten account in which the teller wanted something reasonable, did not get it, and remains capable of getting it elsewhere.

He charged $255 for six two-hour sessions. He also taught at Esalen in Big Sur. His students included Phyllis Mayberg, an administrative associate in Stanford’s genetics department, who had tried other counseling after her marriage failed and disliked being told her anger was acceptable, and Maryam Hellar, a real estate agent in Los Altos who had spent thousands on therapy for memories of an abusive father and first husband in Iran, and who said the class taught her that the forgiveness in question was of herself and the situation. Mayberg’s compliment was that he lacked the social worker voice. He kept the sessions from turning into crying, refused the neutral therapist’s posture, and used his own botched handling of his own friendship as the running example.

Northern Ireland was not his idea. Byron Bland, a Presbyterian minister and associate director of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation, had followed the conflict for a decade. He framed the shift after the 1997 ceasefire as a move from how to reach a deal to how to build relationships that could hold one. He heard about Luskin’s work in 1999 and phoned him. The project was called HOPE, for Healing Our Past Experiences.

HOPE 1 brought five women whose sons had been killed to Stanford in 2000. Their scores on depression, anger, optimism, perceived stress, and the pain of the loss improved, including sleep, and they kept meeting in Ireland afterward and helped recruit the next group.

HOPE 2 ran in February 2001 with seventeen people, nine Catholic and eight Protestant, all of whom had a parent, child, spouse, or sibling murdered. Over seven days of group training, self-rated hurt fell from 6.5 to 4.1 on a ten-point scale. Depression scores fell about 20 percent. Somatic stress symptoms fell about 35 percent. Reported physical vitality rose. All four of those changes reached significance at the conventional threshold.

Trait anger moved from 19.9 to 17.8. Perceived stress fell about 14 percent at p under 0.08. On Rye’s forgiveness scale, fifteen participants rose and two came out less forgiving than they went in.

There was no control group, no randomization, and seventeen subjects, measured immediately after a week of intensive attention at a rich American university, a long way from Belfast. Luskin and Bland posted the numbers with the asterisks and the two reversals intact. That is more than most people do with their pilot data, and the design supports about as much weight as a pilot design ever supports.

The most useful thing anybody said that week was said by Bland, at the table, on the last day. He drew three elements. The death of a loved one in the middle. The community on one side. The family on the other. Because the community holds that it owns the death as much as the family does, it does not honor the family’s wish to heal, and it keeps hatred and revenge in service of its own politics. Brendan Bradley, who had lost five relatives, said people will tell you they understand and they do not. Heads went down around the room.

Bland’s own reading of the change was that the participants’ stories had shifted from victim to survivor. Pearl Marshall, whose son the IRA murdered in 1989, said she had stopped seeing the killers as Catholics and now saw them as IRA. Pat Campbell, whose son Philip was shot in 1991 as he stood at his vending cart in Belfast, said she was forgiving herself for having let his killers ruin her life, and that grief looked identical on either side of the divide. Magee had asked, before agreeing to come, whether the forgiveness could take place entirely inside her own head, since she would never in a million years stand in front of the men who killed Martin and absolve them. She was told yes. That was the goal. She came.

Forgiveness, in Luskin’s definition, is an internal change in a person’s relation to an injury. Reconciliation is a separate act requiring a second party. Excuse is a third thing. Legal and moral accountability is a fourth. Keeping them apart is what let a Catholic woman in Belfast accept help from a Jewish psychologist in California without betraying her brother.

The peer-reviewed record is thinner than the publicity. The main trial appeared in 2006 in the Journal of Clinical Psychology under Alex Harris’s name, with Luskin, Sonya Norman, Sam Standard, Jennifer Bruning, Stephanie Evans, and Thoresen. The six-week program cut negative thoughts and feelings about the target offense two to three times more than the control condition and produced larger gains in positive feeling toward the offender. Effects on stress, anger, hurt, forgiveness-likelihood, and optimism held at four months. The sample was mostly White and college-educated. The other core paper, with Karni Ginzburg and Thoresen, ran in 2005 in the Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, a venue that carries a fraction of the citation weight of the claim it published. A hypertension result with David Tibbits and others appeared in 2006 in the Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling.

In the 2014 meta-analysis by Nathaniel Wade, William Hoyt, Everett Worthington, and colleagues, Luskin’s model is filed as an alternative to the two dominant protocols, Robert Enright’s process model and Worthington’s REACH, and grouped with other approaches too sparsely studied to analyze on their own. Templeton’s own retrospective names Enright’s and Worthington’s programs as the two with the strongest research support and puts everything else in a second tier with positive but limited evidence. Luskin sold more books than either of them.

The corporate work is where the claims outrun the design. In a project run with volunteers from four American Express Financial Services market groups, 120 participants completed one of eight pilots measuring the effect of emotional competence and forgiveness training on sales and quality of life. The training, called Maximizing Your Talent, opened with a one-day workshop, defined emotional competence in the morning, taught forgiveness and stress reduction in the afternoon, and continued through individual development plans and follow-up sessions. Luskin, Rick Aberman, and Anthony DeLorenzo reported in 2005 that the trained advisers averaged 24 percent more in gross sales than a matched control. The report sits with the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations rather than in a journal. The participants volunteered. The outcome measure was revenue in a bull market. The number gets cited in consulting decks two decades later as though it were a coefficient.

Luskin now teaches mindfulness and positive psychology to executives through Stanford’s Graduate School of Business executive education program and coaches several Stanford athletic teams. He has worked as a research associate in preventive cardiology and a lecturer in wellness education at the medical school, and as a senior consultant in wellness at Vaden Health Center. Forgive for Good and Forgive for Love have together sold more than 225,000 copies. In 2025 New Harbinger published The Forgive for Good Recovery Workbook with Lyndon Harris and Herb Kaighan, applying the nine steps to addiction. Harris is a former Episcopal priest who ran a service mission for the responders at the World Trade Center site for more than eight months and whose life came apart afterward.

So a technique developed on a wounded friendship, tested on Stanford undergraduates who were screened for openness, extended to seventeen bereaved people from Belfast without a control group, and sold to financial advisers as a revenue lever, is now offered as a road map out of opioid and alcohol dependence. Each step is defensible. The chain is longer than the evidence under it.

The objections are older than the research. In 2002 the psychologist Sharon Lamb and the philosopher Jeffrie Murphy (1940-2020) published Before Forgiving, arguing that psychotherapy had adopted forgiveness as a strategy without examining it, and asking when a therapist should decline to recommend it and when the recommendation does harm. Their position is that forgiving a wrongdoer who has shown no remorse damages the victim’s self-respect and can reinforce the victimization. Murphy‘s Getting Even makes the affirmative case that anger, resentment, and the wish for revenge deserve more standing in moral and legal life than they are given, and that forgiveness should be granted more selectively. He also wrote the foreword to Thomas Brudholm‘s Resentment’s Virtue, on Jean Améry, which examines the assumption that a victim who forgives is a moral model and a victim who refuses is a patient.

James McNulty reported in 2011 that spouses who tended to express forgiveness had partners who reported more psychological and physical aggression. Over four years of marriage, aggression stayed flat for the more forgiving and declined for the less forgiving. His later work with Michelle Russell found the effect turns on the offender’s agreeableness: forgiveness reduced reoffending among agreeable partners and increased it among disagreeable ones, who read the forgiveness as permission. Enright and Richard Fitzgibbons answer that McNulty’s items measure excusing and letting go rather than forgiveness, and that people scoring high on his scale may be the ones doing the most condoning, which is what leaves them exposed. The dispute is about measurement.

Luskin answers that an unenforceable rule is dropped as a demand. Nothing in the nine steps requires the injured person to remain in the room, drop a lawsuit, or tell the offender anything. His formulation of the goal is “being resilient when things don’t go the way you want.”

The weak point in that answer is causal. The training works by lowering the physiological cost of an unchanged situation. Lowering the cost of tolerating something lowers the pressure to leave it. Whether the net effect on any given person is freedom or entrapment depends on facts the training does not measure, and the corporate application, which teaches emotional regulation to employees inside institutions the employees do not control, does not measure them either. A method that reduces the somatic cost of grievance is, in a workplace, indistinguishable from a method that reduces the rate of complaint.

In March 2026 he gave interviews on a new study of dispositional forgivingness alongside Richard Cowden of Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, whose findings come out of the Global Flourishing Study, a two-wave analysis across twenty-two countries published in Nature. The field he entered when it had fifty studies now runs on samples of hundreds of thousands. His own contribution remains a six-week class and a nine-step list.

In the 2025 workbook he describes what his own injury gave him: empathy for people who are hurt, and “a bullshit detector that hears how people choose to stay stuck in victim mode.”

A man who could not stop telling one story about one wedding built a method for hearing when other people cannot stop telling theirs, and he built it from a cardiologist’s finding that rage shortens lives. What he took from religion was the obligation. What he left behind was the confession, the repentance, and the second party. A skill can be taught to seventeen people from Belfast in a week. It can also be assigned by an employer, priced at $255, and required as a condition of getting along. Both follow from the same translation, and the second is the reason the first traveled.

Sources

Core narrative scene (Encina Hall, workshop scenes, Magee, Watts, Campbell, Marshall, Bradley, Mayberg, Hellar, the cactus, the grievance story, $255 fee, Esalen, the vegetarian restaurant, the friend and the wedding, Bland’s diagram, HOPE origins): Joan O’C. Hamilton, “Peace Work,” Stanford Magazine, May/June 2001

Birth date, parents, marriages, children: Contemporary Authors entry via Encyclopedia.com · Degrees and the school-psychologist employment sequence: Prabook

Thoresen: Wikipedia (dates) · Stanford GSE obituary · Mercury News obituary · Recurrent Coronary Prevention Project with Meyer Friedman

Templeton funding and the growth of the field · Worthington’s 2024 response to positive-psychology critiques, with the 1998 figures

Pilot study design and exclusion criteria

HOPE 2 full results table · HOPE 1 · Sierra Leone project (18-page PDF, unexamined here)

Randomized trial: Harris, Luskin, Norman, Standard, Bruning, Evans, Thoresen, Journal of Clinical Psychology 62(6), 2006 · sample composition and four-month follow-up as summarized by Greater Good in Action · Luskin, Ginzburg, Thoresen 2005, Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 29: 163-184 · Tibbits, Ellis, Piramelli, Luskin, Lukman, hypertension, Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling 60, 2006

Placement in the meta-analytic literature: Wade, Hoyt, Kidwell, Worthington, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 82(1), 2014 · Lundahl, Taylor, Stevenson, Roberts 2008 · Akhtar and Barlow 2018

American Express / Ameriprise study: Luskin, Aberman, DeLorenzo 2005, Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations · design summary · the 24 percent figure as it circulates

Critiques: Lamb and Murphy, Before Forgiving (Oxford, 2002) · Murphy, Getting Even · Murphy foreword to Brudholm’s Resentment’s Virtue · McNulty 2011 · McNulty and Russell 2016 · Enright and Fitzgibbons reply

Present positions, sales figures, 2025 workbook, Lyndon Harris: Greater Good · Fred Luskin · The Forgive for Good Recovery Workbook · the “bullshit detector” line is from the workbook’s introduction, reproduced at Dokumen.pub

March 2026 interview alongside Richard Cowden, Global Flourishing Study

The Hero and the Cuff

In February 2001 seventeen people from Belfast sat in a room at Stanford and answered a question on a printed form. On a scale of one to ten, how much does it hurt right now.

The average answer was 6.5. Seven days later the same seventeen people answered the same question and the average was 4.1. Nine of them were Catholic and eight were Protestant. Every one of them had a parent, a child, a spouse, or a sibling who had been murdered.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) would have wanted to know what happened to the missing 2.4.

Becker’s argument is that a man carries two intolerable pieces of knowledge. He will die, and he suspects he does not count. The first he can do nothing about. The second he can, and the doing of it is what Becker called a hero system: a scheme of cosmic significance that assigns a man a role, tells him what counts as a good performance, and promises that the performance outlasts the body. Every culture supplies one. Most men take the one they are handed. The system is experienced as reality.

A grievance is a hero system. It is cheap, it is portable, and it needs no congregation. It supplies a protagonist, an antagonist, a wrong that demands correction, and a future in which the correction arrives. It confers standing. The man who has been wronged is owed, and to be owed is to exist in someone else’s ledger. That is not nothing. For a great many people it is the only entry they have.

