The rage I felt during my fifth-period math class Sept. 19 was something I soon realized I felt numb towards. It was different from my usual rage in math class. Instead, it was incited by a little notification from my New York Times app: “A Middle East Studies program run by Duke and UNC is under scrutiny as the Education Dept. hunts for anti-Israel bias in universities.”
I did a double-take. At first, I thought something that seems to churn through my mind too often: There goes Betsy DeVos again. Then I looked again. It was something about Duke and UNC—the schools my family was born in, educated in and employed by. These are my schools, I couldn’t help but think.
For a simple rundown, the Department of Education decided to launch an investigation on the joint UNC-Duke Middle Eastern Studies program with the threat of revoking federal funding from the program. The inquiry essentially argues that the program doesn’t place enough positive emphasis on Judaism and Christianity while saying that it “unfairly promotes the positive aspects of Islam.”
Besides the obvious implication that traditionally more Western religions must be saved from unfair treatment under an administration which actively banned the entrance of people from predominantly Muslim countries is beside the point. We are already familiar with the current administration’s not-so-subtle demonization of Islam. What this attack furthers, besides an Islamophobic agenda, is crucial to understanding the extent of censorship under America’s current government.
We’re talking about two established universities, one of which was literally founded during the American Revolution, being threatened with the loss of funding from a department headed by a woman who refuses to send her children to public school. We now live in a world where you could have a Ph.D. in a topic, and no matter how candidly you try to teach it, if the curriculum exposes something our government doesn’t like, it can shut you down.
The criticism from the Department traced back to much of the program’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It’s no secret that the Trump administration has close ties to Israel and little approval of Palestine, including the movement of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in May 2018, officially recognizing the city as Israeli in American eyes. So, when the representation of Israel in the conflict, one depicted as candidly abusive to Palestinian people, is shown in our universities, of course, the Department will shut it down. Now, this isn’t to say that there is a side which we should entrust our educational institutions to uphold, or even that the Program takes a specific side. What this means is that if any depiction of conflict from these schools clashes with the opinion of our government, we can be sure to see some serious censorship.
Related Posts
