Georgetown Gets a Title VI Wakeup Call

until next year, but he’s already left his mark on academe. This past tax day, he sent Education Secretary Betsy DeVos a letter objecting to the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies’ (CMES) use of federal Title VI funds for the anti-Semitic performance of a Palestinian rapper at UNC in March. A flurry of communications between Department of Education (DoE) and UNC officials resulted, most notably the ominous August DoE letter detailing CMES’ myriad violations of Title VI regulations.

Almost overnight, the higher education lobby suffered an emotional meltdown, House Democrats expressed their “concern” by demanding a raft of DoE documents, and academics fretted that public support might become contingent on performance rather than privilege.

But the fun may just be getting started.

In mid-December, Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.) joined the fray with his own letter to DeVos calling attention to Title VI abuses at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS), the school’s Title VI–supported Middle East studies unit. He nails CCAS for its “systemic support for biased, anti-American, pro-BDS individuals and scholarship” that “are not in accordance with the mission of Title VI funds and contrary to America’s national security interests.”

Citing research from the Middle East Forum and elsewhere, Riggleman zeroes in on CCAS professors’ active support of BDS, in clear violation of Title VI requirements to “promote access to research and training overseas, including through linkages to overseas institutions.” Demanding a boycott of Israel is indefensible under these rubrics, yet CCAS-affiliated faculty don’t care. Why should they, given DOE’s decades of hands-off, devil-may-care attitude toward enforcement of its own rules?

As Middle East scholar Martin Kramer has documented, Title VI recipients’ split with Washington’s national security goals emerged in the political turmoil of the mid-1960s. After dodging Nixon’s attempts to end the program (Congress proved to be its savior), by the late-1970s Title VI had become, according to Kramer, “a secure semi-entitlement, backed up by the full weight of the higher education lobby.” Despite cutbacks under the Obama administration and the proposed elimination of funding in Trump’s recent budgets, this professorial perk has remained unscathed — until now.

Mounting evidence supports bringing under control a program whose beneficiaries hold federal law in contempt. Riggleman notes that four professors at CCAS — Osama Abi-Mershed, Judith Tucker, Yvonne Haddad, and Rochelle Davis — are signatories to pro-BDS letters. Tucker, in particular, is singled out for opprobrium. As immediate past president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the umbrella group for scholars of the region, she accelerated what Riggleman calls MESA’s “consistently anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Israel perspective on scholarship and political issues.”

Tucker also makes her biases clear through her adamant opposition to the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, designed to help the departments of education and justice “effectively determine whether an investigation of an incident of anti-Semitism is warranted under their statutory anti-discrimination enforcement authority.” Tucker writes that she shares the authors of the act’s concerns about anti-Semitism in the United States, but Riggleman notes that the provisions of the act that Tucker claims sets forth a dangerously “narrow definition” of anti-Semitism include “[c]alling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews,” “[m]aking mendacious, dehumanizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of the Jews as a collective,” and “[a]ccusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.”

CCAS’ biases don’t end there, however. As Riggleman notes, its board of advisers includes several Gulf-state elites whose appointments present conflicts of interest with both Georgetown’s mission to support objective scholarship uninfluenced by foreign interests and Title VI’s objectives of helping secure America’s national security. They include Abdulrahman bin Saud Al-Thani, the terrorist-supporting Qatar’s minister of state, and Turki bin Faisal Al-Saud, chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Saudi Arabia. The latter follows another prominent Saudi, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, whose $20 million gift in 2005 made Georgetown the seat of Islamist propaganda in the United States. Such men thwart rather than help fulfill the original purpose of Title VI.

Examples of thwarting — or, at best, ignoring — the objectives of Title VI funding aren’t limited to Georgetown. Research by the Middle East Forum and others shows disregard of Title VI rules among many recipients, including, among many others, the University of Texas at Austin, Columbia University, and UCLA. Such widespread disregard for the provision’s statutory mandates is inexcusable, not only for its waste of resources but also for the politicized, biased scholarship and teaching that results. That Middle East studies programs harbor professors who advocate BDS or issue apologias for terrorism illustrates the field’s moral and intellectual decadence. That such rot is supported by taxpayer dollars in clear violation of federal law and DoE rules demands immediate congressional and executive-branch action to correct the corrupt status quo. Riggleman’s actions should be emulated by his colleagues regarding Title VI–funded Middle East studies centers in their states, with an additional proviso: comply with the law or lose federal funding.

