Watch Out Universities - your teaching orders are coming

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/11/06/middle_east/index_np.html

Osama University?
Neoconservative critics have long charged Middle Eastern studies departments with anti-American bias. Now they've enlisted Congress in their crusade.

On Oct. 21, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that could require university international studies departments to show more support for American foreign policy or risk their federal funding. Its approval followed hearings this summer in which members of Congress listened to testimony about the pernicious influence of the late Edward Said in Middle Eastern studies departments, described as enclaves of debased anti-Americanism. Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank, testified, "Title VI-funded programs in Middle Eastern Studies (and other area studies) tend to purvey extreme and one-sided criticisms of American foreign policy." Evidently, the House agreed and decided to intervene.

-snip-

It's not surprising that they started with Middle Eastern studies. There's a particular enmity between hard-line supporters of Israel -- who, with the extraordinary ascension of neoconservatives in the Bush administration, now dominate the American right -- and academics who specialize in studying the Arab and Muslim world. That enmity burst into open conflict after Sept. 11, when conservatives saw an opportunity to accuse Middle East academics not just of biased scholarship but of representing a kind of intellectual fifth column. Soon after the World Trade Center fell, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a Washington-based group co-founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., published a report called "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It," which listed examples of insufficiently patriotic behavior of the part of the professoriate and called universities the "weak link" in the war on terror.
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guess we are going to have to go abroad to get a proper education

How will that sit with the primary voters?

..even with the pink tutus in evidence.

Must...check...facts. BRB.

:wtf:

are scared as hell of free-exchange of ideas.

Only Party-Approved Teaching is allowed.

Amazing how much the Busheviks are becoming like the Commies they professed to hate.

But I don't believe they hated the Commies' for their Tyranny, just for their particular brand of rationalization for Tyranny, which differs from Bushevik rationalizations for THEIR brand of Tyranny.

are just as dogmatic and inflexible as the most hardcore Soviet apparatchiks. For all their outward anti-communism they would be far more comfortable in red china or the USSR than they would in a democratic society, where dissent and free speach are supressed.

live a life free of this gestapo bullshit.

fuck this police state. im leaving.

sounds like a good Republican presidential candidate.

"universities (are) the "weak link" in the war on terror." What the hell are they smoking? I never heard any 'anti-american' crap in any of my mid-east classes. My God how this country is turning into Nazi Germany. f$%^ing Republicans.

May God help us all.
Mysterio

So if it is anti-Arab he is probably going to buy into it, so long as it isn't too radical. he isn't going to want to endanger his political future you know.

There were 3 roll call votes on October 21, none of which was unanimous (see http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2003/ROLL_500.asp).

s_m

On edit:
Yes, it was a voice vote. Who knows how many were present -- this is not recorded information.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:HR03077:@@@L&summ2=m&

:puke:

I guess next they are going to come in and tell the state schools with Religion departments to cut out anything but classes on Christianity. Maybe then they can legislate "non-reivisionist" history and creationism in the science departments. Damn this shit.

and there needs to be more balance to the kind of hardcore arabism that is in vogue now, I would never, ever want the government to dictate what can or should be taught. That was the Soviet method, and it didn't work over there and it will not work here.
Universities should put more balance into reading lists and such, but the US government should stay out of this.

She has been ranting about how few students are learning about George Washington for decades now.

In truth, she has a point in that most "overview" courses available to college freshmen really don't go into much detail about any one period of time or series of events unless the individual instructor brings his own research interest to the class. Students are left to develop insight into events through the papers they are required to do, and given that the "overview" courses are usually classes of 200-300 students, even the student papers go by the wayside. No one can give the proper amount of attention to grading and commenting on so many papers. Only the history majors who take additional, more focused courses get much in-depth understanding of American history.

One of our instructors (not even a full-time staff member, but someone who is hired semester to semester to fill in when there are overloads), has chosen to organize his "101" course around the government's relationships with American Indians in colonial times and through the "opening of the frontier." In that way he gets to the thinking that was going on at the time and how it shaped events. He uses the same text as all the "101" courses use, but from what I hear from students they get a lot more out of the course.

Really, though, as this country is focusing on the Middle East nowadays, it's no wonder that students are interested in learning more about that culture. Also, since this war is going to be endless, or so the administration tells us, it's natural that some students are considering careers that would involve working in those areas. From what I understand, we have pitifully few folks in intelligence who can speak Arabic fluently or who could pass as Arabs if we wanted to spy on someone. What silliness to insist that students know about only Western culture! It could one day cost them their lives... or at least some business. These conservatives make no sense at all!

Give all the teachers the exact same curriculum (a terrible idea), and some classrooms will still better prepare their students than others.

:mad: