4 faculty ‘de-affiliate’ from Middle Eastern Studies Program, citing Israel-Hamas response

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Four Syracuse University faculty members have renounced their affiliation with the Middle Eastern Studies Program after concerns regarding the program’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.

Associate professors Carol Fadda, Jeanette Jouli, Dana Olwan and professor Amy Kallander left the program, citing concerns regarding MESP’s “general silence, couched in the language of ‘neutrality,’” according to a Faculty for Justice in Palestine Instagram post Tuesday.

In the post, the professors listed concerns such as the program not properly educating the SU community about Palestinian and Israeli history, imposing conditions on FJPSU’s “Palestine in Focus” event and dismissing recent teach-ins as “political activism.”

“We refuse such binaristic and faulty divisions, which simultaneously dismiss our labor and expertise, as well as the urgently needed interventions that such educational events create,” the Instagram statement reads.

The decision to “de-affiliate” from MESP came from a “combination of long-term structural problems within the program and the impact of this lack of transparency and collaboration highlighted in the recent months,” the professors wrote in a collective statement to The Daily Orange.

Concerns about MESP’s structure go back to 2014 after ​​Mehrzad Boroujerdi, the founding director of the program, stepped down after 11 years, said Kallander, a history professor and faculty affiliate of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department.

A group of faculty crafted a proposal for the selection of a new director, Kallander said, but they received “no response.” James Steinberg and Karin Ruhlandt — then the deans of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and the College of Arts and Sciences, respectively — appointed Yüksel Sezgin without consulting the faculty, she said.

Since 2014, groups of faculty have attempted to propose structures for the program, Kallander said. She and other faculty attempted to form a model with properly outlined responsibilities for its directors and standing committees, she said.

“We’ve tried to create ways (for) … more faculty participation, and kind of respect for faculty self-governance within the program, and … none of those efforts have really had traction or really gone anywhere,” Kallander said.

The four professors claim Sezgin and the program would only co-sponsor the Palestine in Focus event if it met a set of criteria, such as the inclusion of an “Israeli perspective,” which the professors claim had not been required in the past. The professors wrote that Sezgin showed reluctance to co-sponsor an event “centered on Palestinian histories and experiences.”

“Our event was trying to, in many ways, create more space for Palestinian voices to say ‘let’s talk about Palestinians,’ because that hasn’t been a focus of any of the discussions on campus,” Kallander said.

Sezgin did not respond to The D.O.’s request for comment.

“The whole purpose of being on a campus is you can hear lots of different things and many you might agree with and some of them you might not agree with, and that’s totally okay,” Kallander said. “Co-sponsoring an event shouldn’t mean that somebody has to agree with it.”

In November, Middle East Studies Association of North America’s Committee on Academic Freedom sent a letter addressed to Chancellor Kent Syverud, Provost Gretchen Ritter and Arts and Sciences Dean Behzad Mortazavi condemning SU administrators for failing to uphold their commitment to academic freedom and to defend faculty sharing their “scholarly expertise” on the war.

FJPSU’s post claimed MESP does not reflect the “types of deliberative processes central to the intellectual vitality” of MESA, a nonprofit association that works to promote and advocate for scholarship, academic freedom and education on the Middle East and North Africa.

Statements by MESA’s Board that “convey a broad scholarly consensus within the field” have not been circulated within the MESP or received “serious consideration” by the program at SU, the post states. Since November 2023, MESA has published a letter to the Biden Administration calling for a ceasefire and a separate open letter to U.S. and Canadian college and university presidents.

“It is clear from MESA Board statements that despite Syracuse MESP’s institutional membership in MESA, the stance taken by MESP or the silences of the MESP do not represent this broad consensus,” the professors wrote in their statement.

The university did not respond to The D.O.’s request for comment.

“This is this long pattern of systemic and structural problems within the program and many of us have tried to address those in the past and haven’t succeeded, sadly,” Kallander said. “It has never really been a space of collaboration or intellectual exchange.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article listed Karin Ruhlandt and James Steinberg in an incorrect respective order. Ruhlandt was the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Steinberg the dean of the Maxwell School. The Daily Orange regrets this error.