National Defense Education Act of 1958

The National Defense Education Act of 1958 is cited by Edward Said as a federal initiative supporting university programs in Middle Eastern studies. Its place in the book is not as a self-contained account of the statute, but as a concrete example in an argument about how postwar American scholarship on the region developed alongside national-security and policy concerns.

Place in the development of Middle East studies

Said situates the Act within a broader postwar expansion of American attention to the Middle East. During and after the Second World War, Cairo, Teheran, and North Africa became important arenas, while Britain and France had pioneered the exploitation of the region’s oil, strategic, and human resources. The United States, Said argues, prepared in this setting for a new imperial role. Cultural relations and research were therefore connected to the wider shift in international power, rather than arising solely from detached academic interest.

In describing this emerging apparatus, Said names the National Defense Education Act of 1958 alongside other government and foundation projects supporting university programs. He presents it as one component in an institutional landscape that also included ties between the Social Science Research Council and Middle Eastern studies, federal research projects, foundation support, and research conducted by bodies such as the Defense Department, the RAND Corporation, and the Hudson Institute. The Act is thus identified as part of a network, not as the sole cause of the field’s growth.

National-security rationale

Said connects the expansion of research to an explicitly strategic account of knowledge. Mortimer Graves’s 1950 description of a proposed cultural-relations policy called for acquiring every significant publication in important Near Eastern languages published since 1900, and argued that Congress should recognize this effort as a measure of national security. Graves framed the need for greater American understanding in terms of forces competing with the American idea in the Near East, particularly communism and Islam. In Said’s account, this language helps explain the policy environment in which subsequent federal educational initiatives, including the Act, supported regional study.

The Act’s appearance in the book consequently marks a tension between scholarship’s stated intellectual purposes and its institutional uses. Said does not claim that every investigation is reducible to politics; he argues elsewhere that each humanistic study must determine how knowledge and politics connect in its own subject and historical circumstances. Applied to the development of Middle East studies, this caution makes the Act significant as evidence of a specific setting in which academic programs were supported amid strategic concerns, not as proof that all scholarship had one motive.

Relation to the Orientalist tradition

Said argues that the postwar American research apparatus retained much of the outlook developed by European Orientalism. European scholarship was accommodated, normalized, and popularized in the United States, while new area studies and social-science methods gave that inheritance contemporary forms. The National Defense Education Act belongs to the institutional context of this transition: federal support helped universities expand regional programs, while the broader organization of knowledge remained connected to government and policy interests.

This account also clarifies what the book does and does not establish about the Act. It names the statute as a directly Sputnik-inspired initiative and as one of several supports for university programs, but offers no detailed description of its provisions or implementation. Its evidentiary role is instead analytical: it helps show how the growth of Middle East studies took shape within a national-security framework and how the older European tradition of Orientalist knowledge persisted within new American institutions.