Tag: Middle East Studies Association

Sandbox calls MESA elections!

On By Martin Kramer

Elections for president of the Middle East Studies Association ended last Friday. The results won’t be announced until the association holds its annual conference in another month. But I’ve closed my own straw poll, and on its basis, I’m going to project a winner: Zachary Lockman (NYU) will beat Mark Tessler (Michigan).

Now you may ask how in the world my poll justifies such a call. A total of 45 people voted: 33 voted for Tessler (73 percent), and 12 for Lockman (27 percent). That would seem to point to a landslide victory for Tessler.

Ah, but you see, the people who vote at my website tend to do the opposite of the average MESAn. Last year I ran the same straw poll, and 63 people voted. Fred Donner (Chicago) got 71 percent of the votes, and Juan Cole (Michigan) received only 29 percent. But Cole won the election! So on the basis of that admittedly slim precedent, a candidate who wins by a 70-percent-plus landslide on my site is in big trouble at MESA.

This is my thesis, at least, and I now await the empirical findings that will validate or refute it. Gee, it’s exciting to practice political science on such a high order. I’ll be staying up all night for the next month waiting for the official results.

Update: Zachary Lockman won.

MESA chooses, and you can too

On By Martin Kramer

Members of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) are electing their president, an annual ritual that has symbolic value. The outcome usually moves between radicalism and sobriety in alternate years. Consider the most recent choices, in reverse chronological order: incoming president Juan Cole (radical), Ali Banuazizi (sober), Laurie Brand (radical), Lisa Anderson (sober), Joel Beinin (radical), and so on. MESA this year will choose between Zachary Lockman of New York University, and Mark Tessler of the University of Michigan.

Lockman is the darling of the far left of the spectrum, particularly for his polemical defense of the field’s sorry record in his book Contending Visions of the Middle East. (A polemic it is, disguised beneath a university press veneer.) I called him last year on an academic boycott petition he signed, or signed but didn’t understand, or signed but understood differently from everyone else who signed it. Go here and watch him twist himself in pretzels.

Tessler is a cautious but shrewd manager who likes to play the center. He’s often trotted out as proof that Middle Eastern studies are balanced and reasonable, by people who don’t always know much about him. It was amusing to see Juan Cole, on two occasions, claim that Tessler holds his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University. Tessler did his Ph.D. at Northwestern; he just spent a junior year abroad in Jerusalem more than forty years ago. Cole should know better: he and Tessler are both at Michigan. But when MESA’s mandarins want to present themselves as Israel-friendly, all sorts of exaggerations flourish, and Tessler becomes the poster boy. As such, he pitched up in Washington last year to lobby against Title VI reform.

All of this is by way of encouraging you, dear reader, to cast your own vote in a straw poll on this website. You’ll find the MESA poll box on the sidebar of Sandbox and on the homepage. Choose between Lockman and Tessler, and leave a comment on the whole business, if the spirit moves you.

MESA jumps in Massad’s trench

On By Martin Kramer

You remember Joseph Massad (how could you not?), the assistant professor who’s been at the heart of Columbia’s Middle Eastern studies scandal. Last spring, a university panel investigated allegations that he intimidated a student over her politics. Massad denied it, but the panel found the student credible, and a cloud hangs over his tenure prospects.

Massad is one of Edward Said’s less successful clones. Once, on a flight, I ended up watching a film called Multiplicity. It’s a light comedy about a man who can’t meet all his responsibilities at work and home, so he allows a mad geneticist to clone him twice. Alas, each clone is a bit like a photocopy–distorted and not quite up to the original. Then one of the clones has himself cloned, producing a total idiot. Massad’s doings, writings, and posturings are like an Edward Said gone really bad. So bad, in fact, that while Said achieved Columbia’s highest rank, of University Professor, Massad strikes me as falling far below the minimal requirements for tenure.

But the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has a stake in Massad. Why? Beyond fealty to Said and collegial solidarity, MESA once gave Massad its award for outstanding doctoral dissertation. Not a single MESA-acclaimed dissertation has made for a lasting and influential book, and Massad’s was no exception. The resulting tome, soaked in the impenetrable prose of postcolonial theory, isn’t on anyone’s must-read list. But MESA’s reputation is now invested in Massad, as he himself emphasized in his response to the findings of Columbia’s panel:

An attack on my scholarship therefore is not only an attack on me and on MEALAC [his department at Columbia] but on Columbia’s political science department [which graduated him], on prestigious academic presses, including Columbia University Press [which published his thesis], and on the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), an opinion expressed by Martin Kramer who also condemns Middle East Studies at Columbia and MESA itself.

Massad couldn’t be more right. All those who have accredited, acclaimed, and published him have scraped bottom, and that applies especially to Columbia University and MESA.

Columbia may redeem itself yet, by spitting him out. But MESA, it’s now clear, is digging itself an even deeper hole. Without fanfare, it has just added Massad to the editorial board of its flagship journal, the International Journal of Middle East Studies. That is, it has anointed him formally as an arbiter of quality in scholarship. This effectively destroys whatever credibility the journal still had (after the damage it sustained under the editorship of Juan Cole). Even if this appointment is a mere honorific, Massad’s name on the masthead brings disrepute.

But the mandarins of MESA have gone further. Each fall, MESA’s rank-and-file elect a new president and two members of its six-member board of directors. A nominating committee selects the candidates. Lo and behold, among this year’s candidates for the board is Joseph Massad. He’s a mere assistant professor, with only one book (two more are said to be forthcoming), but he’s being offered to MESA’s members for possible selection as one of the pillars of the field.

Personally, I wish Massad luck in the race. I endorse him. His victory would make the efforts of critics like me even easier. (And I thought it would be hard to surpass Juan Cole’s election last year as MESA’s president. That shows how little I know.) The MESA elections run through October 28. As we get closer to that date, I’ll make my prediction.

Oh, and yes, I’ve also noticed that Zachary Lockman of New York University and Mark Tessler of Michigan are the two candidates for the presidency of MESA. I’ve written about Lockman, and he’s written about me. I intend to come back to that race later in the fall.

Disappointment: Massad’s long-awaited book, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, has been announced by its publisher, Routledge, and I’m disappointed. It’s just a collected volume of his essays. “The essays, which have been previously published in a variety of academic journals, are brought together with a new introduction and conclusion.” So this won’t be an integrated sequel to Said’s famous Question of Palestine. Like I said: the clone’s never up to the original.