Education Dept. Takes Aim at a Center on Middle East Studies. Scholars Say That Could Chill Academic Freedom.

AP Photo, Susan Walsh

The U.S. Department of Education’s threat to strip federal funding from a Middle East-studies program run by Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has alarmed academics, who are worried about the federal government’s apparent interest in the content of college courses and programs — Middle East studies in particular.

After an investigation prompted by a Republican congressman’s complaint, the department warned the universities that the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies lacked viewpoint diversity and didn’t offer enough courses and programming that presented the “positive aspects” of religious minorities in the Middle East, such as Christians and Jews.

That supposed lack of balance, a department official wrote in a letter to UNC’s vice chancellor for research, suggested that the consortium was out of compliance with the terms of its annual $235,000 Title VI grant. Those grants support foreign-language and international-studies programs and centers at many colleges, as well as fellowships for graduate students. The Duke-UNC center’s funding was renewed in 2018 for four more years.

Under Title VI, federal “resource centers” like the Duke-UNC consortium must “provide a full understanding” of their areas and regions, said the department’s letter, dated August 29 and published last week in the Federal Register.

Department officials told the two universities that the center must submit a preliminary response by Sunday and then “provide a revised schedule of activities it plans to support in the coming year” by September 30. University officials also must explain how each activity “promotes foreign-language learning and advances the national-security interests and economic stability of the United States.”

The department’s rhetoric has prompted scholars to condemn what they see as a direct threat to academic freedom. While state governments sometimes weigh in on controversial course content, typically in elementary and secondary schools, many academics said this level of federal interest in details of campus offerings crosses a new, troubling frontier.

The letter has also put the field of Middle East studies on edge. Some professors fear that a chilling effect could discourage debates about controversial issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Besides the Duke-UNC consortium, 14 other Middle East centers receive Title VI funding. One is the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. Brinkley Messick, the institute’s director and a professor of anthropology, said he was reluctant to comment much on the Duke-UNC investigation, because he didn’t want to draw the government’s attention to the program.

“This concerns the essential role of the research university in a democratic society,” Messick wrote in an email. He described the department’s letter as “an aggressive demand for program ‘balance’ from an administration that is itself decidedly unbalanced.”

The discipline of Middle East studies has been a target of critics for years. Kenneth L. Marcus, who leads the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, has described some programs as “academically worthless” and has questioned whether they should receive federal funding at all, arguing that they are biased against Israel. In 2014 he argued that the department was “failing to hold these programs accountable.”

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, some Middle East centers lost federal support, said Anna Bigelow, an associate professor of religious studies at Stanford University. There was sometimes a suspicion, she said, that they “weren’t doing the right thing politically.” On top of that, funding for all Title VI-backed centers declined after the 2008 financial crisis, she said.

Feisal Amin Rasoul al-Istrabadi founded Indiana University’s Center for the Study of the Middle East a decade ago, after serving as U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Every couple of years, he said, a member of Congress condemns such centers as anti-Semitic or anti-American. When that happens, he said, officials at his university ask him to prepare a report on how he would defend his program, which receives Title VI funding, from such attacks.

The Education Department’s language in the Duke-UNC letter is “actually kind of Orwellian,” al-Istrabadi said, because it suggests that universities that don’t promote the current administration’s views will face consequences. The department also appears to suggest, he said, that centers must present both positive and negative views of every religion in the region in their curricula and events. “What that means is, I have to turn my curriculum over to rank polemicists,” he said.

“I can’t imagine a funded center,” he continued, “that would agree to such micromanagement by the federal government of its programming.”

The federal investigation began after the Duke-UNC consortium held a conference called “Conflict Over Gaza: People, Politics, and Possibilities” last spring. The event, which used $5,000 from the center’s Title VI grant, according to the university, featured a performance by a Palestinian rapper during which he made anti-Semitic comments. A video of the performance was shared online. Those remarks were later condemned by the consortium itself and by UNC’s interim chancellor.

‘Questions You Put in Your Mind’

Ari Kohen, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, said no one is served by courses and programs that present only one side of an argument. There should be more discussion of the experiences of Jewish people in majority-Muslim countries, Kohen said. However, he added, “that’s different than the government telling professors what they should and shouldn’t teach their students.”

Professors have to wonder how far the Trump administration might go in promoting its agenda on campuses, Kohen said. “Are we allowed to talk about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi or not? These start to be questions you put in your mind, as a faculty member.”

Louis Fishman, an assistant professor of history at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, is alarmed at the idea that a university would have to quantitatively calculate viewpoint balance — for every two courses focused on Islam, must there be two focused on religious minorities? At any top research university, he said, scholars and students are teaching and pursuing research across the gamut of Middle East studies.

There’s already self-censorship around Middle East-related topics occurring on campuses, including his own, he said. Brooklyn College became a flashpoint in 2016 when the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a conservative foundation, put up posters there and on other campuses that described members of Students for Justice in Palestine, a national group, as terrorist sympathizers. In recent years Fishman has heard from a number of students at Brooklyn that some professors aren’t interested in discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because they want to steer clear of controversy.

The Education Department’s Duke-UNC investigation, he said, “creates the feeling that there’s going to be a witch hunt. And that’s really worrying.”

The department also accused the Duke-UNC consortium of not collaborating enough with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics programs, and of using federal dollars to offer courses and events on subjects that have “little or no relevance to Title VI.”

Planned conferences on “Love and Desire in Modern Iran” and on film criticism in the Middle East “may be relevant in academia,” the department’s letter said, but “we do not see how these activities support the development of foreign language and international expertise for the benefit of U.S. national security and economic stability.”

“These programs should not be funded or subsidized in any way by American taxpayers under Title VI,” the letter continued, “unless you are able to clearly demonstrate that such programs are secondary to more rigorous coursework helping American students to become fluent Farsi speakers and to prepare for work in areas of national need.”

Miriam Elman, an associate professor of political science at Syracuse University, hopes the investigation serves as a wake-up call for higher education. Elman, who also is executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, a group of academics who oppose efforts to boycott Israel, said she believed other centers were even more problematic and should be reformed — though she’d like to see faculty members, not the government, conduct such reviews.

The Duke-UNC letter, she argued, is evidence that the department is just being a good steward of the money it dispenses. Scrutiny of federal funding for Middle East-studies centers is “long overdue,” she said. Her sense of the Duke-UNC consortium’s activities is that “faculty politics seem to be driving the choice of programming.”

Bigelow, the Stanford professor, spent the first 15 years of her career at North Carolina State University, where she often worked with the Duke-UNC consortium. The department’s allegation that some of its programs aren’t intellectually valuable, she said, is inaccurate.

But the department’s actions won’t chill Bigelow’s approach to teaching, she said. “From my perspective, my mission as an educator remains clear — that I’m not here to make things look good or bad, or to whitewash stories. I’m here to complicate people’s understandings.”

The same goes for al-Istrabadi, who runs Indiana’s Middle East center: “I am not deviating one iota from what we’ve done for the past nine years.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.

Clarification (9/23/2019, 1:22 p.m.): This article has been updated to clarify when Middle East-studies center lost Title VI funding over the last two decades. Some lost funds after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and support for all Title VI-backed centers declined after the 2008 financial crisis. Funding did not decline only under the Obama administration.