As protestors once again gathered on the campus of Columbia University this Oct.7, it was a grim reminder of the radical ideas that have been incubating on campuses for decades and burst out into the open, sometimes violently, last year.
As they piled onto public transit to take their anti-Israel chants downtown, it was also a reminder that — in ways large and small, direct and indirect — American taxpayers wind up funding all this. Their dollars trickle down to the programs and professors who have helped inculcate this anti-Western, “anti-colonial” worldview.
The Department of Education (ED), for example, awards grants to fund foreign studies programming and help students learn more obscure languages. $283 million has been spent just since 2020, with $22 million focused particularly on Middle East programs.
The stated public benefit is turning out a larger pool of workers in the national security, foreign aid, and policy fields who can speak local languages, understand geopolitics, and represent American interests abroad.
But a look at publicly available records suggests we may not always be advancing our national interests. We might instead be helping to turn out more of the same radical protestors more likely to side against the United States, Israel, and our allies they would sooner call “settler colonialists.” Each of the three top-funded Middle East programs in the country are home to a readily identified professor who has backed these ideas — and who has been highlighted on past ED grant applications.
Columbia University
At Columbia, where outspoken pro-Israel professor Shai Davidai was recently barred from campus, perhaps the most infamous academic still remains teaching: Dr. Joseph Massad. He proclaimed that Hamas had achieved “a stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.”
Columbia’s Middle East Institute is the number-two funded program since 2020 ($2.8 million); Massad was named on a previous ED grant application among a number of faculty who were “strong on contemporary politics, with tremendous geographic range.”
A specific grant worth $653,632 funded fellowships for students and led at least one to take Massad’s class, “Gender and Sexuality in the Arab World.” While this student enjoyed learning about “gender and feminist theories,” others were less impressed.
Critiques of Massad’s classes published on Middle East Forum highlight his bias against both Israel and the West. Comments include:
The professor (and, shockingly, many of the students) tend to turn discussion sections into ‘us vs. them’ blame game, where they list the West’s various cultural crimes ad nauseum …
I worry about the people who enter the class with little to no knowledge of the topic and form their opinions based on Massad’s lectures … The class is taught unethically, and should be renamed ‘Why Palestinians Hate Israel.’
Massad … takes a categorically anti-U.S. tack at every possible opportunity, and usually succeeds only at alienating his students.
At risk of being too on the nose, he gave a 2002 campus talk called “On Zionism and Jewish Supremacy.”
Indiana University
Indiana University hosts the only program better funded than Columbia ($2.84M); Hoosiers had campus unrest and a problem professor of their own.
Dr. Abdulkader Sinno was faculty advisor for the Palestinian Solidarity Committee (PSC), a student group that preposterously claimed to support “our brothers and sisters being mass-murdered, tortured, killed and raped in Israel.”
They also protested for a ceasefire with signs like “Colonialism, Apartheid, Genecide [sic]” and called Israelis “occupiers.”
Sinno crossed the administration when he reserved a room for a speaker to address PSC, falsely indicating the event was part of the Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures department, although its chair had declined. He later said it was an honest mistake.
Sinno was subsequently suspended from teaching or advising student groups.
Vice Provost Carrie Docherty told Sinno in a letter, “I have serious concerns about the effect your behavior may have on members of the campus community.”
Docherty cited his conduct, judgment, and failure to follow school policies; more worrisome, she “referred to instances of ‘threatening’ behavior toward a colleague and ‘a number of bias reports’ filed against Sinno,” but omitted finer details.
After his suspension, an undeterred Sinno spoke at an “alternative” graduation for pro-Palestinian activists in May.
His name and resume were included in one of IU’s ED grant applications and, like Massad, he remains teaching.
Georgetown University
Rounding out the top three, Georgetown University ($2.64M) is known for turning out plenty of future diplomats. Again, we quickly found a prominent professor with controversial ideas and ties.
Dr. Fida Adely directs the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies within the School of Foreign Service and teaches “education, labor, development, and gender in the Arab world.”
But she’s also on the National Advisory Board of Faculty for Justice (FJP) in Palestine, whose members “support the cause of Palestinian liberation through education, advocacy and action.” FJP supports and “amplifies” Students for Justice in Palestine and similar “pro-Palestinian” groups.
Additionally, FJP members back the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement and seek to “dismantle” programs to study abroad in Israel.
The group’s “Back to School 2024” statement laments the “mechanisms for suppressing speech, criminalizing protest and weaponizing fragility,” claiming Israel’s military campaign exposes “the depths of settler colonial depravity.”
So, they’ve mastered all the buzzwords.
Furthermore, FJP works “in close collaboration with” staff from Birzeit University, a hotbed of radicalism in the West Bank. Members of the Hamas-affiliated “Islamic Bloc” have won the most seats on Birzeit’s student council, while its Union of Professors and Employees declared that 2023 would be remembered as “the year that Palestinians stood boldly in the face of colonial fascism and screamed in defense of their homes, humanity, and lives.”
The nonprofit Canary Mission has compiled plenty more on Adely, including a 2015 blog post criticizing calls for more “dialogue.” She argues they only serve to “disguise the real issues of settler-colonialism, oppression and occupation, and act as a kind of marketing tool rebranding the reality of separation and apartheid as a fantasy of ‘coexistence.” The piece includes now-rote accusations that Israel engaged in “ethnic cleansing” and created an “open-air prison” in Gaza.
Naturally, Georgetown featured Adely as a “select faculty expert” on the university’s Middle East and North Africa studies factsheet and on an ED grant application.
Against our National Interest
So where’s the scrutiny of these applications? During the Trump era, there’s some evidence the administration was kicking the tires. After investigating the use of funds by a joint program of Duke and University of North Carolina, the Department of Education sent a 2019 letter demanding reform to its curriculum and spending.
The letter laments “very little serious instruction preparing individuals to understand the geopolitical challenges to U.S. national security and economic needs but quite a considerable emphasis on advancing ideological priorities.” Department officials said the program lacked balance of perspective and spent tax dollars on irrelevant activities, such as a conference called “Love and Desire in Modern Iran.”
But today, at the top-funded Middle East programs, it’s still easy to find a litany of now-stereotypical red flags: BDS, anticolonialism, genocide claims — the works.
This money is allocated to further America’s national interest. But it’s flowing to people who align themselves against our nation and its allies. Whether intentional or incompetent, the Department of Education is furthering intellectual subversion, not cultural immersion.
Amber Todoroff is deputy policy editor for OpenTheBooks.com, the nation’s largest private database of public spending. She holds a master’s degree from Oxford University.
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