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UK: Muslim students less likely to be awarded top class degrees

Students from Muslim families are less likely to be awarded top class degrees than students from other religions or beliefs, according to research examining UK higher education attainment for people of different faith backgrounds.

The research, based on official statistics gathered from more than two million students attending British universities, found that just 65% of students identifying as Muslim gained firsts and upper second class degrees as undergraduates, compared with more than 76% of all other students.

The attainment gap was particularly wide among those gaining first class honours: only 18% of Muslims were awarded the top classification – a lower proportion than in all other other religious groups and than the nearly 30% of students with no religion who gained firsts. Sikh and Hindu students were also less likely to be awarded first class degrees.

“Reasons for differences in degree award by student’s religion during their time in [higher education] are complex and difficult to disentangle from other characteristics associated with religion,” the report by Advance HE noted.

It suggested that differences in students’ backgrounds and experiences, differences in treatment from staff and other students, and “barriers specifically associated with religious observation” could all play a part in explaining the attainment gap.

The researchers found that the gap between Muslims and others got wider as the proportion of Muslims studying at an institution fell. Universities with Muslims making up just 3% of students saw the worst outcomes compared with their peers, including those in leading Russell Group universities.

The researchers also noted that the performance of Muslim students was inversely related to the proportion of Muslim staff at an institution: for every additional percentage point of Muslim staff, the attainment gap between Muslims and non-Muslims shrank by more than by two percentage points.

Previous research has found that the perceptions of other students and staff – including outright Islamophobia – and a lack of acknowledgement of students’ religion contribute to the negative experiences of Muslim students.

The Advance HE study is the first of its kind to examine how students’ experiences at university can differ according to their religion and beliefs, using responses recorded by the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

The responses from young people enrolled as students in 2017-18 found that nearly half declared they had no religious beliefs, while a third said they were Christian. Some 9% were Muslim, 2% Hindu, 1.7% Buddhist, while just 0.9% were Sikh and 0.4% were Jewish.

But the study also found that a higher proportion of university staff described themselves as Christian compared to students, while the reverse was true for Muslims: only 3% of staff said they were Muslim.

Jewish students were the most academically successful among all groups: nearly nine out of 10 graduated with a first or 2.1 degree. And eight out of 10 students with no religion also achieved a first or 2.1.

Students in Northern Ireland were most likely to identify by religion than their peers in the rest of the UK: more than 70% said they were Christian compared to 33% in Scotland, while only 25% said they had no religion compared with 49% in England.

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Adult education program to remain

With schools shut down until at least March 29 over concerns of spreading the coronavirus, it was business as usual for the Altoona Area School Board on Monday evening, although it was conducted in a different room.

To minimize the risk of spreading germs, the board moved its meeting to the auditorium where people could spread out.

Moving quickly through the agenda, the board decided to keep its adult education program. Board members chose to abandon last month’s suggestion to look at eliminating the program to save money after public outcry.

“We need to keep it,” board member Rick Hoover said. “We invite people to the meetings all the time, and I tell them their voices matter. They were very eloquent and made great points. I think it is very important to keep this program going.”

Board member Sharon Bream said that if the district would have shut the program down, it would have continued somewhere else.

“I think there is a misconception among the public that if we don’t continue this program, it goes away, but that is not the case.” she said. “The state will find someone else to run it.”

Board member Dave Francis said the program’s success is because of the way the district runs it and he doesn’t want someone else taking over.

“My point is to keep it with us because of our staff,” he said. “We have been very successful, so I would hate to pass it off to someone else.”

Board member Ron Johnson said he visited the Stev­ens building where the program is held to get a feel for it.

“I … talked to the instructors and students and asked them to convince me to keep it open,” he said. “They were just coming out of the rooms to talk to me about it.”

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