Luskin found this out. His best man married and did not invite him. He told the story of the slight for years. He knew the friendship was finished and he kept litigating it anyway, which is the behavior of a man who needs the case more than the verdict.

What he built out of that is a curriculum for taking the case away.

His own definition of forgiveness in Forgive for Good ends with the injured man learning to “become a hero instead of a victim in the story you tell.” He used the word. He understood that he was in the business of role reassignment. What he did not say, and may never have thought through, is that a role is issued by a system, that there are many systems, and that the one he was issuing from had a very short list of things it could count.

His method presents as removal. This is the part worth slowing down on.

You hold an unenforceable rule. The friend must invite you. The husband must understand. The father must apologize. Luskin’s teaching is that the rule is not a rule at all, because you have no jurisdiction, and that what you took for a moral fact is a wish with a badge on. Take the badge off. You are left with a preference. Nothing has been added. An illusion has been withdrawn, and what remains is the situation as it stands.

Then you hold a grievance story. It began as an account and hardened into a performance with a villain at the center, embellished, rehearsed, and slanted. Strip the embellishment. Nothing added. An accuracy restored.

Then your body reacts to a nine-year-old betrayal as though a man were coming through the door. Breathe. Attention to the region of the heart. The alarm was false. Nothing added. A false alarm silenced.

Three subtractions and out. This is the most persuasive thing about the system and the least examined.

Look at what got installed while the removals were happening. A self whose feelings are its own property and its own responsibility. A body understood as an asset with a maintenance schedule and a depreciation curve. A lifespan understood as the thing worth protecting, such that anything shortening it is thereby suspect. An offender with no standing, no debt, and no obligation to appear. And, holding all of it up, a universe with no bailiff.

An unenforceable rule is unenforceable only where no court sits. Tell a man his demand cannot be enforced and you have told him something about the furniture of the cosmos, and he will either agree with you or he will not, and if he does not, then your first subtraction was an amputation.

Take the word forgiveness and put it in six rooms.

In Luskin’s room it is private, unilateral, free of charge, and complete without the offender’s knowledge. When Patricia Magee asked before flying to California whether the forgiveness could happen only inside her own head, since she would not stand in front of Martin’s killers in a million years, she was told yes, and that this was the goal, and she came. The transaction has one party. It costs the murderer nothing and he need never learn it occurred. It is measurable on the Rye scale before and after.

Now the second room. In a Galilee village, a killing sets a process in motion. The clans appoint representatives who sign an authorization binding them to whatever the mediating committee decides. The committee negotiates a truce. The offending family offers a first payment, accepted in front of the community, and after that it is a disgrace for the bereaved family to take vengeance. The committee investigates and rules, and the ruling includes a sum to redeem the blood of the dead. It ends in a ceremony in the village square. One mediator’s account of why anyone consents: in Arab culture nothing stands higher than forgiveness, and the man who had the power to refuse and chose otherwise has reached the height of honor.

Put a jaha mediator in the Encina Hall lounge. He listens to the seven days of curriculum. He asks one question.

Who came to the door.

Nobody came, he is told. The offenders were released in a prisoner exchange and live down the street.

Then what has been given up, he says, and to whom, and what did the giving buy her.

In his system forgiveness is a public act that raises the forgiver’s rank, extracted from the offender’s kin at a price, witnessed, and irreversible because reversing it would shame two hundred people. In Luskin’s system it is a private adjustment that raises nothing, costs the offender nothing, and can be undone next Tuesday when she sees them on the street. Both men use the English word forgiveness. They are not describing the same object. They are barely describing the same species of act.

The third room. Maimonides (1138-1204) holds that Yom Kippur does not touch a sin against another man until the offender has made restitution and appeased the one he wronged. The offender must ask, and if refused must return with three of his friends, and again, and a third time, and if the wronged man still refuses, then the offender may go, and the sin now rests on the man who would not forgive.

Read the order of operations. Forgiveness is a response. It has a trigger and the trigger is the offender’s approach. A man who forgives before being asked has not fulfilled the law; he has skipped a step that was not his to skip, and he has denied the offender the appeasement that the offender’s own atonement required. The grievance is held in trust. It is released on presentation.

And there is a status clause. Maimonides also holds that a Torah scholar insulted in public may not forgive his honor, and is punished if he does, because the insult is not to him but to the Torah he carries. He should bear the grudge like a snake until the offender comes to him.

So within one hero system, one law, one author, the same act is obligatory for one man and forbidden for another, and the difference is rank. A grievance can be personal property, or it can be an office you hold. Luskin’s method has no way to represent the second case. It has no field for rank. It asks what the grievance is costing you, and the man holding an office answers that the cost is irrelevant, because the grievance is not his.

The fourth room. A Catholic priest hears the confession, assigns the penance, and pronounces the absolution. Three parties, a formula, a matter, a minister. The penitent’s peace of mind is a fruit of the sacrament and not the sacrament. Ask him what he makes of nine steps that produce peace without a confessor and he will say that peace is available by many routes, some of them grace and some of them technique, and that a man may be calm and unabsolved.

The fifth room. Pashtunwali. Badal comes first. The obligation to avenge a wrong falls not only on the man who suffered it but on his family and his tribe, which is why insults propagate and feuds outlive their causes. Feuds can be settled, through blood compensation, through mediation, through nanawatai, when the weaker party puts himself at the other’s mercy and the offer of peace is accepted. There are exits. All of them run through the collective.

A Pashtun elder given the nine steps would not call the man who used them forgiving. He would call him a thief. The grievance was joint property. Its holder was a trustee. He has disposed of an asset belonging to men not yet born, in exchange for a lower resting heart rate, and he did it without convening anyone.

The sixth room has fluorescent light and a folding table. A shop steward has a grievance form in front of him. In his trade the word means a filing, a step, a right secured by contract and enforceable by arbitration. The word Luskin uses for a pathology is the word he uses for a remedy. Bring him the training. He reads the corporate version, the one Luskin delivered to a hundred and twenty financial advisers with development plans and follow-up sessions, and he says what any steward says.

You’re telling my members their rules are unenforceable. My rules are in Article 12.

He is not being obtuse. He is reading correctly. A method that lowers the somatic cost of an unchanged situation lowers the pressure to change it. In a marriage that may be freedom. On a shop floor it is a reduction in filings, and reductions in filings have a dollar value, and somebody paid for the workshop.

Now take the word peace.

Luskin’s formulation is that forgiveness is another way of describing peacefulness, and elsewhere that the essence of the thing is “being resilient when things don’t go the way you want.” Peace here is a state of the nervous system. It has a pulse, a blood pressure, a Cohen score, a Spielberger score. It is the condition of a man for whom nothing is currently ringing the alarm.

Byron Bland, standing in the same building, meant something else. His framing of the Northern Irish problem after the 1997 ceasefire was that the question had changed from how to reach a deal into how to build relationships capable of holding one. Peace for him is a load-bearing structure between hostile populations. It is not a state of anyone’s body. It could exist in a country full of anxious people and fail in a country full of calm ones.

And the people Bland was addressing meant a third thing, which he had the honesty to draw on a sheet of paper in front of them. A death in the middle. The family on one side. The community on the other. Because the community holds that it owns the death as fully as the family does, it does not honor the family’s wish to heal, and it keeps the hatred and the revenge in service of its own politics.

That is the traditionalist and tribal position stated by a Presbyterian minister to a room of the bereaved, and it deserves better than the treatment it usually gets, which is to be filed under pathology. The community’s claim is coherent. A people whose accounts are open cannot afford members who close their own accounts privately, because each private closure lowers the price of the next injury. The community is not being cruel when it withholds permission to heal. It is defending a deterrent. Any man who has watched his group absorb a hit and do nothing understands what happens to the next hit.

Brendan Bradley had lost five relatives. His summary was that people will tell you they understand and they do not. He was talking about the outsiders. He may also, without meaning to, have been describing the room.

A Stoic freedman would side with Luskin more than with anyone else here, and the resemblance is genealogical rather than coincidental, since the rational-emotive therapy Luskin built on descends from that line. Epictetus (c. 50-135) taught a man to sort the world into what is up to him and what is not, and to keep his judgments in the first pile. What separates them is the warrant. The Stoic wants his opinions correct because the cosmos is rational and his soul should match it. Luskin wants them corrected because misjudgment dumps cholesterol into the blood. The technique survives the change of warrant. The reason for caring does not, and the reason is what a hero system is made of.

Take responsibility, which in his lineage means taking responsibility for your own emotions.

For Luskin that is emancipation. Your feeling is yours, it is produced inside you, and the man who caused it has no further control over the production line. He has been fired from the job of managing your inner weather.

For a gacaca court in Rwanda or a commissioner at a truth commission, responsibility runs the other way. It means the offender stands up and says what he did while the relatives listen. The victim’s interior is not the object. The public record is the object.

For a sponsor at a twelve-step table, responsibility means the fourth step and the eighth: a written inventory, a list of persons harmed, and amends made to them in person. That tradition agrees with Luskin about resentment more strongly than any church does. It holds resentment to be the chief destroyer of the alcoholic. And it prescribes confession to another human being and restitution to the injured party, which is exactly what Luskin’s private method dispenses with.

That collision is now inside a book. The 2025 recovery workbook carries Luskin’s name, Lyndon Harris’s, and Herb Kaighan’s, and applies the nine steps to addiction. Two hero systems have been merged in one paperback. One says get right with the people you hurt, out loud, by name, and then keep doing it for the rest of your life among witnesses. The other says the injury’s grip on your body is the target and the second party is optional. They can be made to cooperate. They cannot both be the ground.
Amazon

And take health, which is the warrant under everything.

Health arrived in this story from cardiology. Thoresen’s father died of a heart attack when Thoresen was nineteen, and Thoresen spent a quarter century with Meyer Friedman demonstrating that a modified temper produces a modified recurrence rate in men who have already had one infarction. Anger became a clinical variable before it became a moral one. Luskin’s dissertation stands in that inheritance, and the whole persuasive force of Forgive for Good is that it can offer a number.

An argument that runs on health can recommend only what is good for the body. It cannot form a sentence about what is worth dying for, and it cannot form a sentence about what is worth being sick for. It is not defective. It has a jurisdiction, and the jurisdiction ends at the skin.

Put four men in front of the same finding. The executive in the eight-hour session at the Graduate School of Business hears capacity and a longer earning arc. His employer hears fewer claims and fewer complaints. A man from a tradition of martyrdom hears a bad trade offered in confident language and declines it, because his people’s dead are not a stressor to be down-regulated. And a hospice nurse hears something Luskin would endorse and the executive would not, which is that a man with eleven weeks left has no cardiovascular reason to forgive anyone and might still want to.

How much of this does he know.

Some. He drew the line between forgiveness and reconciliation and enforced it, which is the single most protective thing in his system, because it meant no woman in that room was told to go back to anyone. He excluded violence and sexual abuse from the early trials rather than overclaim. He posted the Belfast data with the two participants who came out less forgiving left in. He says of his own equipment that his injury gave him empathy and “a bullshit detector that hears how people choose to stay stuck in victim mode.” That sentence knows that the victim role is chosen, which is to say it knows the role is a role.

What he appears not to have priced is that he is a vendor. His method is superb at the thing it measures and silent about the thing it changes. He has never studied whether the training reduces exit, whether the calm employee files less, whether the peaceful wife stays longer than she should, whether a population trained to be at peace with no asks for less. The question is answerable. It requires only a follow-up measure of behavior rather than affect, and in thirty years nobody in that program has taken it. That is what happens when a hero system tells you what to count.

His own hero. He is a clinician who buys years and pays for them in narrative, and his own immortality is the two hundred and twenty-five thousand copies and the seventeen people who slept better in Palo Alto. It is an American shape, built in a laboratory that had already proved that temper kills, funded by a foundation looking for virtues that scan, and sold in the only currency the country reliably accepts, which is a number attached to a lifespan.

The rival he never names is not the vengeful man. He handles the vengeful man easily. His rival is the man with a court: the halakhist whose grievance is held in trust until the offender comes with three witnesses, the elder whose grievance belongs to a lineage, the steward whose grievance is in Article 12, the widow whose village will assemble in the square when the price is paid. To all of them the phrase unenforceable rule is not a discovery but a jurisdictional claim, and one they reject. He has no argument against them. He has a blood pressure reading, which they have already told him is beside the point.

