Posted on 05/29/2002 7:06:48 AM PDT by callisto
First, the good news. Student applications to the National Security Education Program (NSEP) are up dramatically. That's good, because in the post-9/11 world, the NSEP is an extraordinarily important mechanism for distributing educational grants. What makes the NSEP so significant is its requirement that student beneficiaries go to work, after graduation, for a federal agency that safeguards our nation's security. Students who accept NSEP money, for example, put their hard-won knowledge of Arabic to work in America's defense and intelligence agencies, all of which are badly in need of Middle Eastern language expertise. With undergraduate applications to NSEP up by more than 50 percent, we may be seeing a welcome, and long overdue, upsurge in patriotism among America's students.
Now, the bad news. America's leftist professorate is doing everything in its power to kill the National Security Education Program. Worse still, the assault on the NSEP is being led by the very same "area-studies" professors who just hoodwinked Congress into raising their federal subsidy by a record-breaking 26 percent (on grounds of "national security"). These leftist professors are the sort of blame-America-first-ers who attribute the attacks of Sept. 11 to the evils of American foreign policy. Yet these tenured radicals are raking in millions of taxpayer dollars in the supposed service of national security, all while making a concerted effort to destroy the NSEP — the one federal education program that does in fact directly and dramatically enhance American security.
Two weeks ago, in "Anti-Americanism in the Classroom," I wrote about the scandal of Title VI, the government program that funds centers of language and "area studies" at American colleges and universities. On the reasonable assumption that America's security demands that we acquire knowledge of the languages and cultures of the world, Congress has long funded educational grants through Title VI. And in the wake of Sept. 11, America's area-studies professors went to Congress asking for unprecedented increases in funding for Title VI, all with the promise that they would use that money to further American security interests in a newly dangerous world.
But what does Title VI money actually go for? Unfortunately, through Title VI, the United States government has been pouring millions of dollars into the pockets of professors who are utterly hostile to American foreign policy. In "Anti-Americanism in the Classroom," for example, I showed how federal money has been used to support teacher-training material for K-12 education that features authors opposed to the war on terror. I'm talking about course material that showcases the likes of Arundhati Roy, Robert Fisk, Tariq Ali, and Edward Said — the folks who consider Osama bin Laden and George Bush to be equally evil — and all without any balancing readings from more conservative scholars like Bernard Lewis or Samuel Huntington. So, remarkably, through Title VI, Congress has actually been using taxpayer dollars to teach American students to oppose the war on terror.
Unfortunately, the problem of tenured radicals using federal money to undermine American security is anything but isolated. The most egregious example of the problem with Title VI is the concerted effort being made by beneficiaries of Title VI to kill the National Security Education Program.
The NSEP was founded by Sen. David Boren after the Persian Gulf War. Then, as now, it was evident to Congress that our defense and intelligence agencies had far too few people who knew Arabic and other foreign languages. Boren's entirely sensible attempt to solve the problem was to fund a language and area-studies grant that would require beneficiaries to go to work after graduation for some security-related agency of the federal government.
From the start, however, the language and area-studies professors who benefited from the no-strings-attached funding of Title VI howled with outrage at the NSEP's national-security-service requirement. Many of these professors were followers of "post-colonial studies," a school of thought that holds scholarly cooperation with the American government to be a form of immoral collusion with imperialism. The post-colonialists (who now dominate area-studies programs in American universities) launched a boycott against NSEP, refusing to apply for, or accept, any funding from the program — indeed refusing even to recommend the NSEP to students who might want to benefit from it. The African Studies Association, the Latin American Studies Association, and the Middle East Studies Association all passed resolutions refusing cooperation with NSEP. What these professors really wanted was for the NSEP's national-security-service requirement to be eliminated. That way, the money could be funneled back into their own pockets — and with no strings attached.
You might think that, by exposing the deep need of our defense and intelligence establishment for foreign-language expertise, the events of Sept. 11 had changed all this. You would be wrong.
I've learned that in the months since Sept. 11, the directors of Title VI African Studies Centers throughout the United States have reaffirmed their boycott of the National Security Education Program. What's worse, an African-language center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that recently had the courage and patriotism to apply for an NSEP grant will now be subject to a damaging boycott leveled against it by Africanist scholars throughout the United States.
Imagine! The very same professors who have just raked in millions of dollars from a Congress worried about the lack of language expertise in our defense and intelligence establishment are leading an effort to destroy the one foreign-language center in their field actively attempting to work with the government. If these folks really believe that cooperation with the American government is immoral, why are they taking federal money in the first place?
The Africanist boycott of NSEP is being led by Professor David Wiley, director of the African Studies Center at Michigan State University. Wiley is a very powerful man — a key coordinator of National Title VI area-studies centers, and president-elect of the African Studies Association. I recently phoned Wiley to ask him why beneficiaries of Title VI funding are boycotting the NSEP.
