The Center of Controversy

When Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies finds the limelight, it's usually the gentle glow of scholarly achievement. For a while last spring, however, the Center found itself the unaccustomed subject of seering international scrutiny.

"The phone just wouldn't stop ringing," says an official who remembers the weeks which followed the news that the Center's director, Nadav Safran, had used more than $150,000 of the CIA's money to fund academic work. "From Voice of America, from Kuwait, Iran, Iraq--from all over the world--they wanted to know about our work for the CIA."

Now, almost four months later, the New York Times no longer editorializes about Safran and the "serious trouble which arises when the CIA's involvement in scholarly endeavor is kept quiet." Safran, the Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, is slated to give up the Center's helm at the end of the month. But no one connected with the center believes its problems will end with his directorship.

Scholars at the Center as well as specialists across the country agree the CIA affair has deflected attention away from significant challenges facing the Center. The scholars say Safran's CIA ties and style of leadership leave a legacy of suspicion and factionalization which will plague the Center in the years to come. But they also say financing Middle Eastern studies at a time when revenue from petroleum production has plummetted and the Center's own "tired blood" will present its most difficult tests.

Observers of the Center agree that the Center needs a strong director to quell the feuding there, put its fundraising on track, and ensure that research and teaching are not ignored. Several say such leadership is essential to reestablishing what they call the invigorated atmosphere that Safran brought about during his first years there.

Months ago, it was widely speculated that Princeton Professor Roy Mottehedah would be a solid choice to provide such leadership. Although the University has lured Mottehada from Princeton with a lifetime post, sources close to the decision say the expert on medieval Islam does not want to assume a major administrative position for at least two years while he fulfills obligations to Princeton.

Recent statements by Dean Spence that he is looking for someone to head the Center "for a relatively short time" have given rise to speculation he hopes Mottehedah will eventually take over the center. "It would look like the hope or the plan is that Mottehedah would take it over after several years," says Professor of the History of Arabic Science Ibrahim A. Sabra.

But in the face of such speculation, some scholars wonder how well the Center, which according to a respected national rating has fallen relative to similar institutions, can maintain even its tarnished reputation during years of interim leadership.

Many experts on the Middle East say a resounding signal of the Center's lose of stature will come next year, when a prestigious association of Middle East scholars will hold their yearly meeting in Boston but minimize their use of the Center, which formerly was scheduled to host the event.

"What the Center really needs is a strong director with a sense of leadership," says John L. Esposito, a professor of religious studies at Holy Cross. He says an acting director is "not in a position to do what needs to be done."

During the weeks when scholars began discussing Safran's links to the CIA, Professor of Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies Nur O. Yalman warned that a perceived connection between the University and the CIA would make Harvard scholars working in the Middle East inviting targets for anti-American sentiment.

"Any involvement with the CIA lessens our credibility as a scholarly and academic institution and makes us look like an arm of the U.S. government," Yalman said.

According to a source familiar with the center, Yalman's prediction proved true several weeks ago when Egyptian security officers detained and questioned an Egyptologist with ties to the University. Although the Egyptologist, Bassim Zaki, could not be reached for comment, the source says his interrogation focused on Safran's CIA contracts.

But one scholar who did his doctoral work at the Center cautions against exaggerating the effect of a specific CIA contract on academics working in the Middle East. "These days, anyone with an American connection is going to be questioned," says University of New Hampshire Professor John O. Voll.

Voll and other professionals say evocative episodes like Zaki's detention obscure more pressing forces at work on the Center--forces which they say are making national intelligence agency funding increasingly attractive to Centers like Harvard's.

During recent years, economic and political conditions in the Middle East and the falling profits of American oil companies have dried a once brimming well of private funds for Middle Eastern studies.

"The usual sources, the foundations and the oil companies don't have the funds, explains Holy Cross's Esposito. "In this Administration, who has the money? The Defense Department and the CIA."

For several years Exxon, traditionally a major source of funding for Middle East-related research, has reduced its support for Centers like Harvard's, according to Exxon spokesman Donald L. Snook. Spokesmen for Chevron and for other "petrodollar" companies say their companies have made similar funding cuts. They say such reductions will continue for the foreseeable future.

