{"id":5540,"date":"2014-11-04T07:35:11","date_gmt":"2014-11-04T12:35:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.martinkramer.org\/sandbox\/?p=5540"},"modified":"2014-11-04T07:35:11","modified_gmt":"2014-11-04T12:35:11","slug":"a-smoke-screen-for-palestine-pushers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/2014\/11\/a-smoke-screen-for-palestine-pushers\/","title":{"rendered":"A smoke screen for Palestine-pushers"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post first\u00a0appeared<\/a>\u00a0on the <\/em>Commentary blog on November 3.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Handout\"Whenever criticism is leveled at federal funding for area studies in universities\u2014especially those bias-laden, error-prone Middle East centers\u2014someone jumps up to claim that this funding is crucial to the national interest. Now it\u2019s the turn of Nathan Brown, a political scientist at George Washington University and current president of the Middle East Studies Associations (MESA).<\/p>\n

Brown claims<\/a> that federally-funded area studies centers\u00a0are \u201cessential\u201d for U.S. policy, a \u201cvital national asset,\u201d and \u201coften the only sources of knowledge when crises erupt in unfamiliar places.\u201d They\u2019ve done an \u201coutstanding job<\/a> of training\u201d Middle East experts, and \u201cpolitical\u201d criticism of them \u201cthreatens the ability of the United States to understand the world and act effectively in it.\u201d If you don\u2019t like it that \u201can individual faculty member offends a supporter of a particular political position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, should students of Swahili and teachers of Tagalog be caught in the crossfire?\u201d Should \u201cprogramming that is critical of Israel on some campuses endanger all funding for international education?\u201d<\/p>\n

Those are valid questions, but they\u2019re posed disingenuously. Here are Brown\u2019s two main elisions:<\/p>\n

1. The only people who think that these centers are a \u201cvital national asset\u201d are the professors who collect the money. Over the years, there have been a series of government-sponsored reviews of these Title VI programs (reference is to the authorizing title of the Higher Education Act), and not one review has concluded that the programs do\u00a0anything resembling an \u201coutstanding job,\u201d especially on languages. (The last major review, by the National Academies, concluded<\/a> there was \u201cinsufficient information to judge program performance.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The claim that these centers are \u201coften the only sources of knowledge\u201d on emerging trouble spots is just untrue. That\u2019s rarely the case, and as regards the Middle East, it\u2019s now never the case. Government has had to assemble the full range of capabilities, from area expertise to language training, in-house. That\u2019s why the Obama administration\u2014yes, the Obama administration!\u2014cut<\/a> the budget of this \u201cvital national asset\u201d by 40 percent back in 2011. The only lobbying for Title VI funding comes from within academe itself.<\/p>\n

2. The \u201cpolitical\u201d criticism of Title VI Middle East centers is a response to the rampant politicization of some of these centers by those who run them, and who\u2019ve mobilized them against Israel. This isn\u2019t a matter of \u201can individual faculty member\u201d here or there. It\u2019s a plague that arises from overall attitudes in the field. Brown knows the problem, which is why he recently issued a letter to MESA\u2019s members effectively imploring<\/a> them not to drag the organization into a BDS debate.<\/p>\n

One obvious effect has been to drive the study of Israel almost completely out of these centers, into separately-funded and administered Israel studies programs. Some Title VI Middle East centers, thus relieved of the burden of fairly presenting Israel, have become even more blatant purveyors of pro-Palestinian agitprop. This fall, for the first time, half a dozen Title VI center directors openly pledged<\/a> to boycott Israeli academe. How might that impact the centers they administer? No one really knows.<\/p>\n

A case can be made for Title VI. Not every Middle East center is a shameful disaster, and most of the funding goes to centers specializing in other world areas. Brown alludes to some of these arguments. But his broader defense of the Middle Eastern end of Title VI is a misleading attempt to throw up a smoke screen for the very people who really threaten the program: radical professors who treat it as a slush fund to promote their political causes on campus. If Title VI gets rough treatment in the present reauthorization, students of Swahili and teachers of Tagalog should know who\u2019s at fault: the Palestine-pushers who\u2019ve fouled the academic nest with their relentless propagandizing.<\/p>\n

Go\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0to discuss this post via Facebook.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Government funding for area studies is controversial. The president of MESA wants you to think it isn’t. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1167,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[101212,101213,101351,101257],"class_list":["post-5540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-middle-east-studies-association","tag-middle-eastern-studies","tag-nathan-brown","tag-title-vi"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}