While declining to comment on whose program is better, Emily Gottreich, vice chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley, points out that Berkeley has a tenured political scientist, Kiren Chaudhry, who like Gottreich herself was trained at Harvard.

Last year, CMES recommended several senior candidates to the government department to fill the void. But Caton says he does not know what happened after that. The search became the government department’s responsibility, and Caton was not asked to participate.

In the end, the search committee failed to select a senior scholar of Middle East politics who was available and that they were willing to recommend to the government department, Nancy L. Rosenblum, the newly appointed department chair, confirms.

Rosenblum rejects the charge that the government department was unprepared for the growing interest in the Middle East. She says the lack of a Middle Eastern political scientist is due to the “constant reshuffling” of faculty in all areas of comparative politics and is not the result of a long-term oversight.

“There’s this sort of half-life to the work of excellent scholars who go on to produce other scholars,” she says. “The same thing happens in reverse. People retire or resign and fields lie fallow...I expect that 10 years down the line, we’ll see a lot of excellent Middle East scholars.”

Rosenblum says a Middle Eastern political scientist is now a “top regional hiring priority,” followed by an additional professor of African politics.

Rosenblum says the senior search has currently been abandoned but that the department has commissioned a hiring search for a Middle Eastern specialist at the junior level, and the search is well underway. Five candidates are being considered and the first job talk will take place in the next several weeks.

She adds that it is one of the department’s duties to provide “at least the minimum” of the kinds of courses undergraduates expect in the field of Middle Eastern politics, such as a course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meyer Professor of Middle East History E. Roger Owen says the trouble the government department now faces used to be true of the history department. “It used to be that very few American history departments had anyone in modern Middle East history. That, at least, has gotten better,” he says.

Owen contends that the history department is one field Caton doesn’t have to worry about, and could act as an example for other departments who wish to follow suit.

Typically, Owen says, each regional area is allotted two professorships in the history department, but the Middle East has ended up with four. “We couldn’t possibly ask for more,” says Owen, who, along with Afsaneh Najmabadi, professor of history and women’s studies, is an expert on modern Middle East history.

LOOKING BACKWARDS

At the end of the year, Yalman, the only professor who studies the Northern parts of the region, will retire. And Caton has his doubts that he will be replaced. Since Yalman’s chair is rotating, University Hall decides which department should get it next.

Yalman has been teaching at Harvard since 1972 and he says that since then the field of Middle Eastern studies has never gotten a great deal of support. Yet Yalman remains confident in the future of Middle Eastern studies at Harvard, citing the brilliance of the University’s graduate students. “I have never had difficulty in finding superbly prepared teaching fellows for my courses,” he says.

Yalman agrees with Caton that scholars in the areas of culture and literature and arts, as well as in current affairs, finance and the economy, are absolutely necessary additions to the faculty.

Yalman hopes Middle Eastern studies will eventually follow the format which has worked well for the Far East region. Harvard’s East Asian Studies program, he says, has excellent institutes which focus on each critical country, from Japan to China to Korea. He says a similar form of specialization that is integrated within the various disciplines would work well for the study of the Middle East and also the greater Islamic world.

“Since the country is obviously involved with this part of the world in a fundamental way,” Yalman says, “it is important to have new positions in the critical departments.”