Princeton’s Middle East battle is quieter than Columbia’s, but in a way it’s no less important. At its center is Michael Doran, an assistant professor and protégé of Bernard Lewis who teaches the modern politics of the region in the university’s Near Eastern Studies department.
Last spring, Doran was up for tenure, but the university chose to defer his consideration because he was invited to serve as the chairman of a new program at Brandeis. (He declined the offer.)
Doran is well-credentialed. His students rave about his classes, and Middle East experts outside of the American academy — such as Kramer and the Shalem Center’s Michael Oren, author of Six Days of War — speak highly of him. (Kramer and Oren, like Doran, studied at Princeton. Oren calls Doran “a gift to the field.”) He’s written widely noted articles in Foreign Affairs and other popular publications, and has served as a consultant to the U.S. government on matters Middle Eastern.
He also happens to be politically to the right — and unapologetic about it. In a field dominated by anti-Western dogmatism, Doran stands out for his political inclinations, his unusual analyses (particularly for a Middle East scholar these days), and his popularity. It’s hardly shocking that some professors, likely guided by both politics and jealousy, would hope to prevent his further rise
The fact that he is not only a serious and right-leaning scholar but also a popular and influential one means that, if he sticks around, Princeton will be even less likely to succumb to trendy approaches in lieu of rigorous scholarship. As Martin Kramer puts it, "The attack on [Doran] comes from the very far-left 'popular front' that has squelched diversity in Middle Eastern studies for the last 20 years. They'd like every place to be a Columbia or NYU or Berkeley — they regard the existence of even one pocket of diversity as a mortal threat." (Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi's recent decision to apply for a position at Princeton's Transregional Institute suggests the battle may have just been ratcheted up a notch.)