And the cost he cannot put a figure on is the one his instruments were never built to see. He took a duty that had cost the offender something and made it a skill that costs the injured man nothing, which is precisely why it travels, and a skill can be assigned, priced at two hundred and fifty-five dollars, taught to a hundred and twenty financial advisers, and made a condition of getting along. What the seventeen gave up in Encina Hall was 2.4 points of hurt and some part of the only office some of them had ever held. He measured the first with a clipboard. There is no clipboard for the second, and he did not build one, and the absence of that instrument is the research.

Sources

Becker‘s framework: The Denial of Death (1973) and Escape from Evil (1975).

Luskin’s own use of “hero”: the definition appears in Forgive for Good and is quoted at Montessori.org · his formulation of forgiveness as resilience, Greater Good · the “bullshit detector” line from the 2025 workbook’s introduction, The Forgive for Good Recovery Workbook

Sulha: the authorization, truce, first payment, blood redemption, and village-square ceremony, Business Conflict Management and ResearchGate · the mediator on forgiveness as the height of honor, Sharon Lang, “Sulha Peacemaking and the Politics of Persuasion”

Maimonides: Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah 2:9-10, and Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chayim 606:1 for the three requests and the transfer of sin, Sefaria and Unpacked · the Torah scholar who may not forgive his honor, Hilchot Teshuva

Pashtunwali, badal and nanawatai: GlobalSecurity.org and National Strategy

The corporate program, one hundred and twenty participants and eight pilots: Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations

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James C. Weidmann and the Making of Chateau Heartiste

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

On April 9, 2007, an anonymous man in Washington published a post called “Endless Dating.” He argued that prolonged serial dating and late marriage could not last, and that one of two things would follow. Either humans would evolve into animals capable of decades of hookups without turning to cats and pornography, or the people who dated serially and delayed children would fail to have enough of them, and selection would settle the matter. Twelve more posts followed that month. When a reader asked about the sex ratio at birth, the author answered in lowercase, offered sex-selective abortion and then the spontaneous abortion of male fetuses, floated pollutants, and closed by saying the imbalance meant nothing anyway because older men date younger women and no reverse trend compensates. The reader had asked a question. He received a ruling.

The scale was already larger than the evidence. That was the method, and it held for twelve years.

The archive index at heartiste.org lists every month of the run. Adding the monthly counts gives 5,409 posts between April 9, 2007, and May 9, 2019. The yearly totals are 153, 312, 299, 328, 288, 322, 378, 410, 555, 519, 677, 851, and then 317 in the final partial year. Anyone can check the sum in five minutes. The numbers matter later, because they contradict the way this story is usually told.

He called himself Roissy. In Story of O, published in Paris in 1954 by Anne Desclos (1907-1998) under the name Pauline Réage, with a preface by Jean Paulhan (1884-1968), a woman is taken to a château at Roissy and trained to serve a group of men. Choosing that name for a Washington dating blog was a claim about the reader as much as the writer. It said: this is not a seminar for men who cannot get dates. This is literature with a Continental pedigree.

Most of his readers had no idea. In a comment thread in March 2010, one man asked whether “Chateau” meant the author's studio apartment. Another sighed that he guessed nobody there had heard of Story of O. A third supplied the title of the sequel, Return to the Château, and added that it ended badly. The allusion worked as furniture. The house had a name in French and a man at the door.

The furniture was elaborate. Readers who submitted their own encounters did not simply email; they arrived. One rapped the wrought iron lion knocker seeking admittance. One whispered the password to the Chateau consigliere. One donned the black robes of a guest. At the end of the post the doors creaked shut and the readers were escorted to the property gate. The site ran standing features the way a magazine runs departments: Alpha Assessment, Beta of the Month and later Beta of the Year, Comment of the Week, Shiv of the Week, Hamster of the Month, Dating Market Value Test for Men, Dating Market Value Test for Women. Men wrote in with their failures and received numbered options for what they should have texted instead.

One device did more work than any of the others. In the comment threads the proprietor did not reply in his own comment. He inserted a bracketed line inside another man's comment, lowercase, signed only “editor.” A reader's paragraph stands, and then, within it, beneath it, the ruling. No thread got away from him. A man could argue in the comments of Chateau Heartiste, and he could win against other commenters, and he could never have the last word.

Watch one thread. March 25, 2010, a post titled “Alpha Assessment: Big Tease Edition.” A reader named RF submits a text exchange in which a woman gives him her number, then tells him the next night that she is with her boyfriend, and he replies with “lol.” The proprietor spends four paragraphs establishing that the “lol” was a catastrophe, that it told her she had drawn blood, and then lists three better answers, ranked. Below, the commenters have noticed something else. Shel goes off topic: “Roissy in DC” sounded classy, well off, lucid, slightly predatory, and “Citizen Renegade” sounds like a basement, sophomoric, defensive. Switch it back. Stu asks what the name change is about. Carlton Grey asks whether the name is Chateau now. Charlie asks whether Chateau means his studio apartment, and gets the bracketed reply that Charlie has him confused with the bike messenger currently sleeping with Charlie's mother. Then, inside a friendly comment from a man called Dally, the editor explains himself: he had not been in Washington in a long while, so a name change was overdue, and beyond that, “i needed a new incarnation to keep me interested in doing this blog.”

That is a writer describing his own maintenance problem, in lowercase, in brackets, in the middle of someone else's paragraph. The persona had to be refreshed or the man behind it would stop.

The names moved in sequence. Roissy in DC on a WordPress subdomain, then Citizen Renegade by March 2010 while the underlying address stayed roissy.wordpress.com, then Chateau Heartiste at heartiste.wordpress.com, then, after 2019, heartiste.org. Anyone reconstructing the chronology from the surviving archive has to be careful here. The bylines and internal links in the old posts were normalized during the migrations, so a 2010 post now carries the byline Heartiste and links to pages that did not yet exist under that name. The comment text was not rewritten. When the archive and the comments disagree about what the site was called on a given day, the comments are the better witness.

The doctrine is easy to summarize and was designed to be. Men fall along a scale from alpha to beta. The alpha generates desire; the beta supplies attention, money, security, and emotional labor and is spent rather than wanted. Attraction obeys triggers, and the triggers can be learned. Marriage suspends nothing. Two maxims from 2009 carried the argument for a decade: marriage offers no escape from the sexual market and the possibility of being outbid, and for many women five minutes of alpha outweighs five years of beta.

The bargain the blog offered was not sexual technique. It was interpretation. A man arrived with a humiliation and left with a theory that made the humiliation legible and, better, general. He had not failed. He had been operating on false information supplied by a culture that told pretty lies, which was the site's tagline: “Where pretty lies perish.” His pain was tuition. Once he paid it he belonged to a small number of men who could see.

The style suited the bargain. He compressed well. He could take a diffuse social anxiety and reduce it to a line that sounded a century old. Never say it first. Give less than she gives. Keep her uncertain. Apologize twice in a lifetime and choose the occasions. Presented as tactics, these would have invited testing. Presented as commandments, numbered in Roman numerals, they invited obedience and memorization.

The epistemic architecture is where the interesting work is, and it was built to be closed. A woman who chose a dominant man confirmed the theory. A woman who chose a gentle man was buying security, concealing her preferences, or running what the site called the rationalization hamster. A faithful marriage had not yet met the right temptation. A man who objected on moral grounds was a white knight performing chivalry for sexual return, and his objection became evidence about him. The vocabulary classified dissent before the dissent could be heard. That is efficient and it is fatal, because a system that converts every counterexample into a confirmation has stopped taking information from the world.

The site kept a permanent department for external validation: a category called Science Validates Game, 106 posts. In one of the last, from May 6, 2019, a political science paper finding that public apologies do not help politicians is read as confirmation of Commandment VIII, which had been published eleven years earlier. The literature arrived to ratify a conclusion already in force. Kate Barber, writing in Discourse, Context & Media in 2025, describes a related habit in extremist blogging. Embedded hyperlinks give an assertion the visual look of documentation while pointing at the writer's own site or at ideologically allied ones, and readers rarely click. She calls the effect quasi-objectification: the appearance of third-party responsibility for a claim the writer is making on his own authority. Chateau Heartiste appears in her material as one of the destinations.

Some of the observations underneath all this were sound, which is why the site worked. Desire is not a reward for good conduct. Kindness compels nothing. Status affects intimacy. People misreport their own motives, to others and to themselves. Marriage does not end competition. Most published relationship advice in 2007 was sentimental and told readers what they wanted to hear. A writer willing to say these things had material, and for several years he used it on particular people in particular rooms.

Then the particulars thinned. The woman at the bar in Dupont Circle became the American female. The unsuccessful man became a national type. The numbers show the change and they show something else that gets missed. Output ran near 300 posts a year from 2008 through 2013, rose to 555 in 2015, dipped to 519 in the election year of 2016, then climbed to 677 in 2017 and 851 in 2018. The peak month in the entire run is October 2018, with 128 posts. The site was at its most productive after Trump's election, not during the campaign, and by then its subject was no longer dating.

The category counts show what it had become. Game holds 1,101 posts and Girls 1,012, which is what you would expect. Ugly Truths holds 1,393. Culture holds 870, Goodbye America 759, Current Events 722, Globalization 443, Psy Ops 363, Trumperica 264, and a category using a slur-laden phrase about Jewish influence holds 275. Physiognomy Is Real holds 94. A man can file his own work and, in doing so, tell you what it was.

The political translation ran on a concept that transferred without modification. In seduction, the man who accepted the woman's emotional premises had lost the frame and would lose everything after it. In politics, the man who accepted his opponent's language had conceded before the argument started. Answer inside the categories and you lose; refuse the categories and you win. Donald Trump (b. 1946) fit the template on performance rather than policy. He boasted, exaggerated, insulted, declined to apologize, and appeared undamaged. The beta male stopped being the man who failed with women and became the journalist, the academic, the moderate conservative, the White man unwilling to defend his group.

Matthew N. Lyons, writing for Political Research Associates on January 20, 2017, listed James Weidmann under the name Roissy among alt-right figures who had also been active in the manosphere, and described “significant overlap between the manosphere and the Alt Right” across 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit. The site's own blogroll makes the same argument from the inside, and more precisely. It runs under three headings. GAME lists Roosh V, Rational Male, Krauser. MAGA MEN lists Steve Sailer (b. 1958), American Renaissance, Unqualified Reservations by Curtis Yarvin (b. 1973), Vox Popoli, West Hunter, Lion of the Blogosphere. A third heading, SYLLOGISM AND SYNTHESIS, lists Overcoming Bias by Robin Hanson (b. 1959), Arts & Letters Daily, and hbd chick. Read as a claim, the arrangement says that pickup writing, race science, academic contrarianism, and open racial nationalism form one continuous library, and that a man who reads the first shelf should feel no jolt reaching the last. That claim, presented as a sidebar, did more recruiting than most of the essays.

The synthesis never resolved two problems, and the archive's own filing system names them. A category called Marriage Is For Chumps holds 133 posts. The site spent years teaching men that marriage was a provisioning arrangement offering no protection, that the successful man kept his options and his leverage, and that emotional investment was a transfer to the other party. It also spent years arguing that White birth rates were collapsing and that women owed their people fidelity and children. A doctrine that praises male defection and demands female loyalty has a hole in the middle of it. The second problem is smaller in the writing and larger in the politics: the seduction theory was individualist to the bone, addressed to the exceptional man who could exploit a disordered market, and the racial program required solidarity from men who had been told for a decade that solidarity was how betas got used. Neoreaction wanted durable institutions and formal authority. The Chateau ran on opportunism. Nobody at the time reconciled these, and the reconciliation was not attempted.

The outing came early, which changes the standard chronology. On August 8, 2009, a Canadian feminist blogger published the name James C. Weidmann, asserted that his job involved investigating financial fraud, argued that a man employed to expose fraud should not be teaching men to defraud women, and called on his supposed employer and the D.C. police to hold him accountable. That is nine years and nine months before the blog ended. The name was in circulation, attached to an employer claim, from the second full year of the site's life.

He did not respond by stopping. He did not respond by changing register, or by publishing under his own name, or by sitting for an interview. He kept writing anonymous posts as though the outing had not happened, and the output rose afterward rather than falling. The later citations, David Futrelle's in December 2016 and Lyons's in January 2017, did not reveal the name. They normalized it. A claim that had lived in feminist blogs and hostile wikis became a line in a research report, and from there passed into academic writing, a Harvard-published glossary of red pill terms, and a 2021 report from Hope Not Hate on the overlap between misogyny and antisemitism. That is how attributions harden. Repetition in respectable venues, not confirmation.

