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NY Times, Sept. 20, 2019
U.S. Orders Duke and U.N.C. to Recast Tone in Mideast Studies
By Erica L. Green
WASHINGTON — The Education Department has ordered Duke University and
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to remake the Middle
East studies program run jointly by the two schools after concluding
that it was offering students a biased curriculum that, among other
complaints, did not present enough “positive” imagery of Judaism and
Christianity in the region.
In a rare instance of federal intervention in college course content,
the department asserted that the universities’ Middle East program
violated the standards of a federal program that awards funding to
international studies and foreign language programs. The inquiry was
part of a far-reaching investigation into the program by the department,
which under Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, has become
increasingly aggressive in going after perceived anti-Israel bias in
higher education.
That focus appears to reflect the views of an agency leadership that
includes a civil rights chief, Kenneth L. Marcus, who has made a career
of pro-Israel advocacy and has waged a yearslong campaign to
delegitimize and defund Middle East studies programs that he has
criticized as rife with anti-Israel bias.
In this case, the department homed in on what officials saw as a program
that focused on the region’s Muslim population at the expense of its
religious minorities. In the North Carolina program’s outreach to
elementary and secondary school students, the department said, there was
“a considerable emphasis placed on the understanding the positive
aspects of Islam, while there is an absolute absence of any similar
focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, Judaism or any other
religion or belief system in the Middle East.”
Too few of the Duke-U.N.C. programs focused on “the historic
discrimination faced by, and current circumstances of, religious
minorities in the Middle East, including Christians, Jews, Baha’is,
Yazidis, Kurds, Druze and others,” the department said.
With its actions, the department entered the debate over Israel and
Palestinians that has roiled campuses around the country.
The department’s action “should be a wake-up call,” said Miriam Elman,
an associate professor at Syracuse University and the executive director
of the Academic Engagement Network, which opposes the boycott-Israel
movement that has animated campus activism across the country. She
added, “What they’re saying is, ‘If you want to be biased and show an
unbalanced view of the Middle East, you can do that, but you’re not
going to get federal and taxpayer money.’”
Palestinian rights groups accused the Education Department of
intimidation and infringing on academic freedom.
“They really want to send the message that if you want to criticize
Israel, then the federal government is going to look very closely at
your entire program and micromanage it to death,” said Zoha Khalili, a
staff lawyer at Palestine Legal, one such group. The department’s
intervention, she added, “sends a message to Middle Eastern studies
programs that their continued existence depends on their willingness to
toe the government line on Israel.”
In a letter to university officials, the assistant secretary for
postsecondary education, Robert King, wrote that programs run by the
Duke-U.N.C. Consortium for Middle East Studies appeared to be misaligned
with the federal grant they had received. Title VI of the Higher
Education Act awards funding to colleges “establishing, strengthening
and operating a diverse network of undergraduate foreign language and
area or international studies centers and programs.”
The Education Department “believes” the Middle Eastern studies
consortium “has failed to carefully distinguish between activities
lawfully funded under Title VI and other activities” that are “plainly
unqualified for taxpayer support,” Mr. King wrote.
The letter, published this week in the Federal Register, said that the
consortium’s records on the number of students it had enrolled in
foreign language studies — a cornerstone of the federal grant program —
were unclear, and that “it seems clear foreign language instruction and
area studies advancing the security and economic stability of the United
States have taken ‘a back seat’ to other priorities.”
Mr. King wrote that the department believed other offerings, like a
conference focused on “love and desire in modern Iran” and another
focused on Middle East film criticism, “have little or no relevance to
Title VI.” The department wrote the consortium’s programming also
“appears to lack balance.”
The department also criticized the consortium’s teacher training
programs for focusing on issues like “unconscious bias, serving
L.G.B.T.I.Q. youth in schools, culture and the media, diverse books for
the classroom and more.” They said that it had a “startling lack of
focus on geography, geopolitical issues, history and language.”
The administration ordered the consortium to submit a revised schedule
of events it planned to support and a full list of the courses it offers
and the professors working in its Middle East studies program. The
department also directed the consortium to demonstrate that it had
“effective institutional controls” to stay compliant with the
administration’s interpretation of the Higher Education Act. The
universities were given until Sept. 22, only days before the department
is scheduled to approve funding on Sept. 30.
A spokesman for Duke declined to comment, referring questions to the
University of North Carolina. A spokeswoman for the U.N.C. acknowledged
receipt of the letter.
“The consortium deeply values its partnership with the Department of
Education and has always been strongly committed to complying with the
purposes and requirements of the Title VI program,” the university said
in a statement. “In keeping with the spirit of this partnership, the
consortium is committed to working with the department to provide more
information about its programs.”
To advocacy groups enmeshed in academic battles over Israel, the new
investigation was not surprising.
Last year, the department reopened a case into anti-Jewish bias at
Rutgers University that the Obama administration had closed with no
finding of wrongdoing. In reconsidering the case, Mr. Marcus said the
Education Department would be using a State Department definition of
anti-Semitism that, among other things, labels “denying the Jewish
people their right to self-determination” anti-Jewish bigotry,
suggesting that it had been adopted by his office. The Education
Department has not adopted that definition.
In June, Ms. DeVos said she had ordered an investigation into whether
the Duke-U.N.C. consortium had misused any of the $235,000 it received
in Title VI grants, including to sponsor an event in March called
“Conflict Over Gaza: People, Politics and Possibilities.” Representative
George Holding, Republican of North Carolina, had requested that Ms.
DeVos investigate whether federal funding was used to host the
conference, which constituents had said was rife with “radical
anti-Israel bias.”
Mr. Holding said the conference featured active members of the Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel — known as B.D.S. — and
featured panelists who “distorted facts and misrepresented the complex
situation in Gaza.” He said a video shown at the conference featured a
performer who sang a “brazenly anti-Semitic song.”
But some groups came to the defense of the Middle East studies
consortium. Tallie Ben Daniel, the research and education manager at
Jewish Voice for Peace, a liberal group that advocates Palestinian
rights, said the investigation was the latest attempt by the Trump
administration “to enforce a neoconservative agenda onto spaces of
academic inquiry and exploration.” She called the consortium’s
curriculum “rich and diverse.”
To critics like Ms. Daniel, the targeting of the U.N.C.-Duke program
appeared to be a continuation of efforts that predated the Trump
administration. A group founded by Mr. Marcus, the Louis D. Brandeis
Center for Human Rights Under Law, has pressed Education Department and
Congress for years to crack down on Middle East studies programs that
the center claimed promoted an anti-Israel bias.
But Ms. Elman, the professor at Syracuse, said the department’s scrutiny
of the programs was long overdue.
“To get Title VI, you really have to strive for viewpoint diversity,”
she said. “This is what our students want. They don’t want to be
indoctrinated. They want both sides. It’s possible to do that and still
make people uncomfortable.”
Before joining the Education Department, Mr. Marcus had aggressively
lobbied for the Higher Education Act to crack down on Middle East
studies programs, and criticized both the Education Department and
Congress for failing to hold institutions accountable for violating the
law’s “diverse perspectives” requirement.
In 2014, he wrote an opinion article that assailed the Title VI program
for “being used to support biased and academically worthless programming
on college campuses,” leaving students and faculty with opposing views
“ostracized and threatened.”
“Aside from their intellectual vapidity,” Mr. Marcus wrote, “many of
these programs poison the atmosphere on campus.”
He called on the department to establish a complaint process that would
prompt extensive reviews of entire programs like the one being
undertaken into U.N.C. and Duke.
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