Event Details:

Education Under Siege: Attacks on Scholars and Scholarship in Turbulent Times

We are witnessing today what many scholars characterize as the collapse of the post-Cold War liberal order—with serious consequences for Muslims in predominantly Muslim countries as well as for those living in minority communities around the world. The collapse is marked by intensifying violence between state and non-state actors, by deepening social, economic, and environmental crisis, and by the reemergence of autocratic and despotic rule as viable and desirable forms of governance. Political, ethnic, and religious minorities are suspect, and political and economic refugees are viewed as clear and present dangers. In this new world (dis)order, academia is but one of the casualties. This is witnessed by the attack and scapegoating of scholars and their scholarship as threats to national solidarity, economic prosperity, and/or state security.

Such attacks take on different modes of repression and violence depending on the nature of the conflict and the strategies available to those state and non-state actors who see themselves as arbiters of national or communal order. In this context, scholars have suffered intimidation, firings, arrest, exile, and assassination. Schools and institutions of higher education have been defunded, besieged, closed, and violently attacked. Scholarly research and curriculums deemed contrary to the moral fabric of society or to the larger national interest have been denounced, censored, and/or outlawed.

Cosponsors: MSU's James Madison College, College of Arts and Letters, Asian Studies Center, Department of Sociology, College of Education, African Studies Center, Center for Gender in Global Context, and the University of Michigan's Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies