In the end, the debate about what constitutes the mainstream, about the role of ideology in evaluating scholarship, can go on ad infinitum, with evidence on both sides. For all their hysterical nationalism, Kramer and his cohorts obviously aren't wrong that Middle East departments, and the humanities in general, tend to be liberal, or that shrill radicalism abounds on college campuses. Horowitz is just one of a group of conservatives who have made their names documenting leftist excess at American universities, and they rarely have to look far for egregious examples. In one infamous case last year, a U.C. Berkeley course on "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" warned, "Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." The graduate student instructor was forced to remove the notice after a national outcry.

"Clearly, Martin Kramer and his colleagues see themselves as an embattled minority who have been unfairly excluded from academia by what they see as the liberals and leftists who run Middle Eastern studies in the United States, so they want the federal government to come in and somehow make sure people like them get hired or their views get more attention," says Lockman.

Yet the question, finally, isn't whether conservatives really are an embattled minority in the university. It's whether the federal government should supersede experts in deciding which scholarly views deserve to be promoted, and which can be overlooked.

Ironically, given the epic scope of the debate, the actual amount of federal funding at stake is quite small by the standards of large universities. Most centers only receive a few hundred thousand dollars annually from the government. But experts say the programs are often dependent on it. Khalidi presided over five such programs when he was director of the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago prior to moving to Columbia. Title VI grants, he says, are "peanuts in university and federal terms, but in terms of these fields, they're really important." Around 30 percent of his graduate students learned foreign languages on area study grants, he says.

Because federal funding is so crucial to these centers' survival, Khalidi says, the threat that HR 3077 poses to Middle Eastern studies in America is "deadly serious." The bill, he says, would do one of two things. Either it would "impose the teaching of one twisted version of Middle East reality, what I call terrorology, impose it at the taxpayers' expense as one central element in the way the subject is taught. Or, by subjecting self-respecting universities to conditions they will not under any circumstances accept, it would curtail the teaching of the Middle East."

Cole says scholars will have a hard time convincing their bosses to give up funding. "It may be that some centers would forgo it if the interference looks like it's too heavy-handed," he says. "But it's really hard to go to a dean and ask to throw away $200,000 a year if the criteria that has to be met could be met in some way that isn't completely odious to the university. There would be pressure to meet it."

Michigan Republican Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Select Education and author of the bill, insists that's not what lawmakers intend. The advisory committee, he says, will be there "to help schools to learn from each other, to gather information and help schools learn what other schools are doing so they can really improve their own international programs."

Hoekstra agrees with some of Kurtz's criticism of Middle Eastern studies, but says that has nothing to do with his legislation. "I do think that there may be some validity in some of his comments," he says. "I don't believe these studies should be used to promote an ideological point of view. I'm about getting students educated in international affairs, not having students get into a classroom and have them be indoctrinated into a political philosophy. But did we put anything into the bill that puts in some kind of screening process? For those who believe it's there, ask them to point out where it is."

Other congressmen, though, have been less cagey about the bill's likely effect. Welcoming its passage, Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., said, "I am encouraged that the creation of this Advisory Board will help redress a problem which is a great concern of mine, namely, the lack of balance, and indeed the anti-American bias that pervades Title VI-funded Middle East studies programs in particular ... surely it is troubling when evidence suggests that many of the Middle East regional studies grantees are committed to a narrow point of view at odds with our national interest, a point of view that questions the validity of advancing American ideals of democracy and the rule of law around the world, and in the Middle East in particular."

The International Studies in Higher Education Act is a singular victory for Martin Kramer, who proposed similar legislation in "Ivory Towers on Sand." An American-born Israeli citizen with a Ph.D. in Near Eastern studies from Princeton, he served as the director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. Returning to the States, he joined the same network of conservative think tanks that nurtured defense intellectuals like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. The journal he edits, Middle East Quarterly, is published by the Middle East Forum, whose director is Daniel Pipes, the man behind Campus Watch. His book was published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a staunchly pro-Israel think tank whose board of advisors includes Perle and former CIA Director James Woolsey. Wolfowitz resigned from the board when he joined the administration.

Kramer's entire book can be read as an argument for legislation like the International Studies Act. Most of "Ivory Towers on Sand" is a discussion of what Kramer sees as the ideological corruption within Middle Eastern studies, but he also details the minutia of government funding, outlining Title VI's history in order to examine how it can be reformed.

