The funding that's at stake supports area study centers -- interdisciplinary programs devoted to researching specific regions. It was appropriated under Title VI of the 1958 National Defense Education Act. Although the International Studies Act would affect centers concentrating on all parts of the globe, almost all of the debate about it, both inside and outside of Congress, has been about Middle Eastern studies.

There are 17 Middle Eastern studies centers in America, many of them at the nation's best schools, including Harvard, Columbia, New York University and the University of Chicago. They receive Title VI grants to fund graduate student fellowships and to do community outreach and education -- activities like training high school teachers about Middle Eastern issues and providing insight on the region to the media. No Title VI money is used for professor salaries.

The centers form the core of American higher education about the rest of the world. According to Kramer, "70 percent of Ph.D.'s in international studies did their work at these national resource centers, and government money has been vital to the production of Ph.D.'s in this field."

But government money is being misspent, conservative critics say, because, having imbibed Said's sinister post-colonial ideology, Middle Eastern studies departments have become apologists for the Arab world and have neglected the study of inconvenient subjects like the rise of fundamentalist Islam and terrorism. "Take a look at the program of the Middle Eastern Studies Association's annual conference," says Kramer. "There are hundreds of papers there, and none of them are on terrorism. That's because from an ideological point of view, a lot of academics look at the study of terrorism as an overemphasis of an aspect of reality that they would just as soon go away."

Many Middle East studies scholars, says Kramer, entered the field because "they were enamored of the subject, but that subject has an underside. A lot of academics who entered the field in certain generations did so with a third-worldist perspective. They're sympathetic to revolution and believed the Middle East was on the brink of it. They became enthusiasts of various resistance movements, nationalist movements, even at one point Islamist movements."

Other neocons decry the fact that the field has been overtaken by non-Westerners. David Horowitz, a right-wing pundit who has spent much of his career documenting and fighting what he claims is rampant leftist bias in academia, says that in 1979, 3 percent of Middle Eastern scholars were non-Western. "As a result of leftist control of hiring, now 50 percent come from Middle Eastern countries," he says. One might not think it was surprising that a significant percentage of scholars working in a field with a specific regional, cultural and religious emphasis would be from that region, but Horowitz apparently regards many Middle Eastern scholars as mere mouthpieces for their countries' terrorist ideologies. "These are fascist countries!" says Horowitz. "They're Islamofascist countries, and they support terror."

To restore balance to this degraded field, conservatives propose a kind of ideological affirmative action. They want to see a revolution in the ethos of contemporary universities, in which scholars will devote themselves to pulling their weight in the war on terror. That means schools must be compelled to seek out faculty devoted to furthering American interests. If this sounds oddly like a flag-waving version of the extreme academic left's strident calls for "engagement," that doesn't trouble the conservatives.

As Kramer wrote in "Ivory Towers on Sand," "Middle Eastern studies must regain their relevance, or risk becoming 'Exhibit A' in any future case against public support for area studies. They can best achieve this by rediscovering and articulating that which is uniquely American in the American approach to the Middle East. The idea that the United States plays an essentially beneficent role in the world is at the very core of this approach."

To those who object, Kramer writes on his blog, Sandstorm, "Get off the federal dole. Float undisturbed in your post-orientalist bubble while more practical people use the resources to build credible alternatives."

But Cole says the neocon vision of Middle Eastern studies as post-orientalist bubble is a deranged fantasy. (The expression "orientalist" refers to Edward Said's seminal work, "Orientalism," which argued that racist blinders led the West to see people of color as "exotic" Others.) "These arguments that Kurtz, Kramer and others make are only plausible if you don't actually refer to reality," he says. As an example, he reels off the backgrounds of political scientists at centers receiving Title VI grants. "The political scientist at the UCLA Middle Eastern center is Leonard Binder, one of the greats of the field, who fought on Israel's side in the 1948 war. At the University of Washington in Seattle, the political scientists of the Middle East are Ellis Goldberg, who does rational choice and political economy, and Joel Migdal," a Harvard Ph.D. whose latest book is "Through the Lens of Israel: Explorations in State and Society."

"At the University of Michigan," Cole continues, "our political scientist is Mark Tessler, who does survey and opinion research. He has a Ph.D. from Hebrew University. There's Gary Sick at Columbia, who served on Jimmy Carter's National Security Council. We could go on."

The real radicals, many professors say, are Kurtz and company -- and they're lightweight radicals at that. Kurtz, Pipes and Kramer all have Ph.D.'s, but have not established themselves in American academia, finding a home in the world of partisan think tanks instead. Khalidi believes they're trying to punish the academic mainstream for rejecting them.

"It's amusing that people who are by and large failed academics, people who just didn't make it through the standard approach, should argue that it's because of radical bias," says Khalidi. "Theirs are the sourest of sour grapes."

If they wanted to, Khalidi argues, conservatives could do what others do who want more attention paid to a neglected field. "They could raise money for a chair in terrorist studies," he says. "The problem is they want respectability. They want to displace virtually everybody who teaches the Middle East in this country from the center and say the center is between us and them. They want the academic respectability that comes with having federal funding. They want to move from the extreme fringe."

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