Strings attached

Academics fret over possibility of censorship in teaching, research funding.

By David Downs
South Coast Beacon

Thought censorship flies under many flags around the globe, but hundreds of American academics worry its 2004 colors will be red, white and blue.

Professors from UCSB to Yale say the Higher Education Act reappropriation bill of 2004 contains new verbiage that puts politicians in control of Title VI federal funding. Title VI funding pays for teaching and research in some of the most controversial classes on college campuses nationwide.

Juan Campo of the UCSB Center for Middle East Studies and his peers have been emailing friends and their congressmen to protest the reappropriation clause, also known as House Resolution 3077. Though the resolution would beef up funds for international studies, it puts that funding under the knife of an unprecedented advisory board appointed by Congress and the President.

Campo said the Bush administration could stack the board with neoconservatives who might cut money for research or courses deemed anti-American or critical of current foreign policy.

There would be plenty such courses to cut, said conservative academic Dr. Stanley Kurtz. In June 2003, Kurtz told Congress that the nation is littered with hotbeds of anti-Americanism at universities.

It’s so bad, Kurtz said, that many colleges refuse money from the National Security Agency and other government undercover groups, and the politics of professors are hurting America’s ability to recruit good spies.

Kurtz pointed directly to UCSB’s Middle East Studies program and said a political advisory board would bring balance to academia.

“The vigorous and open debate that is supposed to flourish at our colleges and universities cannot exist without faculty members who can speak for divergent points of view,” Kurtz told Congress.

“Why Do They Hate Us,” the controversial UCSB course mentioned by Kurtz, explored criticism of American foreign policy and culture.

Campo said the course accompanies many nontraditional classes questioning the United States’ role in the world and urges students to do as well.

“If you are going to be doing serious work in the area of the Middle East you are going to have speakers and conferences that generate criticism, and if you’re not generating criticism, then you are not doing your job,” he said.

Free speech, Kurtz said, is allowed at public schools, but that doesn’t mean taxpayers have to pay for it. In fact, Congress’ extra $20 million for Title VI studies in 2004 should go into defense spending, he said.

Kurtz’s comments are part of a wave of new threats to academic autonomy, said Richard Applebaum, director of UCSB’s Institute for Social, Behavioral and Economic Research, or ISBER.

Campo and Applebaum said they support academic oversight of grant funding, but it should be the job of professors, researchers and other academics, not political appointees.

“I wouldn’t say this is a direct threat, but it does pose the possibility that there would be ideological interference in terms of the array of programs and class materials and workshops we organize through the center,” Campo said.

Barbara Herr Harthorn, associate director of ISBER, said losing Title VI funding could cost the centers for South East Asian and Middle East studies tens of thousands of dollars, and millions at bigger schools.

“It’s hard to tell what kind of jeopardy the programs would be in because the politics isn’t overt and it would be hard to know why were denied,” she said.

The first salvo came just after the Sept. 11 2001, terrorist attacks in a report by Joseph Lieberman called “Descending Our Civilization.” The report labeled dozens of universities across the nation treasonous for what they taught, according to Applebaum.

“I know what this reminds me of; I was around for McCarthyism,” he said. “Instead of communists, now it’s shadowy terrorists.”

The U.S. House of Representatives passed HR 3077 with wide bipartisan support Oct. 21; now it faces a Senate vote.

Leaders of the top 30 international affairs studies programs in the nation will meet in Washington to consider a large lobbying effort aimed at Congress.