SMITH: Trump’s Department Of Education Cracks Down On Title VI Abuse

Here’s an interesting thought experiment: If you were a professor in charge of a class on geopolitical strategy focusing on Iran, and a student wrote a paper analyzing gender roles in Iranian films, would you give the student a passing grade? Would it even matter if his film analysis happened to be good?

That is essentially the situation faced by Department of Education (DOE) Secretary Betsy DeVos and Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education Robert King, who sent a letter to the Duke University/University of North Carolina (UNC) Consortium for Middle East Studies (CMES) questioning the efficacy of its Title VI grant-funded programs. “The Department believes [CMES] has failed to carefully distinguish between activities lawfully funded under Title VI, and other activities … [that are] protected by general principles of academic freedom … [but are] plainly unqualified for taxpayer support [under Title VI].”