Oh my God. I just got an email from a listserve on Race and Politics that I subscribe to, which says the following:
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This is to inform you on current legislation that is being debated in the House of Representatives. The legislation in question, H.R. 3077, will rewrite the Title VI legislation that has provided FLAS money to many of us and that also funds the various area-studies centers in our universities. In particular, the legislation proposes the creation of an "advisory board" that may severely impact universities by dictating the curricula taught, course materials assigned in class, and the faculty who are hired in institutions that accept Title VI funding.
(snip, changing PoV to a verbatim document from the House Committee.)
"we are here today to learn more about a number of programs that are authorized and funded under Title VI, which are some of the oldest programs of support to higher education. These programs reflect the priority placed by the federal government on diplomacy, national security,
and trade competitiveness. International studies and education have become an increasingly important and relevant topic of conversation and
consideration in higher education... However, with mounting global tensions, some programs under the Higher Education Act that support
foreign language and area studies centers have recently attracted national attention and concern due to the perception of their teachings and policies."
Testimony provided by Dr. Stanley Kurtz
portrays areas studies centers as hotbeds of unpatriotic anti-Americanism. Dr. Kurtz focuses, in particular, on post-colonial theory and the work of Edward Said's Orientalism in which "Said equated professors who support American foreign policy with the 19th century European intellectuals who propped up racist colonial empires. The core premise of post-colonial
theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign languages and cultures at the service of American power."
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There's more, and it gets worse. Before screaming my head off and bursting my eardrums with outraged inner monolog, let me structure my thoughts:
- Stanley Kurtz has no fucking idea what post-colonialism is about. The prospect that national education policy is formulated under such ignorance is MINDBLOWING.
- Stanley Kurtz, as we already knew from his anti-gay writings, is an awful bigot. This is the sort of person who got written out of the American ideological dialogue in the 1960s, the person with a point of view that is so bad it doesn't need to be represented. But he's not only here, he's making policy.
- The Republican leadership has strayed so far from the Conservative credo of freedom of speech it's amazing there are any conservative journalists left in this country. Yet it is a conservative journalist who councils censorship.
- Make Andrew Sullivan weep over this development. Make him eat his own asininity every waking moment of his life. He is a disgusting enabler. Should he continue to bash people whose opinions differ from his relentlessly, as he does with every lying word on his blog, or should he attack this idiot whom he's attacked often before? Sullivan claimed to be a First Amendment absolutist. This is a big enough issue for an honest person to do more than simply post a dissent on his blog. He needs to get right out front from his absurd TV pulpits and make the name of Stanley Kurtz equivalent to that of Joe McCarthy. Andrew, the choice is yours.
- I have a close friend who is a liberal, but also an anti-PC guy at Dartmouth. I keep telling him that free speech is all well and good, and curtailing the groupthink on campus is wonderful, but the Republifuckers aren't in the least interested in free speech. They use liberals to give their side credence. Let this be a lesson to anyone like my friend.