[The following statement was issued by the AAUP chapter at Harvard University on 31 March 2025 in response to the termination of the leadership of the university’s Center for Middle East Studies.]
The Executive Committee of AAUP-Harvard Faculty Chapter condemns the abrupt termination of the leadership of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES): Professor Cemal Kafadar as Director and Associate Professor Rosie Bsheer as Associate Director. Though both Kafadar and Bsheer will retain their regular faculty positions, this summary dismissal of two leading Middle East scholars from their administrative positions is a political infringement on academic freedom and the autonomy of professors to shape intellectual agendas in their areas of research, teaching, and programming expertise.
The University has described the change of leadership at CMES as voluntary. But according to three faculty members familiar with the dismissals, Kafadar and Bsheer were dismissed from their administrative positions without warning or due process.
CMES hosts a diverse array of talks, events, performances, workshops, and conferences on the Middle East and North Africa. In the years since Kafadar and Bsheer assumed leadership of CMES in July 2022, Harvard administration officials never contacted either director with concerns about CMES’s programming. Until last week, Kafadar, who is on leave for academic year 2024–25, was scheduled to resume directing CMES on July 1, 2025 for the last year of his three-year term.
This situation changed on March 25, 2025, when Interim Social Sciences Dean David Cutler dismissed Kafadar as Director. Three days later, Dean Cutler also dismissed Bsheer from her role as Associate Director.
In his explanation of why he was dismissing CMES’s directors, Dean Cutler described what he called a lack of balance and multiple viewpoints in the Center’s programming on Palestine. He singled out two events that occurred in Spring 2025: one hosted by CMES on the war in Lebanon and one co-sponsored by CMES on the targeting of children in Gaza. Before these events took place, advertisements for the events had been the targets of criticism by two Harvard affiliates and several observers from outside the university, allegedly because the topics of the events expressed disapproval of actions taken by the state of Israel. One Harvard affiliate publicly called the proposed topic of the Lebanon panel “very likely” antisemitic in light of Harvard’s adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism on January 21, 2025. It is our understanding that none of the critics attended the events in question. Dean Cutler provided no other justification for questioning Kafadar and Bsheer’s leadership of CMES.
Two hours after Kafadar’s dismissal, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi Hoekstra sent all Harvard center directors a message saying that “the FAS has been working to ensure that diverse points of view are represented on campus as a necessary precondition for academic excellence.” Dean Hoekstra instructed all center directors to “be prepared to discuss with your Divisional Dean the following: (1) the range of programming, seminars, and other activities that you run, (2) the degree to which these activities currently meet our goals of diversity of and exposure to different ideas, perspectives, and topics, [and] (3) how you promote respectful dialogue across controversial topics.” Dean Hoekstra’s email also invoked two recent reports about the climate of Harvard classrooms to ask “(4) what changes, if any, the center or institute you oversee will make in response.” Although these questions were then circulated to journalists, they were not cited as reasons for Kafadar and Bsheer’s dismissals.
AAUP-Harvard Faculty Chapter is gravely concerned by the Harvard administration’s move to dismiss CMES’s leaders. Given the wide range of programming CMES has conducted over the past three years, it is troubling that the university would dismiss a center’s leadership because they hosted two recent events that have been criticized as lacking “balance.” A requirement of topical and ideological balance would be an impossible and inappropriate standard for any single academic event to fulfill. If applied fairly beyond this case, it would require centers in the natural sciences to host programs on climate change that also featured climate denialists; economists who teach about free markets to also feature Marxist counter-speakers; visiting Israeli state officials to be joined onstage by Palestinians; and those who teach the history of slavery to give equal airtime to critics and advocates of slaveholding. Not only has such a standard never been required before of any other centers, but the standard itself, if real, would be a new ideological attempt by critics of the university to undermine its faculty’s subject-area expertise and to dictate what its faculty teaches.
These terminations violate the principle of academic freedom at the heart of our institutional mission and set a bleak precedent for free inquiry and expertise at the university. At a minimum, the administration of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences should release any reports or evaluations of CMES’s alleged failure to meet its new standard. But the most appropriate path forward would be for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to reinstate Kafadar and Bsheer in their administrative roles at CMES, allowing them to serve out the remainder of their leadership terms – and making a clear statement that the intellectual autonomy of academic centers must not be compromised.
Contact: contact@aaup-hfc.org