Princeton University Near East Studies Program

Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies is cited by Edward Said as an example of the institutional prestige of regional scholarship and as a revealing backdrop to judgments that reduce the region’s cultural significance. Founded in 1927 as the oldest such department in the United States, it stood within a growing academic field whose expertise, Said argues, could serve strategic priorities while reproducing Orientalist assumptions.

Institutional Standing

Said mentions the department while discussing a Princeton event and emphasizes the university’s pride in its Near Eastern Studies department, founded in 1927. Its status as the oldest department of its kind in the country gives the institution a particular weight in his argument: academic authority is not merely an individual scholar’s possession but is also established and amplified through universities and professional organizations.

The department’s presence belongs to a wider expansion of Oriental studies that Said traces to the nineteenth century. Learned societies, professorships, and periodicals increased the field’s prestige and its capacity to disseminate knowledge. In this institutional setting, the study of the Orient could be organized as specialized expertise, while the categories and assumptions through which it was understood acquired the standing of scholarly knowledge.

Berger’s Report and Its Judgment

Said connects the department to Morroe Berger, a professor of sociology and Near Eastern studies at Princeton. In 1967, at the request of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Berger prepared a report on Middle Eastern and North African studies. He was also president of the Middle East Studies Association, founded that year as a professional organization concerned with the region across social-science and humanistic disciplines.

Berger’s report surveyed the region’s strategic, economic, and political importance to the United States and endorsed government and foundation support for university programs, including initiatives associated with the 1958 National Defense Education Act and links between the Social Science Research Council and Middle Eastern studies. It then judged that the modern Middle East and North Africa was not a center of great cultural achievement and was unlikely to become one in the near future, concluding that studying the region or its languages therefore offered no reward in terms of modern culture. Said highlights the contrast between this assessment and the institutional investment in studying the region: the report recognized its policy importance while denying comparable cultural value.

Role in Said’s Critique

The department functions in Said’s account as more than background. Its history and academic standing lend context to his examination of how scholarship about the region can be shaped by strategic interests and by inherited hierarchies of cultural worth. The contradiction he draws out is pointed: a field may be institutionally established and publicly supported while its own authoritative assessments characterize the people and cultures it studies as deficient or culturally unproductive.

This example belongs to Said’s broader argument that Orientalist knowledge can make historical societies appear as fixed objects of expert judgment. He criticizes formulations that generalize about Arabs or Islam without adequate attention to concrete history, and that convert complex political and cultural realities into supposedly self-evident traits. The department’s mention therefore anchors the critique in the institutions that confer scholarly authority, while Berger’s report illustrates how that authority can coexist with a dismissive account of the region’s cultural life.