A source close to the Center says that several years ago when oil companies were enjoying unprecedented returns on investments in the Middle East, the Center received about $300,000 from the firms each year. Now, according to the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, that sum has decreased by almost 80 percent.

Although he declines to put a dollar value on his company's aid to Harvard, Exxon's Snook says that aid will diminish by between 30 and 40 percent next year. Snook says Exxon's significant cuts in grants to Harvard did not come in response to the CIA controversy and that they are in line with cuts in funding for similar centers across the country. The CIA controversy probably would have caused Exxon to reduce grants to Harvard if thouroughgoing cuts were not necessary anyway, Snook adds.

According to some people familiar with the Center, the financial stress there is more serious than at other similar institutions, constituting what several call a "financial crisis" brought about by mismanagement and poor planning.

"One of the things that leaked out from a guy on the committee is that in addition to everything else, we have to deal with a financial crisis," says a source who spoke on condition that he not be identified. The source referred to the six-man committee which oversees the center.

Center officials refuse to comment on the statements or to release information regarding the Center's financial health.

"We're in a transition situation, and the global fundraising situation is being studied by the standing committee, and until they've completed their study, it would be inapropriate for me to give you any information," says Amy Meyer, a Center administrator. "This is not something that I think you want to be investigating."

But Burbank Professor of Political Economy Dwight H. Perkins, who heads that committee, says he doesn't know anything about an investigation, adding that it would not be appropriate for his committee to conduct a study. "The standing committee on Middle Eastern studies' role is not to run the Center. Its role is basically what is sometimes called gatekeeping."

Although Perkins refuses to characterize the finances of the Center in "any way," the remarks of others familiar with the committee suggest financial difficulties do exist. "Crisis is not the word I'd use," says Robert D. Putnam, another member of the CMES executive committee, before declining to comment further on the Center's finances.

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences A. Michael Spence says the Center has had a "financial setback" and directs specific inquires about that setback to the committee.

The suspicion, secrecy and high emotions obvious in many conversations with individuals close to the Center may cloud their assessments of its finances. The tenor of those conversations--interviews which professors and accomplished scholars angrily sprinkle with profanities--underscores another legacy of the last several years that observers say will tax any administrator who takes over the Center's direction.

Many Middle Eastern studies centers reflect the factionalization and suspicion endemic to the region they study. As battle lines have been drawn around the director of Harvard's center, however, observers say rivalries there have heated up, possibly becoming entrenched enough to handicap the Center in the future.

Amid the controversy over his use of CIA money, Safran and some of his supporters asserted that attacks on the Egyptian-born Jew had more to do with his religion and sympathies to Israel than with any purported wrongdoing.

In a January interview with the weekly Jewish Advocate, Safran said his opponents tried to use "the Jewish factor" against him. He cited the attacks as an example "of how my opponents and enemies reached for whatever they could hit me with."

But Safran's detractors offered specific criticisms of his administration. Those critical of Safran, who has refused interviews repeatedly and has talked with The Crimson once since the initial disclosures that he used CIA funding to sponsor a conference on Islam last fall, often turn to discussion of Safran's interaction with his colleagues or to his fundraising efforts.

"Damn it all," says one professor with ties to the center, his voice rising with emotion, "What [Safran] did was he came in, fired people left and right, and set up his own kitchen cabinet, and acted like an Egyptian pharoah."

Broadening his remarks to include his colleagues, the professor continues: "There are a lot of people who want to defend Safran instead of the Center. And defend him from what? So he made a mistake. Why doesn't he admit it? What are they thinking?"

Hassan Namazee '72 says he encountered so much resistance from Safran whan he funded a fellowship to benefit Iranian students and Iranian scholarship that he discontinued the program after its first year.

According to Namazee, the program, which he says would have provided $50,000 annually, was not under the auspices of the Center but called on the Center's head to serve on an administrative committee together with four others.

Namazee says "a desire on [Safran's] part to run the committee without the help of the committee" motivated him to stop funding the program after a year.

"It simply got to the point where he did not get his way in a cetain matter, and he resigned in a huff," explains Namazee, who discontinued the fellowship during the 1984-85 academic year.

"People who have supported the Center in the past are not supporting it right now," he says.