News » December 11, 2003

We Aren’t the World

Bills tie area studies funding to national interests

By Laurie King-Irani

Already-strapped institutions of higher learning are facing an ideologically driven effort to limit funding for the study of cultures outside the United States.

For nearly four decades, American universities have benefited from the U.S. Department of Education programs funded under Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Title VI provides grants to nurture area and international studies centers and aims to create national resources for teaching foreign language and supporting research and training in international studies and world affairs. But these programs are under threat as neoconservatives seek to place conditions on continued funding.

Title VI reauthorization already has passed the House and is expected to be taken up by the Senate in January. Differences in the bills will be hammered out in conference—a process not open to the public.

“This legislation represents the thin end of the wedge for political interference with the curriculum,” says Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University’s Middle East Institute. “It is meant to provide a highly partisan, ideological litmus test for academics.”

Among the most alarming provisions of the House bill, known as the International Studies in Higher Education Act, are:

• Section 5, which establishes an International Education Advisory Board to advise the government on Title VI programs in relation to homeland security, international education, international affairs and foreign language training.
• Section 8, which requires reporting to Congress foreign language communities of U.S. residents or citizens, particularly those deemed critical to U.S. national security.

Two members of the International Advisory Board would represent “federal agencies that have national security responsibilities” and the board would make recommendations “to improve the programs under this Title to better reflect the national needs related to the homeland security.”

Although all area studies are under scrutiny, Middle East studies programs in particular have received the most vituperative critiques from neoconservatives calling for a radical rethinking of Title VI. Given that the United States is now engaged in a “War on Terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan and has undertaken global surveillance of Arab and Muslim communities, this is not surprising.

“If implemented as its proponents intend,” Khalidi says, “it would impose the pseudo-sciences of terrorology and the demonization of Islam and Muslims as integral parts of teaching and research about the Middle East, and could have even wider implications.”

Yet the neoconservative assault on Title VI is based on logical fallacies, most notably that any critique of U.S. foreign policy constitutes an attack on U.S. national interests, that area scholars are anti-American and that the programs turn young minds toward unpatriotic thoughts and away from national service. The changes also could prove dangerous to researchers in the field, who already face suspicions that they are agents of the state rather than independent scholars.

“This is an apt example of how academic freedom and civil liberaties are eroded in the name of ‘emergency,’” says Jean Comaroff, Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

“In fact, if current conditions illustrate anything at all, it is the need to counter American parochialism with precisely the sort of knowledge about other languages, cultures and perspectives that Title Vl centers have enabled in the past,” Comaroff says. “Now more than ever, the freedom of their investigations should be nurtured, not curtailed.”

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• Reader Comments

  And just how is it then that we are going to bring democracy to Iraq?  Would that be “another” democracy or this same version?

  Posted by Judith on Dec 16, 2003 at 9:19 AM

  What’s wrong with this.  The Democrats in the Senate have a litmus test to insure that no conservative judges are appointed to the Federal bench.  Why not apply a litmus test to insure federal funds are spent promoting the national interest?

  Posted by Michael Rarick on Dec 19, 2003 at 10:21 PM

  This is what we call higher education? Oh yeah, it’s higher than the paranoid pea-brains are capable of understanding! Limiting students’ choices is not freedom-it’s free dum. DUHHH We pay for our education not just through tuition. We should not pay the billionaire in the White House for his lack of it and fear of it!!

  Posted by Patricia on Jan 6, 2004 at 3:00 AM

  This story is dishonest, biased reporting.  The only sources quoted are from within the academic community who seek to benefit from funds which they would prefer to be given to them without any conditions whatsoever.  (Wouldn’t we all like such a deal?)  Whereas the comments on their highly biased curricula (just try and find someone in one of their academic departments who doesn’t hew to the same political line!) are simply characterized as “vituperative”—without any evidence they were such.

  Khalidi asserts, without proof, that any kind of oversight will “impose…the demonization of Islam and Muslims” in teaching curricula.  Yet anyone who knows of his lectures in Arabic (he’s more circumspect in English), or attends any of the “conferences” held on campuses like Columbia and Georgetown, knows that there are no restraints on these individuals’ demonization of the United States, Israel, Western culture, and that ancient anti-Semitic bugbear, international Zionism.  Ask a question not conforming to the party line at one of these meetings, and you will be denounced as a “Zionist racist pig.”

  The claim by Comaroff that academic freedom is threatened or “eroded” by mere oversight of what programs that receive Federal funding are teaching is bogus.  The real threat to academic freedom is the conversion of political polemics to coursework and the suppression of all dissenting opinions—as is commonplace in humanities departments all over the American academic landscape.  Just try and get hired, let alone achieve tenure, if you are not well to the left on the political spectrum.  That’s academic “freedom.”  George Orwell would not be surprised, even if it’s twenty years past the date of his famous novel.

  Posted by Roger M. Firestone on Jan 14, 2004 at 3:53 PM

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