SUMMER AKHTER

On October 21, The House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill, HR 3077, commonly known as The International Studies in Higher Education Act. The legislation, if it becomes law, would affect federal funding of international studies, known in government parlance as "Title VI fellowships."

International Area Studies Centers and Title VI fellowships came about in the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), passed by the US Congress and signed into law by President Eisenhower in 1958. The rationale was that Title VI would provide funding to meet the "critical need" to train language and area studies specialists in "strategic areas," with an emphasis on Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi-Urdu and Russian. During this period Soviet studies were very well funded.

The new bill supposedly continues this partnership between foreign policy and higher education. The author of HR 3077, Republican Pete Hoekstra (Michigan) explained in a press conference: "Since the events of September 11, 2001, international education has taken on a more fundamental and immediate role than ever."

Despite the rhetoric, Hoekstras bill will not help foster an increased understanding of key social spaces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesÑspaces that created some of the preconditions for modernity. Nor will the bill help to examine medieval Islamic law, reverse American cultural ignorance of Middle Eastern history or expose the roots of anti-American grievances.

Instead, HR 3077 ties funding to an International Education Advisory Board that will essentially monitor anti-American bias within international studies centers. HR 3077 could affect Title VI funding not on the basis of scholarly merit but by way of an ideological litmus test of professors, faculty and graduate students. Two of the boards seven members would come from national security agencies, while the other five would be appointed by Congress and the President. The Board, reporting to the government, can only reduce funding, thereby (somewhat counterproductively) reducing the volume of scholarly content on supposed strategic areas. The bill effectively cuts funding and dries up resources that would otherwise continue to foster language acquisition and scholarly inquiry. The bill could also shrink graduate programs, graduate fellowships and administrative salaries. Despite their ability to monitor and control funding, the proposed Advisory Board would not be able to directly affect the hiring, firing or tenure of professors.

This isnt the first time an administration has sought to cut Title VI funding. In the early 1970s, the Nixon administration made the first of several attempts to cut funding on the grounds that the urgent need for specialists had been met, and the continuing need for specialists would be sufficiently filled by individuals motivated to pursue studies independent of a government program. Yet the Advisory Board component of HR 3077 does more than simply reduce or eliminate funding: It forces scholars to be more careful about what kind of scholarship is and is not promoted through their curricula. It takes certain questions that might be intellectually productive and even useful to American interests out of the running.

Herein lies the difference between Cold War area studies and the new bill. During the Cold War, government money was simply allocated to foster scholarship on the Soviet state. The distinction between the academy and the government was understood: Let the specialists do their thing. The current bill would blur that distinction.

The bill followed the House Subcommittee on Select Education Hearing on "International Programs in Higher Education and Questions About Bias" on June 19, 2003. The hearing included testimony by Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow from Stanford University's Hoover Institute who focuses, in particular, on post-colonial theory and Edward Said's Orientalism, from which Kurtz extrapolated: "Said equated professors who support American foreign policy with 19th Century European intellectuals who propped up racist colonial empires. The core premise of post-colonial theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign languages and cultures at the service of American power."

Critics argue that Kurtz is engaging not Said's postcolonial theory but the subtext of Saids pro-Palestinian and, by default, anti-Sharon stance. Subtextual analysis notwithstanding, Hoekstra and conservative academics such as Kurtz do believe that a vast, left-wing contingency has taken over academia. In order to curb this liberal bias their bill proposes to monitor scholarly output through funding. Their proposal brings up two possibilities: First, if there is in fact no "liberal bias" within academia, no one needs to worry. Second, if the neo-conservative nightmare is true and academia is populated with hordes of radical leftistsÑone wonders where to place conservative academics who unceasingly support US policy. Kurtz himself is an example of such an animal.