Harvard AAUP on Termination of CMES Leadership

Harvard AAUP on Termination of CMES Leadership

Harvard AAUP on Termination of CMES Leadership

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[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

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412