by John Kearney
KEARNEY
TITLE VI
RW 02/20/04 A1
NARRATION: Stanley Kurtz is an anthropologist and a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. His academic research has focused on Hindu goddesses in India. But in the last year, Kurtz has become a public critic of regional studies programs, testifying before Congress that U.S. professors are out of step with the war on terror.
TAPE: KURTZ: As I see it, the problem is that we have a group of professors that, as a whole, are severely opposed to American foreign policy.
NARRATION: Kurtz and others asked Congress to create a panel that could penalize programs with allegedly anti-U.S. curriculums. Late last year, Kurtz discussed the House bill incorporating an advisory panel on "Airtalk," a public radio talk show on KPCC in Pasadena.
TAPE: KURTZ: What the bill is doing is saying, Look, these monies should help encourage programs to meet national needs in a whole variety of areas including defense and intelligence, including homeland security and national security as one among others.
TAPE: KHALIDI: Saying we should have advocates of U.S. foreign policy teaching the history and politics and whatever of a region means that academics should not teach what their training and their understanding of that region teaches them, but whatever the partisan foreign policy of a given administration is.
NARRATION: Rashid Khalidi, director of Columbia's Middle East Institute, debating Kurtz on "Airtalk":
TAPE: KHALIDI: That is a recipe for blind folly, in my opinion.
NARRATION: In 1958, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which funded grants for study in strategic languages at the height of the Cold War.
TAPE: SOUND OF MUSIC AND PEOPLE CHATTING, UP FULL, HOLD TO ESTABLISH, FADE UNDER
NARRATION: Adjacent to an evening social mixer for Columbia's Middle East Institute, historian Richard Bulliet sits in his office, which is filled with art and mementos from his decades of study and travel in west Asia. Bulliet was an early grant recipient as a Harvard student in the 1950s. It was a time when there was more faith in the Pentagon.
TAPE: BULLIET: Defense in those days was construed universally as Cold War. Defense now is something that commands less of a consensus in the country.
NARRATION: One of Bulliet's students, Andrea Stanton, is a doctoral candidate and current recipient of a language grant, now administered by the Department of Education.
TAPE: STANTON: What is the purpose of this funding? If it were to be funding specifically to, say, you will have funding for this and then you will go into the Foreign Service, well, I might not do that. I'm a nerd! I like to hang out in a library, I want to be a professor! So that wouldn't be an appropriate funding source for me.
NARRATION: Yet nerds studying Ottoman archives, as Stanton plans to do, are of little help in fighting Al-Qaeda. Even so, Kurtz and his allies could take heart from the assessment of Sadia Afridi, a Middle East studies and finance student at Columbia. Describing her classmates, Afridi notes a substantial number of:
TAPE: AFRIDI: students who are majoring in security policy, with the aim of working for government. They're interested in these classes because they know it's a big security concern for the US.
NARRATION: In September, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill creating the advisory board. The board would have a political cast, with four of seven seats chosen by Congress, and the remainder appointed by the Secretary of Education. Still, it wasn't the advisory board many conservatives wanted: the board can't alter a university's curriculum. But it can examine Middle East programs and report to Education officials who control funding. The battle now moves to the Senate, where it awaits a vote.
For Columbia Radio News, this is John Kearney.
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