“It is no exaggeration to say that America’s academics have failed to predict or explain the major evolutions of Middle Eastern politics and society over the past two decades. Time and again, academics have been taken by surprise by their subjects; time and again, their paradigms have been swept away by events. Repeated failures have depleted the credibility of scholarship among influential publics.”

The historian Martin Kramer wrote these words in his 2001 book, Ivory Towers on Sand. Released six weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, it presented a road map out of folly for academics and their students. Yet it’s safe to say that in the quarter-century since, the problem has only worsened, leaving a glaring void in the world of America’s Mideast academic studies.

Now the institution that published Kramer’s cri de coeur has partnered with a major university to take a shot at filling that void. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Pepperdine University are launching a fully accredited master’s program in Middle East policy studies.

“After a lot of complaining about the problem, it’s time to start offering solutions,” said Robert Satloff, the longtime director of the Washington Institute who is overseeing the project with Pete N. Peterson, dean of Pepperdine’s school of public policy. “And this is what we like to think is the sort of alternative that we need to provide students.”

The two-year program will begin in the fall semester and is accepting applicants on a rolling-admissions basis. The first class will be capped at about 25 students. In a nod to the urgency with which program organizers see the mission, all students are offered tuition-free scholarships and the program will even reimburse students for costs they may have incurred by already committing to another school.

“The idea might have been in my mind beforehand, but this is a product of the post Oct. 7 environment,” Satloff said. “It’s a product of seeing so many campuses in which debate was stifled by the sound of the voice instead of the quality of the content.”

The “decibel level,” as Satloff calls it, is just one of the obstacles that students face in post-Oct. 7 academia. Another is the widespread worry over whether their past affiliations with organizations deemed too friendly to Israel or misaligned with prevailing ideological dogmas will disqualify them from Mideast graduate programs at elite U.S. schools.

“We will celebrate viewpoint diversity at our program,” Satloff said. “We’re going to be focused on training students to be outstanding diplomats, policymakers, intelligence analysts, journalists, advocates. … You don’t have to hide who you are to apply to our program.”

The classes will all be held at Pepperdine’s Washington, DC location, just a few blocks from the White House. It is, in fact, a Washington-centric program overall, intended to prepare students to move on to careers in public policy.

The elite miseducation that was laid bare after Oct. 7 has real-world consequences beyond the campus. It stifles free inquiry and therefore perpetuates precisely the problems Kramer was talking about in Ivory Towers. It’s no surprise then to see Kramer’s name on the list of invited faculty, alongside region experts like Soner Cagaptay, Hanin Ghaddar, Matthew Levitt, and Karim Sadjadpour, plus DC policy veterans Dennis Ross, Dana Stroul and Elizabeth Dent. (Satloff himself is on the list, too.)

The Pepperdine program seeks to solve another problem exacerbating the extended decline of Middle East academic programs: the billions of dollars in foreign money flooding American universities from influential governments abroad—Qatar being only the most infamous example. The Pepperdine program will adopt the Washington Institute’s own policy of not accepting donations from foreign entities.

The donor-funded model for the program also means Pepperdine won’t be reliant on foreign students whose willingness to pay full freight subsidizes the bloated and biased administrations at many top universities. “We are focused solely on merit,” Satloff said.

The crisis in American higher education won’t solve itself. Perhaps a genuine marketplace of ideas can.