10 | OCTOBER 10 • 2019 

Views

commentary
Is Regulation of 
Anti-Semitism on 
Campus Censorship?
A

s far as President 
Donald Trump’
s liberal 
critics are concerned, 
this is just the latest instance of 
his administration’
s hostility to 
free speech. The Department 
of Education announced last 
month that it 
had ordered 
the Middle 
East Studies 
Department run 
jointly by Duke 
University and 
the University of 
North Carolina 
to revamp the curriculum it was 
offering students. If the schools’
 
consortium that runs the pro-
gram doesn’
t comply, it will 
lose the federal grant money it 
gets under Title VI of the 1964 
Higher Education Act.
As far as most academics are 
concerned, the government’
s 
unprecedented intervention in 
course material is an outrage 
and infringement on academic 
freedom. Yet what really riled 
up the critics are the reasons for 
the demand. The Department 
of Education (DOE) said the 
course offering of the consor-
tium advanced an agenda that 
glorified Islam and ignored 
other faiths in the Mideast. 
The program also promoted 
BDS activities, including a 
conference that was tainted by 
anti-Semitic rhetoric on the part 
of speakers.
Yet rather than being por-
trayed as a necessary action 
in which the administration 
sought to prevent taxpayer dol-
lars from being used to promote 

a skewed view of the world and 
promote hate, the Department 
of Education’
s letter has received 
scathing coverage.
In the current divisive polit-
ical atmosphere, anything that 
the Trump administration 
does — whether good, bad or 
indifferent — is always going to 
be shoehorned into a narrative 
in which its work is denounced 
as evidence of criminal behav-
ior and/or authoritarianism 
by its liberal and Democratic 
critics. Secretary of Education 
Betsy DeVos has been a par-
ticular target of scorn from the 
“resistance.
” Kenneth Marcus, 
the head of the department’
s 
civil-rights bureau, has gotten 
similar treatment. 
But the real problem is that 
the government’
s action is based 
on the recognition that Middle 
East Studies in the United 
States has become a safe space 
for anti-Israel and anti-Semitic 
coursework and programming 
masquerading as scholarship. 
Within these departments, 
support for anti-Zionism and 
anti-Semitic BDS campaigns 
has become a form of ortho-
doxy that teachers and students 
dare not challenge. This was 
brilliantly exposed by Martin 
Kramer in his 2001 book Ivory 
Towers on Sand: The Failure of 
Middle East Studies in America, 
and the situation has only 
grown worse since then.
Yet is it the government’
s 
business to police this lamenta-
ble situation?
Small government conser-
vatives, as well as libertarians 

Jonathan S. 
Tobin

continued on page 12

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