Author: Martin Kramer

U. of California’s Deans Don’t Quite Get It

On By Martin Kramer

This morning’s San Francisco Chronicle runs an op-ed on H.R. 3077 by two heavy-hitters in the University of California system: Geoffrey Garrett, vice provost and dean of the UCLA International Institute, and David Leonard, dean of International and Area Studies at Berkeley. It’s the most intelligent thing that academics have produced so far in response to the bill. They don’t make the absurd claim that the Title VI advisory board would interfere in curriculum, and they accept the idea of a board in principle. But they do propose a change in the board’s composition. Unfortunately, this proposal rests on yet another misreading of the bill.

This is what they write:

The legislation dictates that the [seven-member] advisory board include two members from national security agencies, such as the CIA and the Department of Defense….Why should the national security agencies be singled out above other organizations concerned with international studies and foreign language education?

If any federal agency should be given privileged representation on the board, it is the Department of State. With decades of experience in educational and cultural exchange such as the Fulbright program, the State Department is best suited to help promote international higher education—particularly given the importance of fostering mutual understanding in the post-Sept. 11 world.

How have Professors Garrett and Leonard misread the bill? The two advisory board members who would represent government (and who would be appointed by the Secretary of Education) would not be appointed “from national security agencies.” Rather, they would be appointed from “agencies with national security responsibilities”—that’s the exact language of the bill.

What is an agency with national security responsibilities? Look at the definition used for the purposes of another government-supported program, the National Security Education Program (NSEP), which funds scholarships for students who commit themselves to work in just these agencies. That definition includes these executive departments: the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury—and, yes, the Department of State. All of these departments are deemed to have “national security responsibilities.”

I agree with Professors Garrett and Leonard that there are no grounds to privilege the Department of Defense and the CIA over the Department of State, and the bill doesn’t do that. I hope they would agree that there is also no reason to exclude defense and intelligence agencies in appointments to the board, or to marginalize one department by privileging another. After all, these departments are part of one government, and all of them have needs in the field of international relations.

Congress must be wary lest it lend its hand to an academic boycott of the country’s intelligence and defense agencies, by excluding their representatives from the board. In the present bill, the Secretary of Education is given full discretion to make these two appointments, from whichever agency he or she sees fit. There is no credible reason to limit that discretion. The language of the bill on this point is perfect just as it is.

Professors Garrett and Leonard have one more complaint:

We are further concerned by the proposal that the board be given unusually broad powers to investigate grantee activities, by drawing on the full information available in all government agencies—including intelligence agencies. Because the activities of the Title VI programs are public, why should it be necessary to consult intelligence files to determine the range of the views they present?

This is a reference to a boiler-plate provision of the bill, which gives the advisory board the authority to secure from anywhere in government the information it needs to make its recommendations. That authority is essential, and it has nothing to do with investigating anyone’s views.

For example, one of the nagging questions about the Title VI program is how many of its beneficiaries go into government service. In April of last year, the president of the American Council on Education, David Ward, testified in support of Title VI before Congress, and made this claim:

Many of the graduates who benefited from these programs have gone on to serve in key U.S. government positions… Anecdotal (because the data are classified) evidence suggests that most career security foreign language and area specialists in agencies such as CIA and DIA were trained at institutions with Title VI centers. A local newspaper, for example, recently printed a picture of an intelligence officer in Afghanistan who had received language training at a Title VI center.

When Dr. Ward made this claim, I myself contested aspects of it, again on the basis of anecdotal evidence. But why should a government advisory board, presumably including two government officials, be limited to anecdotal evidence? Only agencies of government can tell the advisory board whether they benefit from the program in the way Dr. Ward claims they do.

So it’s perfectly proper that the law require those agencies to cooperate with the board in its work. The board’s recommendations on the effectiveness of Title VI—which spends $100 million of taxpayers’ money a year—should be grounded in fact and not anecdotes, especially when some of the facts are just waiting to be harvested in Washington.

Thanks to Professors Garrett and Leonard, the debate about H.R. 3077 in academe has moved forward. Yet they still don’t adequately grasp all aspects of the bill’s language and intent. It’s odd that Washington should have to educate the academy in the precise reading of a text. Call it an education.

