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American institutions have a problem. Universities and colleges across the U.S. have failed to evolve their regional studies programs to the geopolitical realities of today.
Nowhere is this issue more evident than in the sidelining of contemporary Turkish studies within Middle Eastern and Eurasian programs.
Within the broader field of Middle Eastern and Eurasian studies, the study of contemporary Türkiye and its language has frequently been treated as a lesser prioritized subfield in the already marginalized areas of regional studies.
Language departments have largely pushed Turkish aside in favor of Arabic and other languages seen as more strategically relevant. This can also be taken as a hangover from post-9/11 priorities that no longer reflect how the region actually looks in 2026.
The irony is striking. Turkish has been designated a critical language by successive US administrations across party lines. Yet a persistent shortage of Turkish speakers has created what officials describe as a capabilities gap in areas of diplomatic and economic interest.
During President Donald Trump’s first term, his administration argued “deficits in critical languages like Turkish limit our nation's capability to secure economic interests and conduct effective and nuanced diplomacy.”
At my own university, where I teach political science courses on the Middle East, opportunities to study contemporary Türkiye remain remarkably limited. Turkish is not offered as a language option for students, despite the university's ranking among the top 20 institutions nationally for international relations and national security.
Each semester I encounter students eager to learn more about Türkiye than their university can offer. Many lack even a basic understanding of a country that fields NATO's second-largest military after the United States. Even in my upper-level Middle East courses, where students are far from novices, exposure to contemporary Türkiye remains minimal.
As one of my students said in our foreign policy class last semester, "All I know about Türkiye is that our professor spends a lot of her time in a country where there are a lot of cats.” The comment got a laugh, but it pointed to something larger: a remarkable gap in resources for students seeking to learn about a country that plays a central role in Middle Eastern, European, and international politics.
Within contemporary academia, Türkiye's existence is “somewhere that is either being relegated to history through the Ottoman Empire or somewhere refugees go,” argues Salma Ghalyoun, a former Fulbright Scholarship grantee to Türkiye and now a lawyer based out of New York City.
Türkiye is often taught as a nostalgic page in history books or as a transit point through which young scholars study broader regional events. What is often missing from this educational framework is Türkiye itself.
What university departments seem to miss is that student demand is already there. Semester after semester, students ask me to recite Turkish words in class, and office hours fill up with requests for programs and opportunities to learn more about Türkiye.
Within American academia, rigid hierarchies of relevance have long shaped regional studies and became particularly entrenched in Middle Eastern and North African studies after 9/11. In the years that followed, national security priorities and counterterrorism concerns began dictating how universities approached the entire MENA region.
This included a massive influx of U.S. federal funding and language initiatives focused on Arabic, Persian, and Pashto, while also prioritizing countries viewed as “strategic allies,” such as Israel.
At the same time, Türkiye has been (appropriately so) viewed as a country whose history, culture, and geography cannot be neatly packaged within a single regional studies field, whether that is Middle Eastern, European, or Eurasian. Yet this complexity helped create an academic blind spot that remains unaddressed to this day.
More than two decades after 9/11, many American institutions have not caught up with students' desire for more Türkiye-related courses. Fewer than 1% of American universities offer Turkish as a language course, with the majority of the institutions that do offer the language belonging to an elite bubble of universities that include Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia University—institutions that historically hold an acceptance rate of only 3% to 4%.
“If existing academic frameworks make it difficult to understand countries that operate across multiple regions, then perhaps the academic frameworks deserve reexamination,” Ghalyoun questions.
In other words, the problem lies in an American educational system whose outdated structures continue to reflect post-9/11 policy priorities and rigid regional boundaries rather than contemporary geopolitical realities.
Türkiye remains a key mediator between Russia and Ukraine, continues to be a major defense exporter, and is an important leader in European security initiatives due to its geography and strong military capabilities.
The July 2026 NATO Summit in Ankara underscored yet again Türkiye's central role in global and regional politics, with NATO Deputy Secretary General Radmila Sekerinska describing the summit as “a big win.”
As Türkiye continues to emerge as a driving force in international affairs, American universities must reconsider the academic structures that have left it on the margins. The problem is not a lack of student interest.
In fact, American students deserve more opportunities from their institutions to study Türkiye and its language, and Türkiye itself deserves to be studied with the seriousness and dignity befitting its place in the world.
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