Federally-Funded Middle East Studies Centers Need Scrutiny

After decades of freewheeling abuse by politicized federally-funded university Middle East Studies centers, the Department of Education (DoE) in 2019 abandoned its hands-off policies and launched an in-depth investigation of the Duke/UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies’ (CMES) misuse of Title VI funds. Despite the hysterical backlash from the higher education lobby and its media allies, DoE’s overdue investigation threatens not academic freedom, but professorial privilege. Long accustomed to operating with no effective oversight, a famously thin-skinned profession has been thrown into panic by DoE’s insistence that CMES stop squandering public resources.

That’s because, from graduate students in Middle East Studies (MES) to university presidents, academics know that should DoE administrators stick to their principles and follow the evidence, their investigations will expand to most of the other fourteen Title VI National Resource Centers (NRC) and thirteen Foreign Language and