Wiley claimed that, in shunning the NSEP, American scholars are only trying to protect their access to third-world countries. Any connection between American scholars and the CIA or the defense department, said Wiley, would prompt a lockout by foreign universities and governments. But Wiley's excuse for the NSEP boycott is unpersuasive. We're not talking about spies here. NSEP rules specifically forbid employment of students by government agencies during their time in college. Students who take NSEP money don't start working for the government until after graduation. Is an American professor going to be locked out of African country because one of his undergraduates might be going to work for the CIA a few years down the road? I don't think so.
After I pressed Wiley a bit, he began to acknowledge that the real reason for the boycott of the NSEP is political. This was difficult for him to deny, since I had documentary evidence of Wiley's long history of politically motivated opposition to NSEP. As a long-time member of the leftist "Association of Concerned African Scholars," Wiley had signed and circulated one of the original attacks on NSEP. In that statement, Wiley and the other signers condemned America for "[subverting] progressive governments and national liberation movements" throughout Africa. When I confronted Wiley with that statement, he acknowledged that some of the motivation for the boycott of NSEP by Title VI beneficiaries was political. At first, Wiley implied that the problem was restricted to America's Cold War foreign policy. After he got going, though, Wiley couldn't help but mention that his opposition to the current U.S. foreign policy in Africa plays a role in his support for the NSEP boycott.
In 1996, the Ford Foundation commissioned anthropologist Jane Guyer to write a report on the state of the field of African studies. That Ford Foundation report is very clear that opposition to the NSEP serves as a political litmus test within the field. The Ford report even made a special mention of David Wiley's activities in circulating material opposed to NSEP. Most disturbing of all, the Ford Report says that during the 1980's "American scholars who supported U.S. policy...more or less withdrew from the African Studies community." That is a delicate way of saying that once tenured radicals like David Wiley got control of African studies, supporters of American foreign policy were effectively driven out of the field. So much for "diversity."
So these are the folks who are receiving millions of dollars in Title VI funding from the American government, even as they conspire to destroy the NSEP — the one education program that actually does directly enhance America's national security. And what about the courageous and patriotic folks over at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's National African Language Resource Center (NALRC)? It was NALRC's application for NSEP money that set off Wiley's attempt to reaffirm the Africanist boycott of NSEP. I asked Wiley if the boycott of NSEP would extend to punishment of Wisconsin's language center. Although he did his best to downplay the matter, Wiley's answer was chilling. He told me that he knew of one scholar already who intended to suspend cooperation with NALRC. Wiley also said that his own faculty was, in principle, committed to shun any relationship with Wisconsin's African-language center.
It's important to understand what this means. Title VI centers cooperate closely, in order to avoid duplication of expertise. If Title VI African-studies centers throughout the country hold back from exchanging students and other forms of cooperation with Wisconsin, then Madison's African-language resource center could easily be destroyed. Having withheld their own cooperation, the Title VI directors could simply tell the Department of Education that the Madison center had "failed to reach its constituents." The result would be a defunding of the rebel center.
That would be an extraordinary inversion of Congress's intent. A bunch of leftist professors with an axe to grind against American foreign policy gang up to destroy a badly needed government program and the patriotic scholars and students who want to join it, all the while taking in millions of dollars in government funding with the claim that they are contributing to America's security!
How long will Congress allow the Title VI scam to continue? The Government Accounting Office hasn't audited Title VI in 24 years. Surely a full GAO audit and serious oversight hearings ought to be required before yet another massive increase in Title VI funding is granted. The truth is, no-strings-attached Title VI funding to the leftist academy needs to be seriously scaled back, while targeted aid to good programs like NSEP needs to be increased.
And Congress must break the outrageous boycott of the NSEP by the beneficiaries of Title VI. And amendment needs to be passed that bans Title VI funding from any university or area-studies center that refuses to grant full cooperation to the NSEP. The boycott of NSEP by Title VI area-studies centers has already succeeded in driving this valuable program out of our finest colleges and universities and into second- and third-tier institutions. Why are we preventing our very best students from going to work for our defense and intelligence agencies? How can Congress stand for such a travesty? How can our government keep subsidizing the very professors most opposed to the war on terror, while allowing those same professors to crush those scholars and students most eager to contribute to America's security?
If you'd like to see Congress cut Title VI and protect the NSEP, then you may want to get in touch with the Chair of the House Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations. Rep. Ralph Regula (R., Ohio), can be reached at 2306 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington D.C. 20515, Phone (202) 225-3876. And here is a link to all the members of the key House Subcommittee. Especially if one of them is your congressman, you may want to write. With the education lobby the only voice that these congressmen have heard on this issue, only pressure from the general public can put a stop to the scam that Title VI has become.
— Stanley Kurtz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Basically, there is so much government largesse out there, so many social engineering programs, so many entitlements, so much waste and bureaucracy, that it is just impossible to keep up with it all. The misuse and abuse of same by liberals is difficult to keep up with, and when seeing something entirely new like this Section VI crap (it was new to me, anyway), makes one just throw up his hands in exasperation.
Clearly, Section VI funds MUST be made contigent on support and acceptance of NSEP, but the fight to make it so... I can just see Da$$hole now, quietly killing this in committee, or threatening filibuster, or making sure it doesn't come out of conference, etc, etc, etc.
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