Berkeley addendum. Over at Berkeley, the head of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Professor Nezar AlSayyad, has called H.R. 3077 “an attempt to silence those who criticize the government.” He has also announced that his center, which now receives a hefty Title VI subsidy, will not apply for funding if the bill is passed. This, from a man whose main claim to administrative fame is the establishment of an Arab studies program named after the Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan, pumped up with $5 million from the Prince Sultan Charity Foundation. One wonders how much criticism of the Saudi government emerges from Berkeley’s center.

I’m going to hold Professor AlSayyad to his word. Let Berkeley’s Middle East center not apply. It will be one less application that has to be read and processed in Washington.

Yale Daily News Flunks Verbal

On By Martin Kramer

As a Princetonian, my expectations from Yale have never been very high. But I always assumed that the best of its students—or at least those students who edit the Yale Daily News—could read a text in English. This morning, even that assumption was shaken.

I refer to an editorial in today’s edition, under the headline: “Bill’s ‘Advisory Board’ is Cause for Concern.” The reference is to the International Studies in Higher Education Act, or H.R. 3077. (Full text here.) The bill would continue long-standing federal subsidies for area studies in universities. It also would establish a board to advise the Department of Education and Congress on how to improve supported programs. When the bill was in committee in the House of Representatives, academics expressed concern that the proposed board could go beyond general priorities, to delve into the curricula of individual programs. So the bill was modified to include this provision:

Nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize the board to mandate, direct, or control an institution of higher education’s specific instructional content, curriculum, or program of instruction.

By any objective reading, that passage is unequivocal—indeed, it was probably dictated by the higher education lobby—and it trumps every other provision of the bill. It manifestly bars the board from mandating, directing, or controlling university curricula. That’s one reason the bill received unanimous bipartisan support in the House, whence it has been sent to the Senate.

Yet you won’t know that this safeguard even exists, if you rely on today’s Yale Daily News. It says this about the purpose of the board:

The act would create a federal advisory committee to oversee the curricula of foreign language and area studies programs that receive government funding. The Yale Center for International and Area Studies, which receives more than $5 million of federal funding annually, would be subject to any such curricular review….Even if the Bush administration is well-behaved, such input into curricula opens the door to dangerous behavior in the future.

“Oversee curricula”? “Curricular review”? “Input into curricula”? Do the editors of the Yale Daily News suffer from a collective reading disability? This spin on the bill is so at odds with its language that it leaves you wondering about the basic comprehension skills of the Yale editors. This doubt is reinforced by an earlier piece contributed by one of the newspaper’s regular columnists, containing this astonishing passage:

According to the language of the bill, professors whose ideological principles may not support U.S. practices abroad can have their appointments terminated, any part of a course’s curriculum containing criticisms of U.S. foreign policy can be censored, and any course deemed entirely anti-American can be barred from ever being taught.

When I first read this passage—written by a Yale senior—my jaw dropped. There is nothing whatsoever in the language of the bill to support a single one of these assertions. In the real world, this sort of thing—making it up—will get you failed out of journalism school, or fired by your newspaper.

But the explanation of poor comprehension is probably too simple, so let me offer a more sinister one. In the very first news story about the bill in the Yale Daily News, it was reported that some Yale professors opposed it. The university’s vice president for federal relations, Richard Jacobs, told the newspaper that Yale had already started to lobby key senators, including Sen. Christopher Dodd (D.-Conn.), against parts of the bill. Dodd sits on the Senate committee that has received the bill from the House (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, or HELP).

In other words, even before the Yale Daily News ran its first story, the Yale administration had opened a backstairs campaign against the bill. So the newspaper is dutifully following the lead of the administration and faculty. It reminds me of how Pravda picked up signals from the Politburo and amplified them—including the crude falsehoods.