WordPress removed the site in the second week of May 2019 and issued no itemized public explanation. Four accounts of that week survive, and each one is coherent from where its author stood.

At Lion of the Blogosphere the commenters sound bereaved. One writes that the deplatforming is beyond demoralizing. Another asks the missing man directly for instructions: CH, please advise, how can we help. A third works through the technical lesson, that hosting on someone else's servers exposes you and self-hosting only moves the problem to the ISP. These are men who had lost a room.

A sympathetic blogger reads it as a sequence. First the news industry, then social media, now hosting providers, and after that isolation, which is where tyranny starts.

A hostile blogger, writing at The Night Wind on May 13, 2019, makes the opposite argument on the same facts and takes the trouble to check something. He observes that the man ran a second WordPress site, a photojournal called Goodbye, America, that the second site stayed up with comments open, and that WordPress prohibits fairly narrow things. His conclusion: “Weidmann didn't get suspended for what he said, but for what he did.” He guesses incitement, on the strength of the race war material.

And Tyler Cowen (b. 1962) posted at Marginal Revolution on May 12, 2019, four sentences of economics. He remembered the years when a blog like his own would have had no platform at all, then the sudden arrival of millions of niches, and then the recent removals. By his accounting the internet had gained say 99 instead of say 100, and he advised against overreacting to the endowment effect of having briefly felt one had everything. Most of the removed sites he had never read.

Nobody in that week wrote about the women in the posts.

Seven years later the archive is still there The most recent post at heartiste.org is dated May 9, 2019, and the comment counts under the final entries are frozen: 64, 65, 171, 306. The footer reads 2026. The page metadata identifies the software as WooCommerce, and a banner at the bottom links to a chaga mushroom vendor with a tracking code. The site offers a Tor address. In the sidebar, above the category list, a live feed carries posts from a Gab account using the name Gaul Atreides, updated within the last week, writing in the house style about crime statistics, immigration, interracial couples, and Jewish influence, and advising that White women who cross the color line should be named and shamed.

James C. Weidmann is the standard attribution for Roissy, Citizen Renegade, and Heartiste, in circulation since 2009 and repeated by researchers, journalists, and reference works since. Here is what it does not support: a birth date, an education, a confirmed employer, a family, a current city, or an answer to whether the man writes today under another name. The employment claims, an accountant, a financial industry regulator, a nonprofit inside the Beltway, come from outing posts and hostile wikis and have never been confirmed on the record by anyone in a position to know. There is also a rumor about his ancestry, floated by rivals inside his own movement, who used the doctrine he had built to raise a question about whether he belonged to the people he claimed to defend. A writer who spends a decade teaching men to classify one another gets classified.

Lyons documented the overlap in personnel and platforms. Robin Mamié, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, and Robert West, at the ACM Web Science conference in 2021, tested the pipeline claim against more than 300 million comments across 115 subreddits and 526 YouTube channels between 2006 and 2018, and their result is more useful than either side's slogan. Users posting in pickup subreddits migrated to alt-right subreddits at rates above their comparison groups. Users commenting on pickup YouTube channels did not. Taken in aggregate the manosphere fed the alt-right less than the alt-lite did. Channels existed. A conveyor belt did not.

What Chateau Heartiste supplied was a grammar. Alpha and beta, frame and framing, cuck, hamster, pedestal, shiv. Terms invented to explain why a woman left a bar with one man rather than another turned out to be portable, and once a man had learned to see a dating scene as a status contest with a hidden hierarchy, he could see an election, an immigration debate, or a newsroom the same way, and feel that he was applying knowledge rather than acquiring an opinion. The grammar made politics feel bodily and personal, which is the source of both its reach and its unreliability.

He never converted any of it into a career. Neil Strauss (b. 1969) got a mass-market book out of the pickup world. Daryush Valizadeh (b. 1979) got books, a forum, a lecture tour, and eventually a religious conversion and a repudiation. Richard Spencer (b. 1978) got an organization and a press corps. Weidmann got 5,409 posts and a domain. When the audience moved to video, podcasts, and live audio, a voice with no face and no name had nowhere to go. The anonymity that made the persona credible, the observer who classified everyone and could be classified by no one, also fixed a ceiling on it. The asymmetry was the whole product. Give it up and the product is gone; keep it and the product cannot travel.

Sources

First post: “Endless Dating,” April 9, 2007, including the comment thread where he answers the sex-ratio question
The March 2010 renaming thread, with the reader comments (shel, Stu, Carlton Grey, Charlie, Dally) and the bracketed editor replies, including “i needed a new incarnation to keep me interested in doing this blog” Front page as of July 26, 2026: last native post May 9, 2019; 2026 copyright line; WooCommerce metadata; chaga affiliate banner; Tor address; the Gaul Atreides Gab feed
The post-count arithmetic: the monthly archive dropdown appears in the sidebar of every page on heartiste.org. Yearly totals 153 / 312 / 299 / 328 / 288 / 322 / 378 / 410 / 555 / 519 / 677 / 851 / 317, total 5,409. Peak month October 2018 at 128. I summed these myself; the claim that output peaked in 2017-2018 rather than 2016 is mine and rests entirely on that sum, so check it if you use it.
Category counts (Ugly Truths 1,393; Game 1,101; Girls 1,012; Culture 870; Goodbye America 759; Current Events 722; Globalization 443; Psy Ops 363; GloboHomoBezos 295; the antisemitic category 275; Trumperica 264; Marriage Is For Chumps 133; Science Validates Game 106; Physiognomy Is Real 94) also come from that same sidebar.
“Science Validates Game” example, the apology study read as confirming Commandment VIII eleven years later
The blogroll headings and their contents (GAME / MAGA MEN / SYLLOGISM AND SYNTHESIS) are in the same sidebar. The reading of the blogroll as an implicit continuity claim is my inference, not the site’s statement.
Two of the last posts, if you want the late register in his own words: “Women Are Anathema to Revolutionary Movements” and “Ministry of Twatter”

Attribution and identification:

The August 8, 2009 outing post, which is the earliest naming I located and which also originates the financial-regulator employment claim — This is the load-bearing correction to the received chronology. If you keep one new thing from this piece, keep this: the name was public in 2009, not 2016.
Matthew N. Lyons, “Ctrl-Alt-Delete,” Political Research Associates, January 20, 2017 — print version
Hope Not Hate, “Antisemitism and Misogyny: Overlap and Interplay,” 2021, by David Lawrence, which discusses him as a pickup writer who moved into racial and antisemitic politics. I have this from a secondhand snippet rather than the full report, so verify the page before citing. RationalWiki and incels.wiki are where most of the repeated biographical detail originates, including the accountant and FINRA claims. Both are unreliable and neither cites a primary source for any personal fact. Use them only as evidence about what circulated.

The 2019 removal, four points of view:

Readers Sympathetic reading (third pillar falling), which quotes and links the Hidden Dominion post of May 11, 2019 Hostile reading, including the observation that the second WordPress site stayed up Tyler Cowen, May 12, 2019
I checked and could not find any itemized public statement from WordPress naming the violated clause. If one exists I missed it.

Scholarship:

Kate Barber, “(Don’t) click here: Hyperlinks as a quasi-objectification strategy in epistemic legitimisation in extremists’ blog posts on sexual violence,” Discourse, Context & Media 66 (2025) 100912 — open PDF. Note the correction: her corpus is blog posts by extremist bloggers on sexual violence, and Chateau Heartiste appears as a link destination in that corpus. It is not a study of his hyperlinking. I described it accordingly.
Robin Mamié, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Robert West, “Are Anti-Feminist Communities Gateways to the Far Right?,” Web Science 2021 — The specific finding I used, that pickup subreddit users migrated to alt-right subreddits while pickup YouTube commenters did not, and that the manosphere in aggregate migrated less than the alt-lite, is in their results section.

Posted in Alt Lite, Alt Right, Dating | Comments Off on James C. Weidmann and the Making of Chateau Heartiste

If the Populists Gain Power, Who Will be Their Favorite Economists?

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

I’m not going to lie, bro. The bench of populist economists is thin.

The star is Oren Cass, who does not have a doctorate. If nationalist populism becomes the governing philosophy of the Republican Party rather than a temporary Trump coalition, Cass is the person most likely to be treated as its principal economist. American Compass supplies what the movement otherwise lacks: a connected theory of tariffs, manufacturing, labor power, family policy, immigration restriction, financialization, and national economic sovereignty. Its political ascent is already visible. Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Senator Josh Hawley have appeared at its major events. Bessent sat for a public discussion with Cass in June 2026.

Oren Cass’s importance would resemble that of John Kenneth Galbraith or Milton Friedman. He supplies the vocabulary, identifies the enemies, integrates policy fields, and tells politicians what their economic program means. He would probably become more powerful than economists with stronger academic records because he’ll be more useful.

Stephen Miran is the strongest candidate to become the movement’s technically credentialed economist. His importance is that he can translate Trump’s intuitions about tariffs, trade deficits, reserve currencies, and burden sharing into something resembling a formal macroeconomic theory. As chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, he argued that conventional trade models failed because they assumed that trade deficits would correct themselves through currency adjustment. He connected persistent deficits to the dollar’s reserve role and defended tariffs as a way to redirect investment toward the United States. Miran has since left both the CEA and Federal Reserve, but his brief ascent showed that a nationalist administration wants economists who can defend policies that most of the profession rejects.

Michael Pettis may become the deepest intellectual source. Pettis explains American deindustrialization through global savings, capital flows, suppressed foreign consumption, and the United States’ role as absorber of last resort. This gives nationalists a more sophisticated explanation of trade deficits than “foreigners are cheating us.” American Compass has already adopted his work as a central part of its globalization program. A serious nationalist government interested in managing capital inflows, the dollar, and persistent trade imbalances would eventually need Pettis more than it needs tariff slogans.

Michael Pettis will remain a favorite of the fighting, Trump-centered wing. He has an economics doctorate and possesses something more valuable in populist politics: complete willingness to attack the professional consensus in public. As of July 1, 2026, he remained Assistant to the President and Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing. Peter Navarro remained director of the National Economic Council. Navarro is likely to retain symbolic status as the economist who fought the free-trade establishment. His function is combat, justification, and bureaucratic pressure. Every time I hear him, or read him, I feel embarrassed and repulsed.

Kevin Hassett represents the continuing power of the older Republican economic establishment. He can defend tax reductions, deregulation, business investment, and conventional growth policy while accommodating Trump’s tariffs and immigration restrictions. The current administration’s program combines nationalist trade policy with large tax reductions, expensing, deregulation, and supply-side claims about investment. If the populists consolidate power without defeating the donor and business wings of the party, Hassett-style economists will remain inside the government as coalition managers.

George Borjas will be the favorite economist on immigration. His work argues that immigration can lower the wages of workers who compete most directly with new arrivals. American Compass is already using his research to argue that the H-1B system gives employers access to less mobile and less expensive labor. Nationalists will place Borjas against economists who emphasize aggregate growth, complementarities, entrepreneurship, and the relatively small average effects of immigration. He provides the movement with the simple and politically powerful proposition that labor scarcity raises worker bargaining power.

David Autor, Gordon Hanson, and David Dorn will be repeatedly cited. Their “China Shock” research established that exposure to Chinese import competition produced persistent employment and community effects that did not disappear through rapid worker relocation or adjustment. That research has already become evidentiary infrastructure for American Compass. Nationalists will invoke the findings while ignoring or opposing many of the authors’ other political positions. Autor will function as the establishment witness who admitted that the old trade story was inadequate.

Dani Rodrik will occupy a similar but more theoretical position. His argument that deep globalization, national self-government, and democratic politics cannot all be maximized simultaneously is almost perfectly designed for nationalist appropriation. His support for industrial policy and greater national policy autonomy makes him useful to them. His liberal politics, climate commitments, and opposition to authoritarianism will keep him from becoming identified with the American populist right. He will be the economist they quote when they want Harvard authority for limiting globalization.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton will be the movement’s favorite diagnosticians of working-class decline. Their research on deaths from drugs, alcohol, and suicide, and on the widening divide between Americans with and without college degrees, supplies empirical support for the claim that GDP growth concealed social disintegration. Nationalists will cite them to show that the market order failed non-college America.

