Of all the institutions that failed to prepare the public for 9/11, universities failed earliest and most completely. Starting in the late 1970s, a very influential academic argument reframed almost any criticism of the Arab or Muslim world as simple racism — regardless of whether the criticism was accurate. That argument reshaped how an entire generation of Middle East scholars were trained.

The consequences were concrete. Weeks after 9/11, one respected scholar published a book detailing how badly this now-dominant school had understood the Middle East because it feared looking at the religious problems. Thus academic experts could not explain what had just happened — his own professional association hadn't held a single serious panel on jihad or terrorism, despite decades of warning signs. A graduate student who wanted to shift his research to studying jihad was told, point blank, that doing so would end his academic career. And they were right.

Twenty-five years later, this gap still shapes public understanding. Most people have never been taught the vocabulary or history needed to make sense of jihadist violence — not because the information doesn't exist, but because the institutions meant to produce and teach that knowledge largely chose not to.