Same Old Title VI Argument

Martin Kramer is now attacking Michigan in the ongoing Title VI debate. The two main targets of the Campus Watch crowd seem to be Columbia and California-Berkeley. I really don't know much about those schools, but I do know things about Michigan. They've told me they actually do train people for government service all the time. I believe them. The fact that they are opposed to one specific program doesn't change that. We're also back to the tactic of conflating research with teaching and relating that to producing Arabic speakers for government service. It seems fairly well-established that a major problem we have is the lack of Arabic teachers to increase the pipeline size. These Arabic teachers will be people who do research in Arabic literature, simply because even as an undergraduate, at the upper levels of language learning you are essentially studying literature.

Another way to look at this question is to ask why Republicans in Congress - including Peter Hoekstra, a Campus Watch ally - blocked Democratic attempts to make undergraduates eligible for FLAS funding under Title VI. If we need Arabic speakers, surely we should open the doors to promoting foreign language study among undergraduates as well as grad students? Of course, the much-reviled Title VI program already does that in many ways. The program we applied for at the University of Wisconsin specified that the focus must be on undergraduate program development and include a language acquisition component. However, you won't be reading that on a site geared more toward a political agenda than anything else.