As reported by Inside Higher Education (IHE), the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has joined a group of scholarly associations in writing a letter to the U.S. Department of Education protesting its insistence that, in order to continue receiving Title VI federal funding, the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies meet accompanying requirements by correcting “a lack of balance” and providing coursework relevant to international studies.
The DoE letter followed an investigation spurred by complaints over a controversial March Duke/UNC conference that promoted anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric.
The DoE’s request would seem to be a reasonable one, but MESA, former MESA president and Stanford professor Joel Beinin---who is quoted by IHE dismissing objections to bias in Title VI Middle East centers as “old hat"---and other academic gatekeepers have grown so accustomed to the anti-Israel, anti-Western orthodoxy that now pervades the field that they characterize maintaining responsibility to taxpayers as a threat to academic freedom.
