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… return to article
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Reader Comments (4)Page 1 of 1 pagesAnd 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 Page 1 of 1 pages -
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