Family-centered nationalism will elevate Melissa Kearney and Catherine Pakaluk. Kearney supplies mainstream empirical authority for the economic advantages associated with stable two-parent families. Pakaluk is more culturally aligned with religious and natalist conservatives. Her work examines women who deliberately choose large families despite falling fertility. Kearney would be the empirical citation. Pakaluk could become the movement intellectual.

E.J. Antoni is likely to gain official and media status if loyalty and rapid policy defense become more important than recognition inside academic economics. He is Heritage’s chief economist and has become a regular defender of the administration’s inflation, budget, and growth claims. He could become important in congressional hearings, conservative media, and staffing networks without becoming intellectually central.

Christopher Phelan and Aaron Hedlund represent another category: reputable academic macroeconomists willing to serve in a populist administration. They currently occupy the senior positions listed by the Council of Economic Advisers. Their status will depend on whether nationalist consolidation still seeks approval from academic economics. Phelan could provide institutional respectability. He is unlikely to become a mass political economist or ideological founder.

The historical canon would also change. Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek would be demoted. They would remain useful on regulation, socialism, school choice, and government bureaucracy. Arthur Laffer would survive as the authority for tax cuts.

The people moving upward in the historical canon would be Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, Henry Charles Carey, and perhaps John Maynard Keynes. Hamilton offers national development, public credit, and manufacturing. List offers productive power and infant-industry protection. Carey offers an indigenous American protectionist tradition. Keynes offers tools for managing investment, demand, capital flows, and international imbalances, although nationalist conservatives would separate those ideas from the later welfare-state Keynesianism.

The likely hierarchy according to ChatGPT is therefore:

Oren Cass as the movement builder.

Stephen Miran as the technical defender of Trump-era nationalism.

Michael Pettis as the most serious theorist of trade and capital imbalances.

Peter Navarro as the political combatant.

George Borjas as the immigration economist.

Autor, Dorn, and Hanson as the empirical witnesses for deindustrialization.

Dani Rodrik as the respectable heterodox authority.

Case and Deaton as the diagnosticians of social collapse.

Kearney and Pakaluk as the family and fertility economists.

Hassett, Phelan, and perhaps Laffer as bridges to the older Republican establishment.

The crucial point is that the nationalist-populist economic canon will be assembled issue by issue according to what is situationally convenient. Its leaders will take tariffs from Miran and Navarro, trade imbalances from Pettis, labor-market evidence from Autor and Borjas, industrial policy from Rodrik and Cass, family analysis from Kearney and Pakaluk, and tax policy from Hassett and Laffer. The political synthesis will come from Cass, Lighthizer, Bessent, and elected politicians. Most of them are not going to knock your socks off. They will provide ammunition, while those in power decide where to fire it.

The available material clusters in three areas: trade imbalances (Pettis, Autor), labor supply (Borjas), and family formation (Kearney, Pakaluk). There is no nationalist monetary theory, no nationalist account of the price level, no nationalist growth or productivity theory, and no nationalist fiscal framework. Those holes explain the personnel. Hassett (b. 1962), Warsh (b. 1970), and Laffer (b. 1940) stay inside a populist government because the movement has nothing of its own to put where they stand. The composition of the coalition follows from the gaps in the canon.

On whether economists matter, the useful literature separates channels. Daniel Hirschman and Elizabeth Popp Berman argued in 2014 that economists influence policy through three routes: professional authority, institutional position, and what Berman later called the economic style of reasoning, the cost-benefit habits embedded in agency procedure. Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist (2022) makes the case that the durable victories came through the second and third routes. Peter Hall‘s The Political Power of Economic Ideas (1989) and Mark Blyth‘s Great Transformations (2002) add that ideas do their work in periods of uncertainty, as weapons for assembling coalitions and then as blueprints for institutions. Marion Fourcade‘s Economists and Societies (2009) explains why the discipline reproduces the way it does. explains why the discipline reproduces the way it does.

Two things fall out of that literature.

First, economists hold the most power where the public is not watching. Bank capital rules, actuarial assumptions, Medicare payment formulas, the discount rate in a regulatory impact analysis. Trade and immigration are now the loudest subjects in American politics. High salience destroys technocratic authority. So the fields the populists care about most are the fields where no economist of any persuasion will govern, and the fields economists will keep governing are ones no populist will contest.

Second, the supply-side precedent settles the question of whether a thin bench is fatal. Jude Wanniski (1936-2005) was a journalist. Robert Bartley (1937-2003) was an editorial page editor. Laffer had a Stanford doctorate and modest standing in the profession. Norman Ture and Paul Craig Roberts (b. 1939) were staff economists. That group reorganized American tax policy for forty years against the near-unanimous view of academic macroeconomics. They won because they supplied a rule a congressman could state in one sentence and a staffer could apply without calling anyone, and because they spent three decades fighting over how the Joint Committee on Taxation scores a bill. A movement does not need great economists. It needs a decision procedure and a scoring convention.

Until February the tariff program ran on presidential discretion. On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court held in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs. The administration pivoted within days to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a temporary balance-of-payments surcharge capped at 150 days. That surcharge expired by operation of law on July 24, 2026, with no extension legislation pending. The replacement is a Section 301 regime proposing duties of ten to twelve and a half percent across forty-six countries, which carries no statutory sunset.

Discretion required no economists. It required one man. Section 301 and Section 232 require administrative records: country-specific findings of unreasonable or discriminatory practice, hearings, responses to comments, injury evidence, causal claims that survive review in the Court of International Trade and the Federal Circuit. That work gets done by staff economists at USTR, Commerce, and the International Trade Commission, an apparatus that has been running antidumping and countervailing injury determinations for decades without producing a single famous name. The Court did more to hand economists power over populist trade policy than any appointment could. Whether the movement can staff that apparatus is the test, and it will be settled by people who appear on nobody’s list of favorite economists.

The industrial policy toolkit is left-coded: Mazzucato (b. 1968), Ha-Joon Chang (b. 1963), Rodrik (b. 1957). The tax toolkit is right-coded. The evidentiary base belongs to liberals who reject the program, Autor (b. 1967), Case (b. 1958), Deaton (b. 1945). A canon assembled from other people’s research cannot run a seminar, and without a seminar there is no reproduction. Think tanks reproduce staff. Departments reproduce scholars. American Compass has produced a generation of Hill aides and no dissertations. That guarantees a movement whose sources will always be available for hostile quotation at the worst moment.

The personnel record already shows the strain. Miran left the Council of Economic Advisers on February 3, 2026, and left the Fed on May 22, 2026, succeeded by Warsh. Pierre Yared, the acting chairman since September, returned to Columbia at the end of June 2026. Three chairs or acting chairs in eighteen months. The credentialed people arrive, defend the policy, and go back to a university or a bank. The people who stay are the ones with no academic exit. As consolidation proceeds, that ratio shifts further toward the permanent staff, and forecast quality falls, because the man who can afford to say the number is wrong has already left the building.

What I would watch, in order of how much it predicts.

Measurement and scoring. Whether CBO’s baseline treats tariff revenue as durable. Whether OIRA’s cost-benefit guidance keeps the revisions to Circular A-4. Whether immigration’s fiscal effects get scored on a Borjas method or a National Academies method. Whether anyone institutionalizes a domestic-production statistic alongside GDP in the Federal statistical system, something Cass has wanted for years. A statistic embedded at BEA outlasts every name on the list.

The Pettis test. His theory implies capital-account measures: taxes on inbound portfolio flows, willingness to surrender reserve-currency privileges, a weaker dollar with higher long rates. Miran’s Mar-a-Lago paper flirted with it. If the movement takes the diagnosis and refuses the medicine, Pettis is decoration.

The List problem. List argued for protection by a rising industrial power catching up to a leader. The United States is a mature, high-wage, services-dominated economy holding the reserve currency with nobody ahead of it. The closer comparison is Britain after 1900, Chamberlain’s tariff reform, a declining industrial hegemon arguing about imperial preference and losing the argument for thirty years. Or Latin American import substitution, where capacity got built, productivity stalled, and the payments crisis arrived on schedule. The essay explaining why the American case escapes those outcomes has not been written.

Finally, the number. Manufacturing employment sits near twelve and a half million and has been flat for a decade. Run the tariffs for eight years. If the number does not move and consumers carry the cost, no canon saves the movement. If it goes to fifteen million, the profession will reorganize around the result inside a decade, and the same journals now publishing tariff skepticism will publish the revision, with citations to Autor and Pettis and none to Navarro.

Economists hold power when they hold a procedure. They hold little when they hold a microphone. The populist bench is short on microphones and shorter on procedures, and the Court just told them they need procedures to keep the policy they already have.

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Live Questions in Psychology

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

Psychology in 2026 has no sovereign question. It has a fight over what counts as a finding, and underneath that fight, a change in what it costs to produce one. The cost change explains most of the status movement, so I would start there.

The reform movement won. Preregistration, multi-site collaboration, adequate power, open data, severe testing. The victory raised the price of a high-prestige result. A clever experiment on ninety undergraduates used to buy a career. Now the price of admission is a consortium, a registry entry, a population cohort, or a randomized trial inside a real institution. Prestige in psychology has migrated from ingenuity to capital. That migration happened just as the American state began withdrawing the capital so fewer places can afford to do work the field respects, and the places that can will increasingly sit outside the United States.

The live questions.

First, whether psychology’s objects exist. When a researcher says depression, intelligence, grit, or self-control, what is he claiming is there? Denny Borsboom and the Amsterdam methods group own this question. Eiko Fried carries it into clinical research, where the network view treats symptoms as producing and sustaining one another. Nobody has answered it. The question has enormous downstream reach, because every other question in the discipline assumes it has been settled.

Second, whether psychology deserves belief. Simine Vazire made that question an editorial program by running Psychological Science, which she has edited since the start of 2024 on a four-year term. Brian Nosek supplies the infrastructure rather than the challenge. Vazire holds the more powerful position, because an editor decides what a finding has to look like before it can be a finding.

Third, whether artificial intelligence explains cognition or imitates its outputs. Iris van Rooij and Olivia Guest at Radboud published the critical case in 2026, arguing that psychology’s weak theory and AI‘s habit of confusing engineered artifacts for minds combine into a perfect storm. Guest puts the practical objection well: the point of science is to produce knowledge, and science cannot be automated. The constructive answer comes from Stanford, where the argument runs that a model trained on human-scale input and subjected to real experiments can serve as a testable theory. Van Rooij is rising because AI made her old demand for formal explanation urgent.

Fourth, what digital life does to young people. This is where public status and disciplinary status split most visibly. Jonathan Haidt (b. 1963) and Jean Twenge (b. 1971) hold the public and legislative ground. Amy Orben and Candice Odgers hold the methodological ground. The interesting development is that Orben stopped arguing and started spending. She and Dan Lewer
are running the IRL Trial in Bradford, roughly four thousand students aged twelve to fifteen, half of them randomly assigned to daily social media limits and a nine at night to seven in the morning curfew, with a comparison group under no restriction. Orben calls it the first large-scale experimental reduction of social media use in healthy minors anywhere. Read her own words carefully and the standard framing collapses: she says the evidence that social media harms individual children, including severe harm, is irrefutable. The dispute concerns population-level causal size, not whether harm occurs. Her group also expects results on the Australian under-sixteen ban within about a year. Within eighteen months this question gets an answer, and whoever is right collects a great deal of status.

Fifth, what genetics predicts and what prediction licenses. Kathryn Paige Harden at Texas asks the question in its morally loaded form. Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness came out from Random House in March 2026. Scientists called it magnificent. The Los Angeles Review of Books treated it as scientific Calvinism and a rehash of eugenics.

Sixth, morality and collective behavior under technological and institutional pressure. Crockett at Princeton took a 2026 Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences for a mechanistic theory of moral cognition, with the citation pointing to how technologies such as social media exploit moral learning and erode community trust. Betsy Levy Paluck offers the answer template: pick a process, intervene in a school or a post-conflict society, and measure behavior.

Seventh, whether the discipline describes humanity or affluent institutional life. Joseph Henrich still owns the question. The answer is arriving through international networks, which weakens any single department’s claim to the topic.

Eighth, whether competing theories can be made to risk defeat. The consciousness field ran an adversarial collaboration on integrated information theory and global workspace theory, preregistered the contrasting predictions, separated theory owners from data collection, and embarrassed both camps. The method won, not either theory. Other subfields are copying it.

