Nadav Safran - Scandal

Scandal

In the early 1980s, it came to light that he had accepted large sums of funding from the CIA without disclosing the fact to the university. According to Zachary Lockman,

The scandal erupted when it became known that Safran had taken $45,700 from the Central Intelligence Agency to fund a major international conference he was hosting at Harvard on "Islam and Politics in the Contemporary Muslim World"—a hot topic at the time and one of obvious interest to the CIA. Not only had Safran secretly used CIA funding for this conference, he had not told the invitees, a number of whom were coming from the Middle East, that the CIA was picking up the tab. It then came out that Safran had also received a $107,430 grant from the CIA for the research project that led to his 1985 book Saudi Arabia: The Ceaseless Quest for Security. Safran's contract with the CIA stipulated that the agency had the right to review and approve the manuscript before publication and that its role in funding the book would not be disclosed. And indeed, the book as published made no mention of the fact that the research for it had been partially funded by the CIA.

When the scandal broke, about half the invitees to Safran's conference withdrew, and many of the faculty and students associated with Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies publicly expressed their opposition to Safran's actions. A month later the Middle East Studies Association censured Safran on the grounds that his actions had violated its 1982 resolution calling on scholars to disclose their sources of research funding. Safran intimated that his critics were motivated by anti-Semitism, but after an internal investigation at Harvard he agreed to step down as center director at the end of the academic year.

After the ensuing scandal was extensively covered in the Harvard Crimson and the Boston Globe, he resigned his position as the head of the Middle East Center. He retired as a professor from Harvard in 2002, and died of cancer in 2003 at the age of 77.