A Republican congressman is calling for a formal investigation of the University of California at Berkeley’s Center of Middle Eastern studies to determine whether federal funds have been used to teach “Holocaust minimization or demonization of a key ally.”
U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., wrote to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos this week with “some troubling information that has emerged” about the program and the “potential misuse of Title VI of the Higher Education Act funding.”
He explained that the law provides taxpayer money to “develop a pool of international experts to meet national needs” regarding “international studies and world languages.” The funded programs are required to be diverse and include a “wide range of views.”
A report from the Middle East Forum, which operates its Campus Watch and Washington Project to monitor such cases, explained, “One major worry concerns support for academic boycotts of Israel.”
“Boycotts aimed at Israel – and only at Israel – are antisemitic, but when it involves Title VI funds, it’s against the law,” said Winfield Myers, director of Campus Watch. “Rep. Lamborn is right to raise this issue with the Department of Education.”
Another potential conflict noted by the Clarion Project is that since 2012, UC Berkley has received $24 million from Saudi Arabia, an Islamic monarchy whose goals and values differ greatly from America’s.
“Last year, Congress correctly raised the alarm concerning the potential for undue influence on universities when accepting money from Communist China. But authoritarian Middle Eastern countries deserve no less scrutiny,” said Cliff Smith, director of the Middle East Forum’s Washington Project. “The Department of Education should insist that UC Berkley be fully transparent about how it spends these funds and present solid evidence that it is not intermingling them with Title VI grants intended to benefit U.S. national security.”
Other Congress members have raised similar concerns about Middle East studies centers at Duke, the University of North Carolina, Georgetown and the University of Arizona.
Lamborn’s letter to DeVos said Berkeley officials apparently “cannot distinguish between speech protected under the First Amendment and misallocating government funding, under the guise of academic freedom, for purposes contrary to those required by Congress.”
Among the points that need clarification: “Berkeley students are overwhelmingly fed a false and distorted narrative not only at odds with an objective approach to understanding the conflict, but substantially at odds [with] American national security interests.”
His letter noted that CMES already has shown bias against Israel, citing a report that CMES has had more than 24 Israel-related events since 2016. Each one “has maliciously attempted to portray the democracy of Israel in a negative light.”
The center also has hosted several highly politicized professors, and while “they retain the constitutional freedom to present biased interpretations of their subjects, there should be a clear delineation of which scholarship is funded by Title VI funds, and which is not.”
Lamborn’s letter cited Ussama Makdisi, a visiting professor history who has claimed in a book review that the connection between the Nazi-era Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and the Nazis was “exaggerated.”
“There is abundant documentary evidence showing that the mufti was without question a rabid anti-Semite, and not simply opposed to Jewish settlement in what was then called Palestine,” Lamborn wrote.
There are other concerns: “Emily Gottreich, chair of CMES, signed a 2009 letter urging the University of California not to restart its year abroad program in Israel. Such a move directly violates Title VI requirements to maintain linkages to universities in the Middle East,” Lamborn wrote. “It is especially egregious coming from a chair of a Title VI funded center and raises serious legal questions regarding her continued leadership at CMES.”
