This article should be required reading for anyone looking for a reality check re Middle East history! It’s a fascinating, brilliant and highly personal account of the author’s interaction with some of the region’s most impactful players, several of whom are still on the world stage.
The Middle East is one of the 3 cases examined and the instructional materials skew strongly towards Edward Said and downplay others such as Bernard Lewis.
Douthat said "... in the current academic landscape, even the successful teaching of controversy still tends to confirm progressivism as a default perspective. For a sense of how this works, it’s worth reading a working paper from three academics at Claremont McKenna College and Scripps College, who use a database of college syllabuses from around the English-speaking world to assess how frequently contrasting perspectives on high-profile issues are assigned in college classrooms... Arguments carried out exclusively among liberals and leftists can be stimulating, engaging, important, revelatory. But they will always be insufficient to the professed task of the university, the understanding of reality in full."
This article should be required reading for anyone looking for a reality check re Middle East history! It’s a fascinating, brilliant and highly personal account of the author’s interaction with some of the region’s most impactful players, several of whom are still on the world stage.
Jonathan Torop provides some perspective here that is missing from today's classrooms. The situation is academics is described in a working paper at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L6aUnf3HZPqOTJrP8ee-m2Szh-uyFKZA/view
The Middle East is one of the 3 cases examined and the instructional materials skew strongly towards Edward Said and downplay others such as Bernard Lewis.
Ross Douthat discussed this study at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/conservative-professors-viewpoint-diversity.html
Douthat said "... in the current academic landscape, even the successful teaching of controversy still tends to confirm progressivism as a default perspective. For a sense of how this works, it’s worth reading a working paper from three academics at Claremont McKenna College and Scripps College, who use a database of college syllabuses from around the English-speaking world to assess how frequently contrasting perspectives on high-profile issues are assigned in college classrooms... Arguments carried out exclusively among liberals and leftists can be stimulating, engaging, important, revelatory. But they will always be insufficient to the professed task of the university, the understanding of reality in full."