For immediate release on October 17, 2024
Contact: [email protected]
MESA Announces new Academic Freedom Initiative
MESA’s Academic Freedom Initiative will support data collection and analysis as well as dissemination of findings regarding academic freedom in the context of scholarship and teaching in Middle East studies.
The Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), the leading professional membership association for scholars and students of the Middle East and North Africa, proudly announces a two-year $312,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the comprehensive study of changes in the campus climate in North America since October 7, 2023.
MESA is a non-profit learned society that seeks to foster the study of the Middle East, promote high standards in scholarship and teaching in the field, and encourage public understanding of the region through programs, publications and education. In addition to enhancing education, furthering intellectual exchange, and recognizing professional distinction, MESA seeks to defend academic freedom.
MESA President Aslı U. Bâli notes “We are proud to announce this new project, which seeks to advance inclusivity, equity, and broader academic freedom on university and college campuses—at a time when the increasingly polarized political climate could inflict permanent damage to these values and commitments.” Dr. Bâli continued: “There is currently no comprehensive picture of developments on North American campuses to make clear the full scope and scale of the resulting policies and policy changes that have been implemented in response to student, staff, and faculty speech and associational activity over the past year. MESA is therefore gratified to receive this grant, which seeks to provide much-needed data and analysis.”
The Academic Freedom Initiative aims to create a public database recording the range of experiences of faculty, staff, and students since October 7, 2023, and to provide analytical frameworks to assess the implications of recent trends. The project also plans to track other changes affecting academic speech at the state and federal levels. Finally, it intends to document the more subtle effects on research, scholarship, and teaching on the Middle East of the changing context for speech and associational life on campuses—including the ways that faculty, researchers, and students may have shifted their research and teaching choices where they might be addressing subjects deemed controversial or divisive.
The grant will support the creation of two new staff positions for the next two years, supporting two key committees: MESA’s Task Force on Civil and Human Rights, as well as its Committee on Academic Freedom’s North America Wing.
A full-time position will assist MESA by taking the lead in data collection, organization, and analysis regarding campus climate and academic freedom issues since October 7, 2023. A second, part-time position will support advocacy and public dissemination of the findings by building out the digital infrastructure and creating public resources.
MESA Executive Director Jeffrey D. Reger notes, “This project is an ideal implementation of MESA’s mission, which is twofold: to promote excellence in research and teaching, and to defend the core tenets of academic freedom, without which our members could not do their work of research and teaching in the first place.” Dr. Reger added: “MESA has therefore long been committed to the defense of academic freedom in our field and beyond, through the advocacy of MESA’s Board of Directors, our Committee on Academic Freedom, and our Task Force on Civil and Human Rights, all of which are supported by the MESA staff. This grant significantly expands the support for our work, and comes at a crucial time for our field as a bellwether for higher education more broadly.”