From Israel to ICE, MESA conference's academic freedom is under attack

In an era of intense crackdowns on academic freedom, this year’s Middle East Studies Association conference, which took place at the end of November, is a place where supporting free speech is a top priority, particularly following the detention of one attendee en route to the event.

As he was about to leave the airport in Oklahoma, Vahid Abedini, an Iranian studies professor at the University of Oklahoma, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement incommunicado for three days, approximately the duration of the conference, casting a shadow over an already tense time for academics from the Middle East.

"I don’t think I’ll ever forget that conference. I still don't have any idea why that happened," Shirin Saeidi, associate professor of political science at the University of Arkansas, where Abedini previously taught, told The New Arab.

"It was absolute fear. I had a friend say they'd never seen MESA feel this sad," she said.

"Among my Arab colleagues, this wasn’t new to them. They’ve fought these battles for a long time. I’m ashamed to say they’ve fought this without Iranian colleagues by their side," Saeidi acknowledged, adding that it was some of her Arab colleagues who helped her cope with Abedini's detention by sharing their own experiences. 

The issue of academic freedom, particularly related to Israel and Palestine studies, but increasingly related to simply to nationality, has become a daily concern for students and professors, as they try to navigate an era of government-sanctioned vigilantism.

"In 2017, right after Trump was elected the first time, it became clear that there was going to be a heightened level and an expanded or deepened set of challenges to academic freedom, so a new task force was formed on political and civil rights," Laurie Brand, chair of the MESA's Committee on Academic Freedom, told TNA.

In March, MESA, the American Association of University Professors, and Knight Institute filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for threatening to arrest and deport students and faculty for protected speech.

"We've never been in a situation where academic freedom at so many levels and across so many institutions and for so many different reasons is threatened and violated," said Brand.

The ongoing crackdowns didn't start in Donald Trump's second term. Some of the primary tactics being used have gained ground in Joe Biden's administration. This includes the use of Title VI (anti-discrimination in education under the Civil Rights Act); conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism; and holding congressional hearings on antisemitism. 

"It intensified with the genocide in Gaza. The encampment movement was where you saw this broad-based assault on faculty, students, staff who were engaged in the encampments or any adjacent protest movements against the genocide," she said.

"That raised the profile of Palestinian advocacy to a different level, and to a different level of repression," she said.

"Even if they succeeded in suppressing all Palestine-related speech, they still have other agendas. It's a misogynist agenda, it's a fascist agenda, so anything they see as oppositional to their programme they will eventually get around to trying to suppress, so we see ourselves as primarily threatened, along with colleagues dealing with gender, colonialism," Brand added.

This has led to solidarity from other fields of study, particularly the humanities. The scientific fields do not tend to have the same level of academic freedom advocacy, despite the current administration holding positions that could be considered anti-science.

Aaron Jakes, associate professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Chicago, told TNA that there's often a misunderstanding of academia requiring a balance of views, rather than the pursuit of facts.

"One of the clearest examples of this has to do with conversations around scholasticide—the targeting of all institutions of higher education in Gaza. That is an easily verifiable empirical fact that every institution of higher education in Gaza has been destroyed in the last two years, and in many settings, a verifiable fact should be treated as a biased opinion," he said.

As for the recent conference, Jakes noted, "This is a space where scholars working in the field facing these kinds of pressures can think and talk together about how to protect and advance the scholarly enterprise."

For Saeidi, the conference instilled in her the belief in the importance of speaking out in the face of fear.

"I would not have been speaking publicly three years ago, thinking if I’m quiet it will stop," she said. "We have to work against that. That's not how suppression works."