On the asker and answerer question, I would put it more sharply than a division of labor. Asking is portable and cheap. Answering is expensive and local. Metascience gave a generation of psychologists a route to high status that required no laboratory, no grant, no participants, and no wait. That is the cheapest prestige available in the discipline, which explains its growth better than its intellectual merit does, and its intellectual merit is real. The corresponding risk is a field full of people who audit and few who build. Vazire, van Rooij, Borsboom, and Guest ask. Nosek, Paluck, Orben, Frank, Goodman, Craske, and Jessica Schleider build.

The questions have become consortium-shaped. Princeton has the fastest rise, holding Crockett, Tom Griffiths, Paluck, Shafir, and Cohen at the intersection of computation, morality, and field experimentation. Stanford has the broadest claim and absorbs new questions rather than chasing them. Amsterdam owns the foundational question about what psychological objects are. Cambridge’s MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit owns adolescent digital mental health, and Orben directs the group there. Leiden, Radboud, and Northwestern are rising in narrower lanes. Two of my four leaders sit outside the United States, and I expect that share to grow.

Moving down. The losses attach to styles. Small samples. Counterintuitive single effects. Theory written after the results. Universal claims from American sophomores. Generic screen-time correlations. Candidate genes. Diagnostic categories treated as natural objects. Prediction models announced before prospective validation. The celebrity social psychologist who owns one memorable finding has lost the most.

The methodological closure is mostly deserved. It also has victims. Preregistration culture penalizes description, exploration, case study, and any population too small or too rare to power a trial. Some true things about unusual people are now hard to publish.

The editorial closure operates through harm standards. Nature Human Behaviour reserves the right to require changes or decline work when anticipated harm to groups outweighs benefit, and presents this as research ethics. Editors who hold that power can use it against accurate findings, and the policy does not have to be abused for authors to anticipate it and self-censor.

The professional closure runs through organizational position-taking. When a body like the American Psychological Association adopts a firm stance on a contested clinical question, youth gender medicine being the current example, it converts an empirical dispute into a loyalty test. Nobody has to be punished for the incentive to work.

The fiscal closure now outweighs the other three combined. The fiscal 2027 budget request released April 3, 2026 proposes dissolving the National Science Foundation’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate and zeroing its funding, with continuing grants aligned to administration priorities transferred elsewhere. That directorate funds roughly sixty-three percent of American academic research in the social and psychological sciences. NSF leadership told staff the same day that it would begin dissolving the directorate before the end of the fiscal year, telling rotators to prepare to return to their universities. The agency has awarded about six hundred thirteen grants in fiscal 2026, roughly a fifth of the 2021 through 2024 pace, and has no confirmed director. The entire National Science Board was fired on April 25, 2026. Congress restored much of what the White House tried to cut a year earlier, so the outcome remains open, and the directorate page was still live in early July. The internal pressures shift what gets published. This one shifts what gets done.

I would add a fifth force nobody has priced yet. If large models can produce plausible synthetic participants and plausible literature reviews, the cheap end of psychology loses its reason to collect human data at all. Van Rooij and Guest argue that on epistemic grounds. The near-term effect will be economic, and it will arrive fastest in exactly the underfunded departments that can no longer afford real samples.

Editors, prize committees, and infrastructure owners still control status flows. The trade publisher has become an independent route around all three. Harden and Haidt both took it. Both gained enormous public standing and paid an internal price. That route will get more crowded as the grants dry up.

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Live Questions in Jewish Studies

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

Jewish Studies in America runs on two currencies now, and they no longer trade at par.

The first is scholarly credit. It goes to the researcher who takes an inherited category, shows it does not hold, and then does the work in languages, archives, fieldwork, objects, law, or numbers to provide the replacement. The second is institutional credit. It goes to whoever can promise a president, a donor, or a federal investigator that the university is combating antisemitism, protecting Jewish students, honoring Holocaust memory, or defending Jewish civilization. A scholar can hold one currency in great quantity and almost none of the other. Some of the sharpest people in the field are invisible to donors. Some of the most visible people in the field such as Deborah Lipstadt do not set anyone’s research agenda.

No department owns the discipline. It sits in history, religion, literature, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, law, and a scattering of endowed centers. The Association for Jewish Studies carries well over 1,900 individual members and a conference of some 1,200 people across roughly 190 sessions. Authority is dispersed by design and by accident, which means the live questions get set by conference divisions, institute themes, and book prize.

The hottest question is what antisemitism is in the American setting. Not whether it rose after 2023, which everyone concedes, but what belongs under the name. Is it one prejudice among many, a distinct conspiracy structure, a form of racialization, a religious inheritance, a political tool, or some braid of all of them? How much of it comes from the right, the left, religious subcultures, online media, or the ordinary indifference of institutions? Where does campus anti-Zionism cross over? Can a university police conduct without policing historical judgment? And the which interventions reduce hostility rather than produce a statement, a training, an investigation, and a settlement.

Maurice Samuels at Yale built the most durable house for that question. He founded the program there in 2011 and has argued for keeping the subject historical while the politics around it boils. Jonathan Judaken (b. 1968) at Washington University is the one climbing fastest as a conceptual questioner. His work puts antisemitism into conversation with racism, colonialism, and critical theory, asks whether the inherited definitions still do any work, and collected a major historical prize in 2025. Lila Corwin Berman at NYU asks the institutional version, which is the sharper one: who gets to found an antisemitism center, write its mission, hire its staff, and speak for scholarship to the people writing the checks. Her willingness to criticize centers built around a predetermined mission has raised her standing among colleagues worried about who controls the field. Jeffrey Veidlinger at Michigan supplies the institutional answer. He runs a center that studies antisemitism alongside other hatreds and has held that comparative line against pressure to narrow it into advocacy.

Leonard Saxe and the Cohen Center at Brandeis hold down the empirical side. They run the surveys and campus studies that let anyone test a claim about Jewish students. The strength is evidence. The limit is that measurement inherits its definitions before the first question gets asked, so the survey can only settle arguments the survey design already permits. Public figures such as Deborah Lipstadt (b. 1947) carry enormous visibility.

The second live question is who counts as Jewish in America. The old version worried about intermarriage and disappearance. The new version asks about people with one Jewish parent, converts, Jews of no religion, Black and Asian and Latino Jews, queer and trans Jews, Haredim, secular Yiddishists, and anyone whose Jewishness is familial, political, linguistic, or occasional. Do population surveys find Jewish identity or manufacture an administrative copy of it? Who disappears when a foundation defines a countable population before deciding what to fund? Berman is the strongest senior questioner here because she ties identity to money and institutional power. Sarah Bunin Benor supplies an answer. Her work on Jewish languages shows people performing difference through vocabulary, accent, naming, and setting. Michigan has made the argument explicit by choosing Jewish peoplehood as a future institute theme. The continuity vocabulary is losing scholarly credit while surviving in fundraising, where urgency sells.

Third, Haredi life. For decades much American Jewish scholarship treated liberal denominational Judaism as the center and Haredim as a remnant with a birthrate. That position is gone. David Myers and Nomi Stolzenberg reframed the subject when they showed how a disciplined religious community uses American constitutional law, municipal incorporation, electoral bargaining, and property development to carve out autonomy inside a liberal state. Ayala Fader took the other route and found the doubters who stay inside, running concealed intellectual lives through their phones. Chaya Nove is the young scholar rising, and she argues the field romanticized Yiddish as the language of a murdered European past while ignoring the hundreds of thousands of people speaking and changing it in Brooklyn and Rockland County. Programs that keep treating the liberal synagogue as representative American Judaism will lose relevance. Institutions that combine language, ethnography, law, and sociology will gain.

Fourth, whether the field can stop treating Ashkenazi experience as the unmarked default. The question is whether emancipation, secularization, assimilation, diaspora, race, and modernity look different when the story starts in Salonica or Baghdad or Rabat instead of Berlin or Warsaw. Sarah Abrevaya Stein at UCLA and Devin Naar at Washington have made Sephardi and Ottoman material central. The AJS has written race, gender, queer studies, disability, and digital humanities into its formal divisions.

Fifth, the premodern question. Was there ever a single coherent Judaism, or have scholars projected a later idea of unified religion backward onto communities that shared little? How much authority did rabbis hold over people who left no texts? Mira Balberg reads rabbinic material as a system for organizing bodies, knowledge, and selfhood. Ra’anan Boustan has pushed social heterogeneity, material culture, and the construction of tradition. The movement runs from canonical text alone toward text plus archaeology, inscriptions, objects, food, illness, and the neighbors. Philological mastery still commands respect and no longer sets agendas.

Sixth, Jewish law and ethics. Julia Watts Belser made disability an analytic category, working across ethics, gender, sexuality, and rabbinic interpretation. Rebecca Epstein-Levi is rising fast on sex, risk, consent, and Jewish ethics, and she does the rare thing of posing the question and building the framework in the same book. This area has intellectual energy and little money, because its conclusions do not convert into a campaign.

Seventh, Holocaust memory after the survivors. Preservation is solved. The new questions are epistemological. Does digital testimony preserve encounter or simulate it? What breaks when an interview gets chopped into searchable clips tagged by someone else’s categories? What happens when a generative system produces plausible testimony that never happened? How does a scholar write about ordinary survival, compromise, and postwar family wreckage without bending it toward redemption? Hannah Pollin-Galay has gained standing by making language part of Holocaust history. Nove’s work treats recorded testimony as a linguistic archive carrying dialect, class, and migration. Public history institutions are gaining money faster than the archival theorists are gaining lines.

The eighth cluster has no commanding figure yet. Podcasts, streaming instruction, digital archives, online conversion and doubt, and models trained on digitized Jewish texts by people who cannot read them are all remaking who counts as an interpreter of Judaism. Michigan has already named media as a theme. The risk is that Jewish Studies cedes the whole territory to computer scientists and communications faculty with method and no Hebrew.

On askers and answerers, the field rarely rewards a provocateur. Berman asks who controls American Jewish institutions and categories and money, and demographers and institutional historians fill in behind her. Judaken and Samuels set the conceptual terms on antisemitism, Saxe and Brandeis supply the counts, Veidlinger supplies the model of a center that survives its own funding. Myers and Stolzenberg reframed Haredi autonomy as an American legal development, and Fader and Nove answer at close range with what people say and believe. Belser and Epstein-Levi do both jobs.

If department means department, NYU’s Skirball has the strongest claim: breadth, Berman’s American Jewish history center, and a new antisemitism center that embodies the exact tension she has criticized. For choosing frontier questions on purpose, Michigan’s Frankel Institute has the best claim, since its run of themes reads like a map of where the field is going. Penn’s Katz Center holds greater all-field convening prestige without binding fellows to a mission. Brandeis leads on contemporary evidence. Yale remains the respected address for antisemitism as a scholarly subject. UCLA stays near the top for Sephardi and Mediterranean work

Moving up intellectually: Berman, Judaken, Veidlinger, Benor, Belser, Epstein-Levi, Nove, Pollin-Galay, Ayelet Brinn. Moving up institutionally: Michigan, NYU, Brandeis, Cornell on the strength of a five million dollar gift that endows faculty lines, Florida Atlantic with a twenty million dollar gift and a new building, Denver with an endowed chair and expanded course offerings. Capacity and visibility are not the same as leadership, and the newer money buys the first two.

Indiana’s program has taken the clearest damage. A longtime director removed, a specialist in contemporary antisemitism installed over faculty objection, and then disputes over what a graduate student may research and travel to present. The removed director lost power and gained sympathy. His replacement gained control and became a contested figure inside the profession. Columbia’s standing suffers less from anything its Jewish Studies faculty did than from the spectacle of a university negotiating its academic priorities under a federal funding threat. At Washington, established faculty objected when the university built a parallel antisemitism operation staffed by people without equivalent expertise in the field, which is what bypassing a discipline looks like from inside it. A federal agency spent months trying to compel Penn to hand over names of Jewish faculty, students, and staff before dropping that demand this month.

Claims of closure from the left exist. The profession’s vocabulary and conference structure lean left-liberal, and work defending Zionism as a legitimate Jewish attachment or treating Jewish peoplehood in normative terms draws more suspicion than comparable work in anti-colonial framing. I have not seen a case of a left-led program stripping funding or replacing leadership over a research question that matches the documented record at Indiana. The field is pressed from four sides at once. Donors want compliance with a mission. Administrators want reputational cover. Governments want a demonstrable action. Activists want moral clarity. Scholars want permission to make distinctions that inconvenience all four.

