https://www.jihadwatch.org/2022/10/americas-troubled-middle-eastern-ivory-towers
“Since the earliest days of Americans’ engagement with the Middle East, U.S. officials have looked to Americans associated with the region’s universities to advance U.S. interests,” writes commentator and political veteran Pratik Chougule. His recent, intriguing book, American Universities in the Middle Fast and U.S. Foreign Policy: Intersections with American Interests, details how such policies “have yielded mixed results” amidst the greater Middle East’s conflicted politics.
As Chougule discussed in a recent interview, his case studies of American universities established in the Middle East begin with nineteenth-century Christian missionaries. They saw American academic excellence as a means of introducing Muslim societies to the Bible. Such evangelicals founded in 1866 the Syrian Protestant College, forerunner to the American University of Beirut (AUB), and in 1919 the American University of Cairo (AUC).
Until World War II, the private universities AUB and AUC remained isolated American presences in the Middle East, but American government aloofness from the region changed dramatically during the Cold War. At AUB, the “U.S. government came to view the university as a strategic asset,” particularly as, among other reasons, AUB “administrators had developed close ties to regional governments with oil reserves,” Chougule observes. Meanwhile, since AUC’s founding president Charles Watson, “six of AUC’s eleven presidents previously served in the U.S. government in diplomatic and military roles.” By 1978, AUC was the “only America higher education institution to receive more than half of its funds” from the United States government, Chougule notes.
Growing American interest in the Middle East came with a price, particularly given American support for the state of Israel, a deeply unpopular move at AUB, AUC, and in the wider region. “Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, AUB administrators expended political capital to lobby Washington against the Zionist movement,” Chougule writes. Similarly, AUC faculty members have endorsed university resolutions denouncing Egypt’s 1979 peace agreement with Israel, both in 1979 and 2008.
“Regional leaders had to pay a greater political price to welcome an American higher education presence in their countries” after American recognition of Israel in 1948, Chougule notes. Conflict with Israel often made campus peace impossible. “By the 1970s, protests related to the Arab-Israeli conflict overwhelmed AUB,” he observes.