So Yale is running a deliberately misleading campaign, relying on distortions, incitement, and the pliant editors of the campus newspaper, in order to leverage Sen. Dodd into opposing the bill. Why? Look at the composition of the HELP committee on which Sen. Dodd sits. Nearly all of the Republicans and most of the Democrats come from states whose institutions get little or no federal money for Middle Eastern studies, and not much more for area studies. Sen. Dodd is one of the few committee members who has constituents who receive the subsidy. And so Yale has assumed the responsibility of running a campaign directed at Sen. Dodd, on behalf of the entire area studies crowd.

What can you do to counter the lobbying efforts of big academe? If you are a resident of Connecticut, it’s easy: click here for a form and write to Sen. Dodd. Tell him that you fully support H.R. 3077 and the advisory board it would establish. Tell him that you are appalled by the deliberate distortion of the bill at the hands of its critics, especially at Yale. Tell him that the bill’s smooth passage is the least Congress can do to assure that this subsidy serves some national purpose at a moment of national need. For more arguments for the bill, read this address I gave two weeks ago, and follow the links from its right-hand panel.

If you’re not a resident of Connecticut, you can have just as much effect by writing the same things to Sen. Judd Gregg (R.-N.H.), chair of the HELP committee. Click here for a form or write directly to greggstaff@labor.senate.gov. Also check this list of HELP committee members, to see if one of your senators is on it, and write to that senator, with a copy to Sen. Gregg.

Yale Library Joins Intifada? While I am indulging my bias against Yale, I wonder why Palestinian propaganda posters are featured at the website of the library’s Near East Collection. Is it because the posters are such outstanding and rare holdings? (The stuff looks pretty commonplace to me.) Or is it because of the politics of the collection’s curator and chief faculty adviser, both of whom signed the extremist Yale divestment petition against Israel? Just wondering.

Nonsense on Title VI in the L.A. Times

On By Martin Kramer

The International Studies in Higher Education Act (H.R. 3077) would create an advisory board for Title VI, the federal subsidy program for area (and Middle Eastern) studies in universities. As I’ve argued before, such a board is the very least Congress can do to assure some return on the taxpayers’ investment in these programs. I spoke in defense of the bill on a panel in Washington on November 20, and I post my remarks here. In my address, I dispel some of the way-out notions about the legislation now being propagated on campuses.

Now the issue has cropped up in the national press, in the form of an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by one Paula R. Newberg, identified as an “independent consultant.” The piece is a slick and evasive advertisement for Title VI, the sort that is regularly churned out by the higher education lobby and Saudi ARAMCO. Its bottom line: a board would “seriously diminish” the “capacity of the U.S. to be a responsible world actor.” To make that argument, you have to misrepresent Title VI and H.R. 3077. Our “independent consultant” does this with a lobbyist’s panache for half-truths, falsehoods, and omissions.

So after you’ve read the op-ed, here are the four grievous sins committed by its author.

1. Newberg opens by noting that “for two years, Congress has rightly insisted that the United States needs better foreign intelligence.” True. “One way to obtain it is to train more experts in foreign languages.” True. H.R. 3077, she writes, is “an assault on the very programs that produce these professionals.”

False, because these programs do not produce those professionals. The great bulk of the money goes to fellowships for doctoral students. When The Chronicle of Higher Education spoke to a dozen job-hunting Ph.D.s in Middle Eastern studies in the spring of 2002, not one expressed any interest in government employment. “Academics just aren’t biting,” said one job candidate, as quoted by the Chronicle. “I don’t think running around chasing terrorists is the solution to this problem. Academics have a belief in the power of education to effect change.” The real intelligence professionals—the few men and women who solve problems when the “power of education” fails—are produced elsewhere.

Title VI programs have also shifted their emphasis away from languages. A government-contracted report on Title VI, published in 2000, admitted as much: “Over the years, the original focus on language has been replaced with a much broader mandate for area, international, and international business studies. … functional linguistic competence in the graduates of the nation’s colleges and universities has tended to diminish.” Title VI is failing at precisely the mission Newberg thinks it should fulfill, a fact concealed from the public precisely because there is no board to measure the program against the intent of Congress.

2. Newberg writes that Title VI has produced international knowledge, although “these centers have endured funding cuts.”

