US Universities Took $600 Million Tied To Muslim Nations

Luke Rosiak | Investigative Reporter,  Daily Caller

• A Department of Education program funds colleges to teach about the Arab world, but upcoming payments are going to colleges that have received millions of dollars from Arab countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, data shows.
• One critic said that coupling the program with the foreign funding is “a back-door route to Saudi influence.”
• Some of the universities employ faculty or have hosted guests who made anti-semitic remarks.

The Cold War-era Higher Education Act of 1965 created a program called “Title VI” that pays colleges to help students better understand international relations and includes funds earmarked for studying the Middle East. It was intended to help prepare a cadre of intelligence agents and diplomats.

Instead, the money has funded anti-Americanism and anti-semitism in U.S. higher education, according to a November 2014 report by the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. There have been instances where some of the universities hosted or employed anti-semites, with some facing accusations of having ties to terror groups.

For 2019 through 2021, the Education Department has allocated nearly $7.5 million to 16 universities for Middle East studies and outreach, according to Title IV records. Twelve of those have recently received money affiliated with Muslim-majority nations in the Middle East, and in each case, that money dwarfed the U.S. funding, a DCNF (Daily Caller News Foundation) data analysis found.

The Education Department says that “In addition to supporting foreign language and area studies instruction and research, Title VI” recipients will “conduct outreach and develop programs that expand global opportunities for K-16 educators.”

A senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Stanley Kurtz, has been warning about the issue for years.

The system “has opened up a back-door route to Saudi influence over America’s K-12 curriculum,” he wrote in the National Review in 2007. “Believe it or not, the Saudis have figured out how to make an end-run around America’s K-12 curriculum safeguards, thereby gaining control over much of what children in the United States learn about the Middle East.”

The Muslim nations awarded $603 million to the 12 universities from 2011 to 2016 — 80 times more than the allocated Title VI funding, The DCNF found. Israeli interests donated a total of $13 million to eight of the schools, but in every case, their funding was only a fraction of the Muslim nations’.

College	Taxpayer Money for Middle East Studies	Funds From Muslim Middle East Countries	Funds from Israel
Total	$7,452,916	$603,252,491	$13,026,242
University of Chicago	$611,000	$5,718,930	$313,800
University of California, Berkeley	$597,500	$18,569,018	$507,882
Indiana University	$594,000	$3,041,719	$306,990
Columbia University	$589,300	$13,636,790
University of California, Los Angeles	$586,500	$12,485,991	$6,025,700
University of Michigan	$581,000	$15,837,433	$1,815,288
University of Washington – Seattle	$539,000	$10,729,004	$2,995,676
New York University	$537,500	$81,140,930	$891,893
Georgetown University	$484,558	$343,751,617
George Washington University	$258,000	$96,122,285
University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill*	$235,000	$251,998
Yale University	$220,000	$1,966,776	$169,013

Sources: Department of Education Title VI grants 2019-2021, Department of Education foreign gifts and contracts data 2011-2016. *This award was split with Duke University, which did not receive funding from Muslim Middle East nations or from Israel.

 The program helps teachers convey a nuanced and realistic view of Arabs and Islam to overcome stereotypes and shallow media presentations, supplementing the often inadequate treatment in curriculum and textbooks,” it continues. However, one critic commented, “Outreach coordinators or teacher-trainers at a number of university Middle East Studies centers have themselves been trained by the very same Saudi-funded foundations that design K-12 course materials.”

Below are examples of anti-semitism from colleges or their faculty that received funding from the Muslim nations.

• The University of California, Berkeley, which is the second-highest recipient  of Title IV funding and has received $19 million in funding from Middle Eastern countries, hosted a 2011 event where a lecturer said that “Holocaust denial is a form of protest.” In its report, the Brandeis Center wrote that he “downplayed the atrocities of the Holocaust.”

• At Columbia University, which received $14 million from the Muslim countries, $600,000 from Title VI, and none from Israel, Iranian Studies professor Hamid Dabashi said in May that the Jewish state is behind “[e]very dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world.”

• The University of California, Los Angeles, held a 2009 panel comprised of four critics of Israel’s existence, according to the Brandeis Center. One described Israeli soldiers as war criminals, and another said they target civilians. The panel “riled up the largely non-student audience into chants such as ‘Zionism is racism,’ ‘Zionism is Nazism,’ and ‘F- Israel,'” according to the Brandeis Center. UCLA received $12 million from the Muslim nations. It also received $6 million from Israel, far more than any other school, but most of that money came from Israeli biotech firms, while only $980 came from a group dedicated to boosting ties with Israel, the Yahel Foundation.

• In October 2015, “Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies hosted a teach-in for K-14 teachers and the public on Gaza featuring speakers who have defended Hamas and support the BDS movement,” according to the Endowment for Middle East Truth. “The event was co-sponsored by the World Affairs Council and the Jerusalem Fund.” Also at Georgetown, a Saudi-funded entity uses social justice rhetoric popular among liberal college students to advance a Saudi agenda, likening Muslims to Hispanic “Dreamers,” invoking “white supremacy” and using hip-hop.

• At the University of Michigan, which has received $16 million from the Muslim countries and $1.8 million from the Muslim countries and $1.8 million from Israel, two instructors refused to help students study abroad in Israel in 2018.

The countries whose governments and foundations — and, to a lesser extent, companies and citizens — have donated to the latest Title VI recipients are Qatar ($343 million), Saudi Arabia ($131 million), United Arab Emirates ($87 million), Kuwait ($16 million), Turkey ($9 million), as well as Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, Bahrain and Iraq.

In 2006, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found “substantial evidence” that “many university departments of Middle East studies provide one-sided, highly polemical academic presentations and some may repress legitimate debate concerning Israel.”