( 2112 )

… Or why Senator Lieberman should wake up with a horse’s head in his bed.

Ok so lets assume that you two carzy kids have never heard of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni  so here’s the story: Not long after the Towers fell, the council [co-founded by Lynne Cheney and smoking Joe Lieberman, then D-Conn] published a report entitled: “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It,” which was often refered to as a blacklist becasue it listed examples of insufficiently patriotic behavior of the part of the professoriate and called universities the “weak link” in the war on terror. In due course that report formed the basis for HR 3077, The International Studies in Higher Education Act.  HR 3077 would have established an “advisory board” to monitor international studies centers on American’s college campuses. Said boards would make recommendations to assist the Secretary of Education and Congress improve Title VI funded programs to “better reflect the national needs in relation to the homeland security, international education, and international affairs…” Sounds like a good idea right? But what is odd is that those boards would have investigatory powers, and will be able to use resources of federal, state, and local governments to investigate programs and assess them in light of whether they provide sufficient airtime to “champions of American foreign policy.”

 Those of you who’ve visited 2112 previously may have noted that I’m not exactly a fan of Informed Comment’s Juan Cole [he’s too much of a statist for my taste and his anti Kurdish independance rants are misguided at best] but anyway he responded to HR 3077 by saying that its inherent claim of “anti-Americanism” was intellectually dishonest. “What they mean . . . if you pin them down is ambivalence about the Iraq war, or dislike of Israeli colonization of the West Bank, or recognition that the U.S. government has sometimes in the past been in bed with present enemies like al Qaeda or Saddam. None of these positions is ‘anti-American,’ and any attempt by congressionally appointed body to tell university professors they cannot say these things—or that if they say them they must hire someone else who will say the opposite—is a contravention of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.” Rasid Khalidi – yep the same guy Sarah Palin brought up  – had this to say: “”[The Senate Version HR 3077] is part of a wider campaign to intimidate,” asserts Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Chair of Arab Studies at Columbia and head of its Middle East Institute. “It won’t work with my generation, but it will discourage younger scholars from going into the field. One of the objectives is to put the universities in an impossible position—either to accept partisan intrusion into academic affairs or just not take the money.” According to Amy Newhall, executive director of the Middle East Studies Association, the effect will be counterproductive: fewer and fewer students studying Arabic, Pashtu, Turkish, Urdu.” [regular vistors know how I feel about that development]. Fortunately, those two were not alone.  Neve Gordon weighed in.  Moustafa Bayoumi asked: “Must Knowledge Serve Power?”  Sara Roy and others at the NEA offered up a couple of takes. So did the folks at the Tartan and my former neighbors at the Maroon. Salon got in on the act: with Osama  University:  “Inherent in the act is the assumption that if most established experts believe American Middle East policy is bad, the flaw lies with the experts, not the policy. “There’s the threat that centers will be punished for not toeing the official line out of Washington, which is an unprecedented degree of federal intrusion into a university-based area studies program,” says Zachary Lockman, a New York University history professor and director of the school’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.“ There were even on air debates. So take a read and a listen and make up your own minds kids. O’ and yeah some the stuff I’ve linked to is a tad hyperbolic, but the fact remains that Joe has supported “Pro American Standards” in higher education. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find even the concept reprehensible.

If you agree, you have a phone and monkeyboy, it is time to USE IT!