False again. As far as I can recall, funding for Title VI over the past decade has never been cut even once. The appropriation has grown every year. More to the point, Title VI received a massive post-9/11 windfall on January 10, 2002, when President George W. Bush approved Congress’s authorization of a 26 percent increase (over $20 million a year) for the program, to meet an “urgent need.” Since 2000, federal funding for area studies centers at universities has ballooned by fifty percent, and funding for fellowships has doubled. The universities are now flush with taxpayers’ money, appropriated on a renewed promise that this will enhance national security. There are more federally-subsidized Middle East centers right now that at any time in America’s history. Is it too much money? Too little? Just the right amount? Maybe that money should go to another higher education program? We’ll never know, unless we have a board with appointees well-positioned to define U.S. needs, and determine whether the program is meeting them.

3. Newberg then casts H.R. 3077 as an attempt by interested parties to foist their Middle East views on academics. For this reason, a board “is utterly impractical, given the polarization of Middle East politics…[N]o politically appointed advisory board is likely to bridge these differences any more than the U.S. has reconciled competing visions of Middle East peace.”

Once more, false. Far from being “utterly impractical,” boards supervise every other comparable federal program. The sister program of Title VI, the Fulbright program, is the mainstay of foreign research for U.S. academics. It has a 12-member board, all of them presidential appointees. The U.S. Institute of Peace has a board of presidential appointees, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars has one too. These boards are supervisory, not advisory—they have more powers than the proposed Title VI board. All three support advanced research in international affairs, including the Middle East. Yet they somehow manage to “bridge differences.” The real question is why Title VI, of all these programs, should be exempt from having a board. Of course, you would never know that from Newberg, who forgets to tell you just what an administrative anomaly Title VI has become.

4. Newberg praises Title VI for having introduced thousands of Americans to foreign societies and cultures. If she has a reservation, it is that “some scholars have used this platform to underscore distinctively, occasionally parochial, American views.”

Is this a misprint? It seems to me this should read: “Some scholars have used this platform to underscore distinctively, occasionally parochial, anti-American views.” There is no more systematic abuse of Title VI than the exploitation of taxpayers’ money by professorial activists to fund propagandistic “outreach” activities. All of the instances known to me involve totally one-sided teachers’ seminars and study kits that rail against U.S. policy. Do you think your tax dollars should fund a “critical reader” on 9/11 for K-12 teachers, in which every single reading bashes the United States? Do you think federal subsidies should fund a seminar on the Iraq war for K-12 teachers, addressed by five “anti-war” activists, and not a single supporter of U.S. policy? Professors are sovereign in the classroom, but “outreach” is a federally-mandated activity to reach non-students. As part of the contract, universities undertake to spread knowledge, not propaganda. What is absolutely clear, given that these abuses have continued even as Title VI has come under fire, is that only a board can stop “outreach” outrages.

In sum, the Los Angeles Times has run an op-ed completely detached from reality on campus, which is not surprising, since its author-consultant has no connection to campus. You would think that with 120 subsidized area centers across the country, each one with a director and faculty, a Title VI beneficiary could be found to argue the case against H.R. 3077. But I suppose any one of them would be embarrassed to make the arguments Newberg makes, in the way she makes them—because they are false. But that’s what consultants are for, isn’t it?

L.A. Times Follow-up. Robert Satloff, who was quoted out of context in Newberg’s piece, wrote a letter to the paper, and it has been published. Satloff, after taking the op-ed to task for distorting the bill, adds this:

As a recipient of generous Title VI grants for my own graduate education, I know the value of such funding. I also know how many universities and area-study programs have abused it for purposes far from the noble one for which it was intended, i.e., to advance language proficiency, academic expertise and community awareness of foreign policy issues in the service of U.S. national security interests. The sole purpose of this proposed board is to advise the Department of Education, whose legal responsibility to perform oversight of Title VI recipients remains unchanged by this bill. Since no one compels universities to ask for taxpayer dollars to fund their area-study programs, a little scrutiny over how that money is spent is not too much to ask. That’s not a liberal or conservative idea; it’s a reflection of traditional American fair play.

Well put.