Title
VI, a recent addition to the original
Higher Education Act of 1965, is part of a post-9/11
educational trend aimed at exposing Americans to the languages
and cultures of the Middle East. The program gives a little over
$100 million a year to the Department of Education (DE) for
language and foreign policy study, but critics fear it may
sometimes run counter to our goals in the war on terror.
Conservative journalists, most notably National Review’s
Stanley
Kurtz and Martin
Kramer, have accused the federal government of sending Title
VI funds to biased professors and partisan programs — ones that
exclusively taught Middle East history with Arabs portrayed as
Little Red Riding Hood and America as the Big Bad Wolf. This
school of thought, spurred by Edward Said’s Orientalism, largely
ignores the negative aspects of the politics and cultures of the
Middle East and discounts much of the scholarship critical of the
region produced in the West.
Predictably, left-wing professors have dismissed these
accusations as a witch hunt by right-wing crazies. Nezar
AlSayyad, chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC
Berkeley, said the original reforms were “intervention in what
faculty members do and it is an attempt to silence those who
criticize the government.”
Juan Cole, a regular contributor to Salon and professor
of the modern Middle East at the University of Michigan, said on his blog
that their efforts were intended to “warp academic study and
ensure that independent researchers are not allowed to be heard,”
and that the DE “already does oversight of the area studies
centers, and gives or withholds money according to whether they
meet government goals.”
After the initial call for reform, a congressional hearing was
held, and a bill was passed in August of last year to require
Title VI award recipients to “reflect diverse perspectives and a
wide range of views.” Kurtz was encouraged but said “A lot will
depend on how it is enacted and enforced.” Miriam A. Kazanjian,
of the Coalition for International Education, told the
Chronicle of Higher Education, “I don’t know anyone who
is against diverse perspectives; it’s like motherhood and apple
pie.”
How diverse the perspectives will really be is up to government
bureaucrats. The public can have input on these bureaucrats’
interpretation of the law via a “comments” section on the Federal
Register. But whether this is in fact a meaningful reform — and,
more importantly, how the money gets in the hands of the
universities — remains unclear.
Kurtz argued in National Review that the money has been
going into partisan hands because it was handled by DE committees
whose membership was monopolized by left-wing academics: “Instead
of restricting the membership of these committees to scholars,
policy makers and policy experts from think tanks need to be
empowered to sit on such panels.” Cole countered that education
officials already oversaw the process and that “government
objectives” were being met.
Yet following the money is extremely difficult. The $100 million
transferred from the U.S. Treasury to the DE for Title VI
programs funds ten area and language study programs in the U.S.
and abroad, typically administered by individual universities as
improvements or additions to existing foreign studies programs.
The department couldn’t say conclusively how much money goes to
Middle Eastern and Asian studies, but their website features a
chart that
shows what money went to which university for the largest of the
10 programs.
The chart does a good job of detailing individual grants, but
does not say how much money is dedicated to a specific region.
Some information can be gleaned by looking at the individual
grants, or at least, what a group of individuals receive. Between
the main program and the 9 others, approximately $7 million went
this past year to a variety of purposes at 23 African and Middle
East studies centers across the U.S.
Another program gave $245,724 to the University of Michigan to
further develop advanced Arabic language studies. The university
curricula paid for by these grants was not publicized on the DE
website, is not available through the departments’ press office,
and is not available on the individual universities programs’
websites. A case-by-case examination of individual universities
curricula would need to be undertaken in order to judge the
partisanship of the programs.
But Title VI recipients are awarded their payments only after
being approved by a review board, so the DE should be aware of
the curricula it is funding before it ever gives the money out.
According to the department’s press office, potential grantees
apply for funding through an online ED application, consisting of
a 40-page grant essay, among other requirements. These
applications are evaluated by readers, who are selected by the
ED’s Office of Postsecondary Education Field Reader System
(OPEFRS).
So how does one qualify as a reader? DE press officers could not
tell me exactly, though a government website asks
potential readers for a great deal of information and says they
must hold bachelor’s degrees. I was also assured that the readers
who oversaw the administration of the last round of Middle East
programs did include one public official, one private industry
representative, and four academics representing “of course a full
array of academic institutions.”
Education officials say reader applications were overseen by the
Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Postsecondary
Education. Maybe he could tell me whether that “full array” of
academic viewpoints included any from a non-Said perspective.
Unfortunately, the DE has gone through at least four separate
Deputy Assistant Secretaries for the Office of Postsecondary
Education in the past two years. Press release records indicate
that Sally Stroup was confirmed for the position on April 14,
2006. After her resignation, James Manning became the Acting
Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education on from May 4,
2006 until August 6, 2007, when Diane Auer Jones was the
confirmed Assistant Secretary. But then Jones resigned on August
1. 2008, at which point Cheryl Oldham became the latest Acting
Assistant Secretary. She was on maternity leave and not available
for comment.
When it comes to Title VI, there are a lot more questions than
answers.
