Wm. Scott Harrop (Lecturer, Dept. of Middle East and South Asian Languages and Cultures)
“Teaching about Middle East Revolutions at Mr. Jefferson’s University”
I presentlyteach the “capstone” seminar course for the interdisciplinary Middle East Studies major. I am also coordinatingan ongoing assessment of the course, reviewingpast teaching approaches, surveying alumni, and crafting suggestions for future design. An initial review prompted the question of how I could best contribute to the course, not just for this semester, yet as a lasting legacy for the program and even the University. As ananalyst of Middle East revolutions, and as a recent Fellow at Monticello’s International Center for Jefferson Studies, the idea emerged to lend a Jeffersonian framework to the course, one central to the enduring purposes of the University of Virginia: the struggle for human freedom.
The timing for such a thematic inquiry has been propitious, with dramatic rebellions unfolding from Tunisia to Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Iran, Syria, Lebanonand beyond.Theory and history meet in the present. Whilemonitoring events and contemplating classic Jefferson-tinged questions about catalysts to rebellion,each studentis charged to become our expert guide on one freedom movement. With interactive guidance, they eachexamine their case movement’s origins, agendas, prospects, and strategies, both domestically and internationally, the latter being what Jefferson well understood as “the opinions of mankind.” Studentsare presenting their findingsbefore their fellow seminarians, prior to refinement for final briefing papers.
Ironically, the best innovation in our seminarmay be in taking seriously our venue. Here, we arecontemplating Middle Eastern struggles for freedom, for independence, at the one University which can proudly claim a unique founding purpose for such study. Reflecting nearly a half century after penning the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson offered a conviction that the world’s nations would yet “burst the chains” and “assume the blessings and security of self-government.” Yet students are also pondering, in light of difficult cases before them, Jefferson’s cautions about the prospects for “the ball of liberty”afterthe fires of war and revolution, where political cultures might not yet comport well with the requirements of self-government. As Jefferson once consoled Lafayette amid the French Revolution, the transition from autocracy to democracy "was not a featherbed. "
Jefferson’s prescription for liberty’s advancewas not imposition, but education. “Enlighten the people generally,” Jefferson wrote in 1816, “and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.” Near his own death, Jefferson’s eyes were fixed onthis University’s “holy cause.” As he put it then in closing a last letter to James Madison: “if I remove beyond the reach of attentions to the University,… it is a comfort to leave that institution under your care… to believe that you are engaged in vindicating to posterity the course we have pursued for preserving to them, in all their purity, the blessings of self-government.”
To Jefferson’s “holy cause,” I serve this course.