It is my pleasure to announce that Congress has decided to investigate the charges of political bias that have been leveled against Title VI programs by critics like Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and myself. This Thursday, June 19, at 1:00 P.M. in room 2175 of the Rayburn House Office Building, the Subcommittee on Select Education will hold a hearing entitled, "International Programs in Higher Education and Questions of Bias." I will testify at that hearing, and it is likely that defenders of Title VI will also be called as witnesses. There could be fireworks. I will post a report on the hearings next week.

Stanley Kurtz at the indispensable Nazi-hunting site campus-watch. Needless to say, this is excellent news. Check out this well-deserved slam on neo-Nazi Arab supremacist Leftwinger Edward Said:

Said has also called for the International Criminal Court to prosecute Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, and General Wesley Clark as war criminals. According to Said, the genocidal actions of these American leaders make Slobodan Milosevic himself look like "a rank amateur in viciousness." Said has even treated the very idea of American democracy a farce. He has belittled the reverence in which Americans hold the Constitution, which Said dismisses with the comment that it was written by "wealthy, white, slaveholding, Anglophilic men."

Yet Edward Said is the most honored and influential theorist in academic area-studies today. Just last year, the Middle East Studies Association, many of whose members are associated with Title VI centers, joined its European counterparts in presenting Edward Said with a special award for his unparalleled contribution to Middle East studies. In his book, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, Martin Kramer details the pervasive influence of Edward Said's post-colonial theory on Middle East studies, as I myself have noted in my discussion of Kramer's book.

It gets worse:

Talk about student safety is nothing but a pretext for a politically motivated boycott of the NSEP by Title VI-funded scholars bitterly opposed to American foreign policy. That is made unequivocally clear by an early pro-boycott statement by the Association of Concerned African Scholars. That statement explains the boycott as a refusal to aid a U.S. policy that "[subverts] progressive governments and national liberation movements" throughout Africa.

For my earlier piece, "Ivory Scam," I reported on a Ford Foundation study that clearly describes the NSEP boycott as politically motivated. That study acknowledges that during the 1980's, "American scholars who supported U.S. policy...more or less withdrew from the African Studies community." The same was true of U.S. policy supporters in other area-studies fields, except that it would be more accurate to say that supporters of U.S. policy were driven out of area studies, than that they "withdrew."

Talk about the worst kept secret in academe. Leftist professors deliberately purging their ideological enemies? Whoda thunk it?