The funding picture explains most of the rest. Targeted money floods in while the surrounding humanities contract. A single federal humanities grant of more than ten million dollars, the largest that agency has ever made, went to a Jewish civilization project whose purposes were named before the research began. Against that, the discipline’s own open awards look like pocket change: a thousand dollars for contingent faculty research, five thousand toward a first book, thirty-three thousand for a dissertation year, fifteen thousand for the top book prize. Many of the new antisemitism positions are temporary, off the tenure track, or housed in administration, which produces the strange result that the best-funded subject in the field employs the least protected scholars. Not every targeted gift restricts; Cornell’s appears to buy durable faculty capacity, and Michigan has shown that donor money can fund a comparative program. The test is whether the gift pays for scholars and infrastructure or for a conclusion.

Rank the money and you get the field’s future. Antisemitism, Holocaust education, student protection, and Jewish civilization are climbing. Demography and communal identity hold steady because they yield findings a foundation can act on. Sephardi, Haredi, race, gender, disability, and digital work rise in reputation while receiving little support. Languages, archives, philology, and ancient and medieval history keep their intellectual standing and lose bargaining power, because they cannot promise a president anything by Friday.

The danger is the conversion of a field that investigates Jewish life into a service provider hired to confirm what a university, a foundation, a government, or a communal organization already believes about Jewish life. Watch the grant titles. Wherever the title contains the finding, the research has already been spent.

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Jews | Comments Off on Live Questions in Jewish Studies

The Gap

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

FICTION WITH HELP FROM AI:

1.

Dale Pruitt, 56, preaches twenty-two minutes at the eleven o’clock service, and the elders tell him this is the best year of preaching in his twenty-nine.

Saturday at nine he sits in the study with the Barclay commentaries open on the desk and the laptop open on his knees. He types the passage, Luke 15, and his notes from Tuesday, and asks for three ways to structure it. The first is a sermon he has heard four times. The third is a sermon nobody should preach. The second has a turn in it he has never made, from the father running down the road to the older son doing arithmetic in the field, and he takes the turn and builds his own stairs under it. By midnight he has rewritten most of the words. The illustration about the mechanic who would not forgive his brother is his, from a man he buried in 2019.

Sunday a woman takes his hand at the door and says the Lord spoke through him this morning. He says thank you. He believes her and he believes himself, and he does not examine how both fit in one chest.

At the board meeting in April a young elder asks with his phone face down on the table. “Do you use the AI, pastor?”

“Like a concordance,” Dale says. “For the Greek.”

“Good,” the elder says. “Some people here would have a problem with it.”

“They would,” Dale says, and moves the meeting to the parking lot resurfacing.

2.

Marina Delgado, 38, charges twenty-two cents a word and keeps a small blue badge on her site that reads Human Written. The badge costs eighty dollars a year from a company in Austin that verifies nothing.

Her method: she feeds the brief, the client’s style guide, and the three strongest pieces from the client’s archive, and asks for an outline and a mediocre draft. The draft is mediocre. She takes the outline, throws out eighty percent of the sentences, and writes over the rest. Two hours later the piece would pass any test she can think of. It used to take six hours. She bills six, because she bid the project and not the hour.

In March a software client sends a new vendor agreement with an attestation clause. No generative AI in any deliverable. Breach means clawback of all fees paid. Marina reads it twice, signs it, and returns it as a PDF. Her daughter’s preschool costs two thousand a month. Her closest competitor works out of Manila for six cents a word, does what Marina does, faster, and signs the same page.

“I’d never use it for the writing,” she tells the client’s marketing director on the Thursday call. The director says she appreciates that, she really does, the brand voice is everything. The director’s own emails come out of a tool her company licensed in January. So does the deck on the screen between them. Neither woman mentions either thing, and the call ends four minutes early, and both of them say this was great.

3.

A conference room on the fourth floor of a humanities building, twelve faculty, one dean, and a policy draft in front of everyone stating that unauthorized use of generative artificial intelligence constitutes academic dishonesty and may result in suspension.

The dean has been explaining the detection vendor. Ninety-eight percent accurate, the vendor says.

Priya Raghunathan, associate professor, third year on this committee, puts down her pen. “Show of hands. Who wrote every word of his last recommendation letter?”

Nobody moves.

“Mine either. I wrote nine in October. I gave it the CV and my notes and it gave me a first pass and I fixed it and I signed it. Every sentence in those letters is true. I stand behind all of them. And on Monday I get to fail a nineteen-year-old for a smaller version of what I did in October. The difference between him and me is that I have a chair and he has a hearing.”

A man from classics says the two cases are different, and his reason is a real one. The student is assessed on the process. She is assessed on the outcome.

“Yes,” Priya says. “Who decided which of us gets assessed on process?”

From the end of the table, a lecturer who is not on the committee and came in for the coffee: “I teach four sections of composition at two campuses for forty-one thousand dollars a year. Four hundred and eighty essays a semester. You want to know how I get comments back inside a week.”

Nobody answers him.

The policy passes eleven to one. In August it appears in every syllabus in the college, in a standard paragraph most of the faculty paste without reading, drafted from a template the dean’s office produced in ninety seconds.

4.

Owen Vance, 19, has never written a school paper in a world where the machine was not sitting there.

He has worked out rules, and he did work them out, on a server with four hundred members who trade them the way earlier students traded old exams. Never paste. The version history in a Google Doc shows two thousand words landing in one block at 11:52 p.m., and that block has ended people. So type it, or run the extension that types it for you at ninety words a minute with pauses for thinking. Ask for a C-plus draft, because the A draft reads like nobody alive. Keep three of your own weak sentences per page. Leave one comma splice. Cite one source the machine cannot reach, something from the microfilm in the basement of the library, because a real page number in a 1974 issue of a journal nobody has digitized ends every conversation before it starts.

In seminar he says he uses it to brainstorm. The professor nods and says that is a legitimate use, that is what these tools are good for. Owen means about eleven percent of what he said.

He gets a 91 on the Melville paper. The comment says his close reading of the whiteness of the whale shows a real ear for the text. He reads it twice and feels something he has no word for, sitting close to pride and not the same.

5.

Hana Kim, 20, writes formal English because she learned it from textbooks and her mother’s red pen, and formal English reads as machine. The detector returns 87 percent on her Latin American history paper.

The hearing takes place at a laminate table with a box of tissues already on it, which tells her what these rooms are used to. She explains her drafting habits. She explains that she outlines on paper first. The associate dean is kind and asks whether she can prove it, and Hana understands that she has been asked to prove a negative to a number.

She keeps her grade after two weeks and one letter from her academic advisor. Since February she records her screen while she writes, every session, four hours of footage per essay, stored in a folder on her drive named Evidence. She has never once used the tool. Around half her friends use it every week.

She has stopped saying that she does not use it, because the sentence has been ruined. Everyone says it now. She hears her own voice saying it and hears the lie in it that is not hers.

6.

Ray Ocampo, 47, composites for a vendor shop in Culver City that has three floors, no signage, and a nondisclosure agreement running eleven pages. His client this quarter is a studio with a press release taped to the breakroom fridge announcing its lawsuit against an AI company for the unauthorized use of copyrighted material. Somebody drew a smiley face on it in January and nobody has taken it down.

His week: cleaning generated crowd extension for a battle sequence, a hundred and forty extras turned into eleven thousand, then a pass to fix hands and repair the edges where the machine loses interest. The shot list calls the work environment augmentation. The call sheet says nothing. The credit roll will say the name of the shop.

At the mixer in June a union rep he likes asks what they are running over there.

“Traditional comp, mostly,” Ray says. “Some machine-learning assist on the roto.”

That sentence was written in a conference room by a man in a quarter-zip and distributed to the floor as guidance. Ray has said it eleven times and it comes out smooth now. He has a mortgage in Sherman Oaks and a son starting at Cal State Northridge in the fall. His friend Teo, who told the same shop no in 2025 on principle, drives for a grocery delivery app and posts about integrity on Sundays, and Ray likes those posts, every one of them, from his phone in the parking lot.

7.

Bill Ferraro, 51, sits at his father’s kitchen table at two in the morning. The funeral is at ten. On the paper napkin in front of him he has written three lines in four hours: the 1962 Impala, second shift at the plant for thirty-one years, he paid for the wedding and never said one word about love.

He opens the laptop and types those three things and everything else he can remember, unsorted, eight hundred words, the fight about the truck, the smell of the garage, the way his father sat in the car in the driveway for ten minutes before coming in. He asks how to put it in order.

What comes back has one sentence in it he keeps, about a man who said what he meant with money and time because the other words were not given to him. The order of the paragraphs is not his. Everything else at the funeral is his, in his throat, in front of two hundred people at St. Anthony’s.

His sister holds his arm in the vestibule afterward and asks how he did that.

“I don’t know,” Bill says. “It just came.”

That night at the hotel he deletes the conversation from his history. He cannot say why he does it. He meant every word he said over his father’s coffin, and he knows he meant it, and he deletes it anyway before he sleeps.

8.

Corinne Whately, 34, illustrator, eleven years freelance, posts a process video in September because she is proud of the piece and because she believes in showing the work. In the video she says she generated a rough for the perspective on the cathedral interior, printed it, and painted the final in gouache over four days.

Twelve hours later the repost has forty thousand quotes. The anthology drops her piece on a Thursday. The gallery in Portland uses the word postpone. Her income falls sixty percent over the next quarter, and two commercial clients who never explain anything stop explaining anything.

Two of the accounts loudest in her mentions use the same tool she used. She knows their line work. She has known it since 2019. She says nothing, because saying it would confirm to everyone watching that she is the kind of person who thinks about this.

Her friends take one lesson from what happened to her, and the lesson is not about tools. The illustrators she knows still use what they use. They no longer make videos.

Devin Osei, 33, staff engineer, tells his father at Thanksgiving that it is basically autocomplete. Sixty-two percent of the lines he shipped in the last quarter arrived as suggestions he accepted, and he read every one of them, and he rejected plenty, and he would tell you the reading is the job now.

His VP shows the board a slide claiming a forty percent lift in engineering throughput, a number produced by a director who needed a number.

Sales tells the bank, whose vendor policy forbids third-party generative tools in any delivered code, that every line is written and reviewed by their engineers. The second half of that sentence holds. The bank’s own chief technology officer wrote the vendor policy in a tool his team has not finished approving, and he was pleased with how quickly it came together, and he mentioned that to no one.

The concealment is old. Speechwriters put words in mouths and the mouths took the credit. Ghostwriters delivered the memoirs of generals. Session players cut the records the band toured behind, and the sleeve said the band. Script doctors saved pictures and went uncredited by contract. Erving Goffman (1922-1982) described the back region as the place where the work of the performance gets done and out of which the audience is kept, and he noticed that audiences cooperate. They stay out. Nobody at dinner asks the host who cooked.

What has changed is the volume, the speed, and who gets asked. Priya signs nine letters and answers to nobody. Owen answers to a detector. Marina signs an attestation her client’s own marketing department violates on Tuesdays. Hana, who has done nothing, keeps four hours of video per essay in a folder called Evidence, and Corinne, who said out loud what half her field does in silence, lost a quarter of her year for it. The disclosure falls on the ones least able to refuse it. The rules get written by people using the tool to write them.

There is a case for the silence, and Dale Pruitt could make it. The mechanic in the sermon was his. Bill Ferraro’s love for his father was his. No man owes the room an itemized list of what sat on his desk while he worked, and the reader who wants to know what a thing cost to make is asking a question about himself.

There is a case against the silence, and Hana Kim could make it, and the buyer who paid twenty-two cents a word could make it, and the union rep at the mixer in June could make it if anyone told him what to ask.

Everyone in these scenes gives an account of his use, and every account runs shorter than the use. The gap is where the work got done. Nobody has agreed yet on whose business the gap is, and until that is settled, the people in it will keep giving the short account, because so far the short account is the one that gets you through the door.

