Free Republic

Last Thursday, June 19, I testified at a contentious hearing of the House Subcommittee on Select Education. The hearing was convened to examine charges of bias leveled against programs of international education funded under Title VI of the Higher Education Act. Title VI-funded programs support the academic study of the Middle East, and other areas of the world. (You can read my testimony here and you can view the hearings on video by going here. Note that the first two of the five witnesses were not involved in the controversy. You can safely skip their testimony, if desired.) Having laid...

First, the good news. Student applications to the National Security Education Program (NSEP) are up dramatically. That's good, because in the post-9/11 world, the NSEP is an extraordinarily important mechanism for distributing educational grants. What makes the NSEP so significant is its requirement that student beneficiaries go to work, after graduation, for a federal agency that safeguards our nation's security. Students who accept NSEP money, for example, put their hard-won knowledge of Arabic to work in America's defense and intelligence agencies, all of which are badly in need of Middle Eastern language expertise. With undergraduate applications to NSEP up by...