Adnan Bseisu, Contributing Photographer

At a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Middle Eastern North African room in the Asian American Cultural Center, the MENA student association celebrated more than the establishment of a designated space.  

The Oct. 28 ceremony featured student speeches, cuisine from the region, decorations and conversations in the new room. Since the start of the 2022 fall semester, the MENA association has welcomed new and returning students for mixers and collaborative events across cultural centers. 

Though the room has been open since the beginning of the school year, the event was a more symbolic visualizer of the various cultural and advocacy endeavors that MENA plans to host this coming year, according to student organizers. The MENA student association serves as an umbrella organization that aims to cultivate a safe space for any student with ancestral or cultural roots to the region. 

“Our [student] organization hasn’t been active … for a while,” said Layla Hedroug ’25, who currently serves as the MENA association’s vice president. “So this was kind of a revival of some sort … This event was basically to show people that we’re still present, and we’re coming back better and stronger than ever.”

Since the MENA student association’s launch in 2019, little has changed in regards to Yale’s classification of MENA students — in that it continues to be nonexistent. The University does not recognize the MENA label as its own separate racial group in its admissions process. 

The MENA student association has taken steps to make University-related surveys more inclusive and conscious of this gap. The 2018-2019 Yale College Council survey, which saw about 2,000 responses, featured three MENA-specific questions and found that about 6 percent of the student body identify as MENA, though MENA President Youssef Ibrahim ’25 believes that the numbers are higher today.

The MENA association is currently working on another survey with more specific categories to gauge more accurate numbers, Hedroug said. 

According to Hedroug and other leaders who spoke at Friday’s ceremony, ambiguity surrounding MENA identity is a theme that surfaces time and time again, contributing to an erasure of culturally specific problems and diminishing the urgency to both acknowledge and address these issues.

“We’re talking about a people whose diversity [is] being completely overlooked,” Hedroug said. 

At the ribbon-cutting, MENA student leaders decorated various rooms with Persian, North African, Turkish, Shami and Khaleeji cultural symbols that highlighted the nuances of the MENA identity. Attendees of the event later moved from room to room, ultimately stopping by the newly-opened MENA room on the third floor. 

The road to attaining this room was not easy. Students of the group have called for a more established campus presence since 2018, after years of juggling a system where MENA students were assigned a peer liaison from either the AACC or Afro-American cultural houses depending on which they identified more with. 

Hedroug, who spoke with former Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun in the past to push for a separate cultural house, called the conversation “embarrassing” for the University. 

She, along with other students, cited the importance of creating a more defined and inclusive space where students didn’t have to box themselves into specific criteria. However, Hedroug was disappointed when Chun shut down the idea, claiming that the house would have created divisions between students. 

Chun did not respond to requests for comment. 

Sarah Ben Tkhayet ’26, who serves as MENA’s outreach chair, said that getting a room is also a symbol of the AACC’s solidarity with MENA in its calls for a MENA cultural house.

“The highlight [of getting the room] would be the link that is being solidified between MENA and the AACC,” Ben Tkhayet said. “The AACC is a very strong organization, with a lot of affiliate orgs, so the fact that we have now solidified our links to them is bringing us a step closer to getting our own cultural house.” 

Ben Tkhayet told the News that despite the symbolism of the room opening, MENA students need a larger space to gather on campus. She said the space is still too small to accommodate many of MENA’s events, estimating that it “would only fit 10 people comfortably.”

Selam Mazioud ’25, the group’s advocacy chair, echoed Ben Tkhayet’s sentiment that the ribbon-cutting represents only a step in the overall struggle for greater representation. For Ibrahim, the efforts of the administration remain stagnant in matching this need — evidenced by the fact that the group had to book out almost all of the AACC in order to successfully host Friday evening’s ceremony. 

“While we are grateful for the space … it is not representative of what our struggle is about,” Mazioud said. “We will continue to advocate for a cultural house that represents our community and for the recognition of MENA as its own identity.” 

Interim Vice President of Communications Karen Peart responded that the University is deeply grateful to those involved in the success of creating this designated space. 

She described it as an effort that was made possible through close collaboration and conversation between students and the Yale Dean’s Office, announcing that the office will “continue to provide support to build upon these recent successes.” 

Though details as to the University’s plans to acknowledge MENA remain murky, the Yale Macmillan Center’s Council on Middle East Studies is in the works of combining an academic and student-life approach to centering MENA narratives. In addition to engineering culturally-centered academic programs and exchange opportunities for students to study in MENA countries, the council looks forward to engaging student groups on campus in conversations about cultivating the arts, supporting student dance performances, debates and musical endeavors. 

According to the Council website, Yale prides itself in the “teaching and researching [of] Arabic and its literature, as well as the history of the Middle East and North Africa and its culture.” It does so through a rich fabric of professorships and coursework that examine the MENA identity through historical, cultural and artistic lens.

Despite looking forward to continued progress, the leaders of the MENA student association noted that Yale’s commitment to academics and student life should be more leveled. Ben Tkhayet said that she is still grateful for the impact that the room will have on the MENA student community, explaining that it is a critical first step.

For Ben Tkhayet, knowing that MENA students now have a designated space to find each other on campus gives her confidence. She said that she has already seen students who do not otherwise interact on campus “have fun and collaborate” with each other during the events the association has held this semester. 

“The opening was really sentimental — it really was a sweet moment,” Hedroug said. “I had an amazing time and the people there were also really enjoying themselves, including our board members.”

In a University survey from 2018, over 75 percent of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that they support the creation of a Middle East and North Africa cultural house.