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The Second Apprenticeship: What the Public Record Shows About Middle East Studies, and What it Would Take to Know More

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

Middle East Studies gets described constantly and counted rarely. Critics say the field trains students to work on Gaza, empire, and American power. Defenders say outside pressure is making honest scholarship harder. Both sides read the field from its controversies.
The public record says something else, and it is checkable. Departments publish dissertation titles. Some publish placement records. Job boards archive what universities were willing to pay for. Syllabi show which books carry the field from one generation to the next. A pilot of 153 dissertations and one department’s placement tables now exists, assembled entirely from pages anyone can open.
Two findings come out of it. One is solid enough to publish. The other is smaller than it looks at first sight.

The finding

Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies publishes the first position and the current position of every PhD it has awarded since 2000, broken into five-year cohorts. Across the four completed cohorts, the way a graduate enters the profession has been replaced.
Of the 33 PhDs awarded from 2000 through 2006, 15 went straight into tenure-track positions and 7 took postdoctoral fellowships. Of the 20 awarded from 2007 through 2011, 6 went straight to tenure track and 8 to postdocs. Of the 23 from 2012 through 2016, 4 and 13. Of the 17 from 2017 through 2021, 1 and 12.
Direct entry fell from 45.5 percent to 5.9 percent. Postdoctoral entry rose from 21.2 percent to 70.6 percent. Both movements are monotone across every cohort. A Cochran-Armitage test gives z of -3.225 and p of 0.0013 for the decline, and z of 3.662 and p of 0.00025 for the rise. Comparing the earliest completed cohort against the latest, Fisher’s exact test gives p of 0.0045 and an odds ratio of 13.3.
A fifth cohort sits on the same table, running from 2022 through June 2026, and it moves the other way. Two of its 19 members entered tenure-track jobs, which is 10.5 percent. The cohort is open, its newest members have had months rather than years, and 2 of 19 against 1 of 17 is noise on those denominators. The trend tests above use the four completed cohorts and leave it out. Anyone checking the source table should see it there.
The doctorate qualifies the holder to begin a second apprenticeship of unknown length.

What the finding is not

Read the first-position table alone and it looks like an occupational collapse. Princeton also publishes current position, and that reading dies immediately. Of the 2000 through 2006 cohort, 25 of 33 now hold tenured or tenure-track jobs. Of 2007 through 2011, 16 of 20. Of 2012 through 2016, 16 of 23. Even of 2017 through 2021, whose members are five to nine years out, 10 of 17.
Many graduates arrive. They arrive later. First position and current position have to be reported together, because each alone tells a false story: one of a profession that has stopped hiring, one of a profession where nothing has changed.
What the tables cannot say is how long the delay runs. They are cohort aggregates. They hold no transition dates. One person may have spent a single year in a fellowship and another eight, and the published numbers cannot distinguish them. Any sentence about how many years the apprenticeship lasts is an invention until somebody builds the career histories.

The control, and what it did to the interpretation

The obvious question is whether this belongs to Near Eastern Studies or to the humanities. Princeton’s own History department supplies the nearest comparison, since it faces the same institution, the same job market, and the same access to prestigious fellowships.
History reports that among 2021 through 2025 graduates who went into education, 66.7 percent took postdocs and 7.4 percent went to tenure-track jobs. The department publishes no headcount, but the rounded percentages resolve cleanly to 54, 13, 6, 3, 3, and 2 out of 81. Among recent Near Eastern Studies graduates entering academic or educational first positions, 13 of 16 took postdocs and 2 of 16 took tenure-track jobs. Fisher’s exact test on the postdoc comparison gives p of 0.376. The intervals overlap heavily.
The comparison rules out a large difference between the two departments and is too weak to rule out a moderate one.
Two further things on the History page.
The first supports the delay reading rather than the collapse reading, from an independent department. Among History PhDs from 2008 through 2020, observed five or ten years out, 83.7 percent of those in education hold tenure-track positions and 1.1 percent remain postdocs. The apprenticeship resolves. At an elite department, it appears to resolve for most people.
The second is a warning about the comparison. History’s denominator counts only graduates who entered education, and education accounts for 78 percent of its PhDs. Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies denominator counts every graduate. The two departments publish different objects. History’s numbers come from web searches and emailed self-reports with no stated headcount and a measurement window that shifts by cohort. Near Eastern Studies publishes what reads as a departmental census with first position defined the same way for twenty-six years. A test that compares a census against a reconstruction from rounded percentages should not be reported as though it settled anything.
The national picture points the same direction. Humanities Indicators, drawing on the Survey of Earned Doctorates, reports that postdoctoral commitments among new humanities and arts PhDs rose from about 4 percent in 1990 to about 12 percent in 2020, with history above 18 percent. Princeton’s rates are far higher, and Princeton graduates have unusual access to fellowships. The comparison suggests without settling.

Why the study still belongs in this field

If postdocization runs across elite humanities, then the question it raises runs across elite humanities too. A scholar on a one-year appointment depends on recommendations, renewals, invitations, and the judgment of future search committees. A tenured professor can anger a donor or a colleague at lower cost. The formal rules permit dissent in both cases. The material structure prices it differently.
Middle East scholars report high rates of professional self-censorship. In late 2023, 82 percent of United States respondents said they self-censor when speaking professionally about Israel and Palestine, and among assistant professors the figure reached 98 percent. In the round fielded around the start of the 2026 Iran war, 77 percent reported self-censoring, and self-censorship on Iran doubled from 17 percent to 33 percent overall and 40 percent in the United States within weeks.
Those numbers are read as evidence about ideology. One camp sees fear of donors, legislators, and advocacy groups. The other sees fear of colleagues enforcing a consensus. Both may be right. Neither has been separated from a third possibility, which is that people who cannot count on employment past next June behave differently from people who can.
Most fields poll their members about nothing. Middle East Studies has a running survey of professional speech, conducted by people with the standing to add questions to it, and now the beginnings of an employment record built from public pages. The field is the natural laboratory for the question precisely because it is unusual in what it measures about itself, and the answer would apply well beyond it.
That study can embarrass everyone. It might show external pressure dominates. It might show internal peer pressure dominates. It might show the labor structure amplifies both.

The dissertation finding, and how far it reaches

Princeton and Chicago together produced 123 dissertations across the sampled years. Coded against 1948, 101 fall before, 3 after, 5 straddle, and 14 cannot be placed from the title. Among clear cases, 2.9 percent are post-1948. Anyone who believes these departments turn out scholars of contemporary Palestine has to explain the Ottoman postal service, Ugaritic pronouns, Hittite ceramics, and the marginalia of a sixteenth-century Cairene scholar.
The obvious objection is that Chicago trains philologists, archaeologists, and Egyptologists, so the sample guarantees the answer. Strip out the ancient, biblical, and Egyptological work and 69 clear cases remain, of which 3 are post-1948. The share moves from 2.9 percent to 4.3 percent. The objection fails.
Adding Columbia’s interdisciplinary department was meant to test whether interdisciplinary training produces contemporary work. Among Columbia’s recent Middle East and North Africa dissertations that classify cleanly, 4 of 14 are post-1948, or 28.6 percent. Columbia differs from the two traditional departments, and the difference is unlikely to be noise, with Fisher’s exact p of 0.0138.
Where Columbia sits remains unknown. The Wilson interval on 4 of 14 runs from 11.7 percent to 54.6 percent. It contains 50 percent. The data can say Columbia is more contemporary. The data cannot say whether the field contains two separated clocks or one gradual slope, and any draft that picked between them was overreading its own numbers.

What the sources taught, which may outlast the findings

Three departments published placement information and produced three different objects. Princeton distinguishes first position from current position and defines both. Chicago heads a column Job Placement without saying which it means. Columbia publishes current position only. Pooling them produces nonsense, and the temptation to pool them is strong because they look alike in a spreadsheet.
Columbia’s roster lists 8 graduates for 2020, 1 for 2021, 10 for 2022, 7 for 2023, and 4 for 2024, and the page’s own metadata gives a last modification date of August 14, 2024. A department producing eight to ten doctorates in neighboring years did not produce one in 2021. The roster is maintained rather than complete, which means it cannot serve as a production series, and if the missing names are the people who left the profession, the placement column reads high.
Columbia publishes no dissertation titles. Six had to be recovered from elsewhere, and three were wrong. In every case a later book or fellowship project title had displaced the deposited dissertation title. Scholars with books and fellowships leave a bigger public trace, so reconstruction from visibility oversamples the successful, and the error correlates with the outcome anyone would want to measure.

What needs doing, in order

The bottleneck has moved from analysis to collection, and further interpretation of the existing numbers will not pay.
The first job is person-level career histories, and it is the one that converts a suggestive finding into a measurable one. Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies department publishes the names and dissertation years of every PhD since 1927. For the 112 graduates since 2000, a CV, a faculty page, or a professional profile gives the doctorate year, each position with its dates, and the year of first tenure-line appointment. That yields median time to a permanent job by cohort, and the share still outside a tenure line at one, three, five, and eight years, with proper handling of people whose careers are still running. Roughly 112 people, perhaps twenty hours, and it answers the question everything else has been forced to leave open. Do the same for Princeton History, whose doctoral degrees awarded page supplies the names, and the control becomes a real one rather than a comparison of unlike published summaries.
The second job is the dissertation hypothesis, and department pages are the wrong tool for it. The strong version predicts the largest contemporary share inside political science, anthropology, and history departments, which do not publish Middle East title lists at all. A ProQuest or repository query returns institution, year, and title for several hundred such dissertations in one operation, without depending on any department’s willingness to maintain a page.
The third job is job advertisements, still untouched and still the only measure of demand rather than supply. Archived captures of the H-Net job guide and the MESA employment page reach back past 2016. Retrieval is the entire difficulty, and retrieval is solved.
The fourth job is the survey, and it needs a collaborator rather than a scraper. A future Barometer round that asked about tenure status, contract length, renewability, years since the doctorate, years spent in temporary appointments, visa dependence, institution type, and reliance on regional access would let anyone test whether employment vulnerability predicts silence once political position and subfield are held constant. The people who run that survey have the standing to add the questions. Nobody else can.
Syllabi come last, and possibly never. The access cost is high and the return is the lowest of the five.

What would kill each claim

The postdocization finding dies if the person-level histories show that the time from doctorate to permanent job has stayed flat, meaning the postdoc was always there and only the labeling changed. It also weakens sharply if Princeton History’s cohort-by-cohort curve, once reconstructed, turns out to be steeper than Near Eastern Studies.
The precarity hypothesis dies if self-censorship shows no relationship to contract security once beliefs and subfield are controlled. That would be a real result and would strengthen both political explanations at once.
The two-clock hypothesis dies if disciplinary departments turn out to produce pre-1948 work at rates near Princeton’s and Chicago’s. It survives in its strong form only if their contemporary share clears 50 percent with an interval that excludes the traditional departments.

Why any of this is public business

The public pays for the universities, the fellowships, the libraries, and much of the student support. Students organize six or seven years of their lives around a career, and now a further stretch of unknown length after that. Departments admit doctoral candidates without publishing, in most cases, any honest account of what happens next. Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies department is unusual in publishing enough to be analyzed, and it comes out of the exercise looking honest.
Arguments about this field almost always start from a political conclusion and gather examples. The counting runs the other way. It asks what departments produce, what universities advertise, where graduates go, how long they stay temporary, and which books get assigned. The answers so far have embarrassed the loudest claim on offer, which was that traditional departments have been captured by present-day politics. They have also failed to support the tidy counter-story about area-studies funding.
The numbers are public. The methods are ordinary. The employment and production record of this field has never been assembled, and assembling it takes weeks rather than grants.

Notes

Version 0.5, posted July 26, 2026. Cite this version and date, since the files below will change as the collection grows. Every count was computed from the released files rather than typed by hand.

Corrections are welcome and will be published here with attribution. The coding of individual dissertations, the Columbia roster gaps, and the three recovered titles marked provisional are the places where somebody inside these departments can settle a question in a sentence that would take me a week.

Data

middle_east_studies_incentives_v04

mes_columbia_title_audit_v04

mes_princeton_internal_controls_v04

mes_significance_tests_v04

mes_dissertations_v4

Sources

Princeton Near Eastern Studies first positions

Princeton Near Eastern Studies current positions

Princeton Near Eastern Studies past dissertation titles

Princeton History career outcomes

Princeton History doctoral degrees awarded

Chicago Middle Eastern Studies alumni placement

Columbia MESAAS recent PhDs

Columbia GSAS dissertation notices

Humanities Indicators, job status at graduation

Middle East Scholar Barometer

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Live Questions in Middle East Studies

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

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

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