The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is the preeminent organization promoting scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. Recently, MESA’s discussions with campus advocacy groups across the country, as well as legal advocacy groups and national media organizations, have made clear that despite the rise of harassment, pressure, intimidation, and discrimination incidents on U.S. campuses since October 7th, there is no comprehensive picture of these developments. This lack of data and data collection is making it difficult for organizations to adequately support students and educators studying, teaching, or advocating on related issues. Our aim is to rectify this shortfall by creating a database that captures the change in campus climate and documents incidents of harassment, intimidation, and discrimination experienced since October 7, 2023 on campuses in North America, with particular attention to faculty, staff, students who work in Middle East Studies, though not exclusively. Please support our efforts to collectively describe and meet the needs of the moment by letting us know about such incidents of harassment, intimidation, and discrimination you have directly experienced or witnessed. On Anonymity: We understand how critically important the protection of anonymity is at this moment for affected communities. The information you include here will only be shared with the team working on advocacy around these issues with MESA. We will not share this information with third parties in a way that can be connected back to your identity without your permission. If you do give your permission, we would use more granular information for the purposes of advocacy and media outreach. We ask for identifying information for two different purposes: distinguishing responses from trolling, and helping us to reach back out to you. While we cannot guarantee legal support or provide legal advice, we have a variety of resources to share with you, and may, in certain cases, be able to make referrals. Why Report?: There are many reasons that reporting what has happened to you is important. Our goal is to build a collective community record of what is happening at this moment because having such a record broadens our range of advocacy tools. For example, filing complaints with your campus authorities helps fulfill one prong of a Title VI complaint, because it shows that the administrations were on notice of a hostile environment and failed to act, or responded poorly, if that is the case. Filing complaints to the DOE and DOJ also puts the government on notice and removes an excuse for them to claim ignorance. While this tool is not a substitute for these actions, we understand that individuals carry many risks in choosing to file such complaints and may reasonably choose not to. We hope that our tool may both help to fill out the picture that is missing as a result and also give campus members a greater sense that they are not alone and create the bases for considering making such complaints collectively to shield individuals from disproportionate risk.
SUCH AS: My employment is precarious and I have few job-related protections.
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