j. - Education law on the block?

Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Friday October 28, 2005

Education law on the block?

new york (jta) | U.S. lawmakers and academics are engaged in a fierce debate over the renewal of Title VI of the Higher Education Act.

First enacted in 1958 as part of the National Defense Education Act, the purpose of Title VI of the Higher Education Act, according to its framers, was “to meet the national defense needs of the United States.”

National defense, according to current Department of Education publications, “remains central to the programs 40 years after their inception.”

Critics seeking to amend the legislation contend that universities often promote anti-American and anti-Israeli biases and do not merit federal funds that were intended to serve American interests.

Many academics worry that restrictions will violate academic freedoms.

While Title VI may have had a noble purpose, it does not work in practice, according to Middle East scholar Martin Kramer.

Kramer analyzed Middle East studies centers and the work of the Title VI National Resource Centers in his 2001 book, “Ivory Towers on Sand — The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America.”

He was the first to charge that, using Title VI financing as a base, many Middle East studies departments pushed an anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish and pro-Palestinian agenda on students and faculty.

Those departments, Kramer said, deferred to the anti-Western, post-colonialist beliefs of thinkers such as Edward Said, the late Palestinian activist and Columbia University professor of comparative literature.

At the same time, academics denigrated the work of prominent mainstream Middle East scholars such as Bernard Lewis, the acclaimed Princeton University professor emeritus, as too pro-Western.

Kramer wrote that those departments encouraged a worldview in which instruction about Israel is twisted and degraded, while instruction about the United States eliminates positive and patriotic references.

The negative emphasis often found in those departments is like “teaching about the United States through the lens of what happened at Abu Ghraib prison” in Baghdad, said Sarah Stern, director of the Washington office for governmental and public affairs of the American Jewish Congress, which formally protested Title VI educational practices to the Department of Education.

“And it’s teaching about Israel through the lens of Deir Yassin,” she said, referring to an infamous battle during Israel’s War of Independence in which Jewish militias allegedly murdered Arab civilians.

In written testimony submitted to Congress in 2003, the then-director of Georgetown’s National Resource Center on the Middle East, Barbara Stowasser, and a colleague defended the work at university resource centers.

They wrote: “We have had scholars working at our centers who have come to differing conclusions on an array of issues, as one would expect in an academic setting which is premised on the principle of academic freedom and the belief that rigorous and serious intellectual discussion are important to informing both our students and others who benefit from contact with the work of our centers.

“We would make the point, however, that in the process, our centers’ work has been balanced and reflective of diverse views.”

Rep. Patrick Tiberi (R-Ohio), however, is looking to change the education law. He introduced legislation this session that would create an advisory board to observe the workings of Title VI and report to Congress. Academic associations oppose the legislation as an attack on free speech and academic freedom.

The House Committee on Education in the Workforce passed the legislation as part of the Higher Education reauthorization bill, but it has yet to pass the full House of Representatives.

In the Senate, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) attached a version of the legislation to that reauthorization bill. The Senate version does not include an advisory board provision but requires a survey of national and defense agencies to determine what they most need from the university community.

The Senate version also requires a grievance procedure if university students feel they’re being discriminated against. It further requires schools to show how many students who have studied in these resource centers actually go into national security and defense fields.