Middlebury College recently yanked its students out of Jordan, citing regional instability, and dumped them into Morocco under the guise of "safety." This isn’t a strategic pivot. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of North African reality packaged as institutional "duty of care." By moving students from the Levant to the Maghreb, administrators aren't mitigating risk; they are simply trading a familiar geopolitical tension for a volatile, underreported domestic pressure cooker.
The assumption that Morocco serves as a "safe haven" for Western students during Middle Eastern upheaval is a lazy trope rooted in an outdated, Eurocentric view of the Arab world. It suggests that if you aren't bordering Israel, you are somehow immune to the ideological shockwaves rippling through the Ummah. I’ve watched universities pull these lateral moves for decades, treating the MENA region like a game of Risk where any green territory is interchangeable with another.
The Myth of the Maghreb Exception
University risk assessment teams love Morocco because it feels "adjacent to Europe." They see the high-speed trains, the French influence, and the Mediterranean coastline and mistake aesthetic stability for actual security. But Morocco is not a neutral observer in the current regional conflict. The 2020 Abraham Accords—which saw Morocco normalize ties with Israel in exchange for U.S. recognition of its sovereignty over Western Sahara—changed the math permanently.
By moving students to Rabat or Casablanca, Middlebury has placed them in the crosshairs of a nation grappling with its own internal identity crisis. The Moroccan street is overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian. The government, meanwhile, is tethered to a controversial diplomatic deal with the very entity that is the source of the regional friction. You aren't taking students away from the fire; you are placing them on top of a different kind of furnace—one where the vents are smaller and the pressure is higher.
Regional Contagion Doesn't Respect Borders
The logic of "distance equals safety" is a relic of pre-internet diplomacy. We live in a world of digital contagion. The images coming out of Gaza do not lose their potency once they cross the Libyan border. In fact, they often gain a sharper, more subversive edge in countries like Morocco, where public dissent is more tightly controlled than in the relatively more vocal Jordanian civil society.
In Jordan, the protests are a known quantity. They are institutionalized, predictable, and often serve as a pressure valve for the monarchy. In Morocco, the tension is subterranean. When the lid blows, it doesn't look like a controlled march down a designated Amman street. It looks like the 2011 February 20 movement or the Rif protests—spontaneous, localized, and incredibly difficult for a foreign university to navigate.
The Academic Dilution of the "Easy Exit"
Beyond the physical safety concerns, there is the intellectual dishonesty of the "study abroad swap." You cannot study the nuances of Levantine Arabic, the specific socioeconomic hurdles of a refugee-integrated state like Jordan, or the complex tribal-monarchical balance of the Hashemite Kingdom by sitting in a café in Marrakesh.
The dialects are different. The history is different. The social fabric is entirely distinct. By suggesting that Morocco is a suitable "backup" for Jordan, Middlebury is telling its students that the specificities of these cultures don't actually matter. It treats the Arab world as a monolith. "We can’t do the East, so let’s just do the West—it’s all basically the same, right?" Wrong. It’s an academic bait-and-switch that rewards institutional panic over pedagogical depth.
The Security Theater of Institutional Liability
Let’s be blunt: This move wasn't made for the students. It was made for the lawyers and the insurance underwriters. If a student gets caught in a riot in Amman, the university is liable for ignoring a State Department travel advisory or "failing to act" during a crisis. If that same student gets caught in a protest in Rabat, the university can claim they took "proactive measures" to move them to a perceived safe zone.
It’s security theater. It’s about creating a paper trail of "safety" rather than actually assessing the ground truth. I have spent years analyzing how educational institutions manage crisis, and the pattern is always the same: prioritize the optics of relocation over the reality of the destination.
The "Safe Haven" Fallacy
To understand why this is a mistake, we need to look at the mechanics of Moroccan internal security. The Moroccan state (the Makhzen) is exceptionally good at maintaining a veneer of calm. They have a sophisticated internal security apparatus that keeps the streets clear for tourists and foreign students. But that calm is brittle.
- The Western Sahara Variable: Morocco’s foreign policy is dominated by one issue. Any regional instability that threatens their position on the Sahara—or their relationship with the U.S.—can lead to sudden, sharp changes in domestic policy.
- Economic Fragility: Morocco is facing massive inflation and water scarcity. These are the real "security risks" for a student living in a local neighborhood. Social unrest triggered by the price of bread is just as dangerous as a political rally, yet it rarely makes it into a university's risk briefing.
- The Normalization Backlash: Protests against the normalization with Israel are frequent and growing. To put American students in the middle of a country where the government is actively suppressing pro-Palestinian sentiment while simultaneously cozying up to the U.S. is a recipe for disaster.
The Better Way (That No One Wants to Hear)
If a region is genuinely too dangerous for students, you don't move them to the "next best" country in the same cultural hemisphere. You bring them home. Or you let them stay and teach them how to navigate the reality of the world they claimed they wanted to study.
The most valuable lesson a Middle East Studies student could learn right now is how a society functions—or fails to function—during a regional war. By evacuating them to Morocco, you are shielding them from the very subject matter they are supposed to be mastering. You are teaching them that when things get "too real," the American institution will provide an escape hatch to a more comfortable, "Europeanized" version of their field of study.
The Cost of the Pivot
This isn't just about Middlebury. This is a systemic failure in how Western academia engages with the Global South. We treat these countries as disposable laboratories for student "growth" until the moment they become inconvenient.
The pivot to Morocco is a signal of weakness. It tells the host communities in Jordan that our commitment to them is paper-thin. It tells the Moroccan hosts that they are merely a "plan B." And it tells the students that their safety is a product of geography rather than situational awareness and cultural immersion.
Stop pretending Morocco is a vacuum. It is a complex, sovereign nation with its own simmering conflicts, not a waiting room for the Levant. If you want to keep students safe, teach them to read the room, not how to change the zip code.
The next time an administrator tells you they are moving a program for "safety," ask them to show you the data on Moroccan domestic instability versus Jordanian protest cycles. Ask them to explain how moving students to a country with a direct, controversial link to the regional conflict makes them "safer." They won't have an answer, because the answer isn't in the data. It's in the insurance policy.
Pack your bags if you must, but don't call it a haven. It’s just a different kind of storm.