As Kramer reports, Title VI was, from its inception in 1958, "administered as a no-strings-attached benefit." Back then, though, the leaders of the field were people "of a patriotic disposition, who could be counted upon to help out," Kramer writes. This, he makes clear, is no longer the case. Thus the time has come to attach strings.

"It is important for Congress to take a deeper interest in Title VI, and Middle Eastern studies are as good a place as any to begin asking questions," he wrote in "Ivory Towers on Sand." "A relevant congressional subcommittee might hold a hearing on the contribution of Middle Eastern studies to American public policy."

In June, the Congressional Subcommittee on Select Education did just that, convening hearings on "International Programs in Higher Education and Questions of Bias." At the end of his opening statement, Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., said, "I am interested in opening the discussion and debate to learn more about the merits of and concern for federal support given to some of the international education programs that have been questioned in regard to their teachings, which have been associated with efforts to potentially undermine American foreign policy."

Kurtz, testifying before the subcommittee, nodded to Kramer, calling his book "the most comprehensive and authoritative account of the extremist bias against American foreign policy that pervades contemporary Middle East studies." Much of the blame for this bias, he said, is a result of the malign influence of Edward Said and post-colonial theory, which he called the "ruling intellectual paradigm in academic area studies."

He proceeded to list some of Said's more inflammatory statements, including his 1999 call for Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Wesley Clark to be tried for war crimes along with Slobodan Milosevic. Said, Kurtz continued, "has even treated the very idea of American democracy as a farce. He has belittled the reverence in which Americans hold the Constitution, which Said dismisses with the comment that it was written by 'wealthy, white, slaveholding Anglophilic men.'"

There might have been an eerie déjà vu in seeing a congressional committee examine the work of a renowned scholar for treasonous intent, but Kurtz told the panel he was not proposing to blacklist Said. "My concern is that Title VI-funded centers too seldom balance readings from Edward Said and his like-minded colleagues with readings from authors who support American foreign policy," he said. This was more generous than Kurtz's comrades have been toward their enemies' work. Last year, Pipes told Salon, "I want Noam Chomsky to be taught at universities about as much as I want Hitler's writing or Stalin's writing. These are wild and extremist ideas that I believe have no place in a university."

At the end of his testimony, Kurtz made several policy recommendations, including the creation of a board to manage Title VI. Asked about the role of the board in an e-mail interview, Kurtz wrote, "The board should look to encourage intellectual diversity, and it should also encourage programs that successfully bring students into positions of responsibility in the areas of international affairs, international business, foreign language expertise, and national security."

According to Kurtz, the legislation is in the spirit of the best liberal tradition. "I hope that HR 3077 will encourage vigorous debate within the academy on the state of the world generally, and on American foreign policy in particular," he writes. "I'd like to see the sort of debate that now goes on between the academy and its outside critics take place within the academy itself. That doesn't mean excluding critics of American foreign policy from the academy. It means bringing supporters back in."

For professors of Middle Eastern studies, though, it's outrageous, and dangerous, that the government is meddling with academic freedom. And it's especially galling that those who are calling for government intervention are the very neocons whose fear-mongering claims about Iraq have been shown to be false. "The thing that burns me, these are the guys who told us that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons program and would have a nuke within three years," says Cole. "And they're coming back and telling us that our scholarship is shoddy and we need to be overseen by them?"

To Khalidi, the neoconservative attack on Middle Eastern studies recalls the assault launched earlier this year on American intelligence agencies that failed to confirm right-wing assumptions about Iraq. Once again, conservatives are questioning the competency of those who don't agree with them about the Middle East, insisting their views would triumph if only they weren't suppressed by a mandarin establishment in need of immediate reform. And just as Pentagon hawks set up their own intelligence office when the CIA didn't tell them what they wanted to hear about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, now the neocons are trying to do the same thing in academia.

"Neoconservatives want to substitute zealotry and true belief for real expertise," Khalidi says. "They're not just after us in the Middle East field. They're not just after academics. You see this inside the military, inside the intelligence community. You see this in the way the State Department has been treated. Anybody who knows anything about anything is suspect. Unless you have the right views you are not allowed to speak, and if you do, you do so at your peril."

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