Saudi in the Classroom
A fundamental front in the war.
By Stanley Kurtz
National Review Online
The Stealth Curriculum
There's certainly something troubling here. And once you grasp the Saudi connection, it begins to make sense. Stotsky didn't quite put all the pieces together, but she came very close. Her stint at the Massachusetts Department of Education, and her bad experience with Harvard's Center for Middle East Studies prompted Stotsky to publish The Stealth Curriculum: Manipulating America's History Teachers under the auspices of the Fordham Foundation.
Introducing Stotsky's study, Fordham Foundation president, and noted education expert, Chester Finn, calls the use of teacher-training seminars a "vast dark continent within our public (and private) educational system." According to Finn "interest groups and ideologues" have used these seminars to "fly under the radar" of ordinary curriculum safeguards, promulgating "bias, misinformation, and politically charged conclusions, though never acknowledging their semi-covert agendas." All too often, says Finn, those agendas include viewing "the history of freedom as the history of oppression" and urging students "to be more sympathetic to cultures that don't value individual rights than to those that do." It's a sad commentary on Title VI subsidies to American universities to think that this high-profile federally-funded program has become the parade example of a much broader educational scandal.
Even in 2004, Stotsky had more than an inkling of Saudi financial involvement in Title VI outreach programs. In The Stealth Curriculum, she wrote: "Most of these materials have been prepared and/or funded by Islamic sources here and abroad, and are distributed or sold directly to schools or individual teachers, thereby bypassing public scrutiny." Stotsky goes on to note that after 9/11, the Saudi government sent U.S. schools thousands of packages of educational material that, for example, attributed the Middle East's problems to Western colonization.
Saudi Money
Yet the full extent of Saudi curricular funding, and the magnitude of its influence over university outreach programs funded under Title VI, was only revealed in late 2005 by a special four-part investigative report by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA). As the JTA put it: "Saudi Arabia is paying to influence the teaching of American public schoolchildren. And the U.S. taxpayer is an unwitting accomplice....Often bypassing school boards and nudging aside approved curricula....These materials praise and sometimes promote Islam, but criticize Judaism and Christianity....Ironically, what gives credibility to...these distorted materials is Title VI of the Higher Education Act....Believing they're importing the wisdom of places like Harvard or Georgetown, they are actually inviting into their schools whole curricula and syllabuses developed with the support of Riyadh."
Riyadh achieves this by supporting a number of groups devoted to the development and dissemination of English-language curricula about the Middle East. This includes funding from Saudi Aramco, a Saudi government-owned oil company, for a Berkeley, California-based group called, Arab World and Islamic Resources, or AIWAR.
According to the JTA, AIWAR's founder, Audrey Shabbas, also edits the controversial "Arab World Studies Notebook." Shabbas, in turn, is employed by the Middle East Policy Council (MEPC) to conduct its teacher-training and seminar programs, says JTA. And MEPC (formerly the Arab American Affairs Council) is headed by a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and, according to the JTA, receives direct funding from Saudi Arabia.
According to the JTA, the Middle East Policy Council was seeking major funding for its teaching efforts from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz in late 2005. Alwaleed himself initiated contacts with MEPC after hearing about its seminars designed to shape American teachers' perceptions of the Middle East. It appears that the partnership between MEPC and Prince Alwaleed has borne fruit. This past March, Prince Alwaleed announced that he was supplementing his earlier donation of $100,000 to MEPC with a $1 million gift for its teacher-training programs. By the way, this is the same Prince Alwaleed whose $10 million post-9/11 gift was returned by Rudy Giuliani because that gift was accompanied by a letter blaming American foreign policy for the attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. (For more on massive gifts by Prince Alwaleed to Harvard and Georgetown for programs Islamic studies, see this item by Martin Kramer.)
The final piece of the puzzle discovered by the JTA is a little-known but clearly influential foundation called Dar al Islam ("Abode of Islam"), located in Abiquiu, New Mexico. Created with Saudi funding, according to the JTA, Dar al Islam runs teacher-training programs and has employed a number of individuals who've gone on to work in or with public outreach programs at federally-funded Title VI university centers of Middle-East Studies.
According to JTA, for example, Betty Shabbas, who edits the Arab World Studies Notebook and whose work is promoted by outreach coordinators at several Title VI Middle East National Resource Centers, was herself director of Dar al Islam's summer teacher-training program in 1994 and 1995. JTA also notes that an outreach coordinator at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, a Title VI National Resource Center on the Middle East, was for several years assistant director of Dar al Islam's teacher-training institute. The precise funding and affiliation history of Dar al Islam is complex and in dispute. According to the JTA, after it began investigating the topic, Dar al Islam changed some of the information on its website. (For details, readers should consult the four-part JTA series linked above, especially parts 1 and 3.)
Although this complex web of financial and organizational involvement was illuminated with unprecedented clarity by the JTA report, Saudi involvement with Title VI Middle East Studies centers has never been entirely secret. For example, a volume published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies notes three specific sources of funding for the center's public outreach program: federal Title VI subsidies, matching funds from Harvard itself, and funding from the Saudi-government owned oil company, Aramco.
Not College
The upshot of all this is that the close links between Saudi funded curriculum-development and teacher-training programs, on the one hand, and federally subsidized university programs of Middle East Studies, on the other, has opened up a back-door route to Saudi influence over America's K-12 curriculum.
Stotsky's work and the JTA report have been public for some time, yet virtually no-one has noticed. I myself testified before the House in 2003 on the need to reform Title VI. The problem of bias in public outreach programs was one of my key concerns, yet even I was shocked when I discovered Stotsky and the JTA story. The extent of Saudi influence raises the already deep-lying problems with Title VI to a whole new level.
It's also important to emphasize that Title VI public outreach programs are not part of the college curriculum. In my testimony before the House, I addressed broader issues of bias in university programs of Middle East Studies. Yet I invoked that context to explain problems in Title VI public outreach programs, which are creatures of Congress -- yet without real oversight. Opponents of Title VI reform have consistently misrepresented the issue as a question of academic freedom, when every piece of legislation aimed at reforming Title VI has contained a provision preventing the federal government from mandating or controlling the content of college curricula. Moreover, I have publicly endorsed that provision.
The real effect of blocking federal oversight of Title VI has been to create a public outreach program that is not part of the college curriculum -- a program funded by the American taxpayer, yet answerable to no-one. The unsupervised state of these university outreach programs leaves them open to exploitation by foreign interests seeking control of America's K-12 curriculum on the Middle East. That is an intolerable situation. Congress must restore federal oversight to Title VI of the Higher Education Act.
Hope?
The good news is that Congress may soon help to solve this problem. Despite the polarization and inaction in the current session of Congress, senators Kennedy and Enzi have reached bipartisan agreement on an excellent plan of reform for Title VI -- including the creation of grievance procedures to handle complaints about the public outreach program. (Stotsky recommends a similar solution). The question is, will the House adopt the bipartisan Senate compromise on Title VI, or will the higher-education lobby move to block reform? This issue could easily devolve into an ugly political battle. Yet if the House decides to model its reauthorization of the Higher Education Act on the Kennedy-Enzi Title VI compromise, Title VI reform could become one of the few bipartisan bright spots of the current congressional session.
That's the good news. The catch is that even -- or especially -- if reform does pass, it's still going to take tremendous effort to counteract the growing Saudi use of Title VI as a lever to gain influence over how America teaches its children about the Middle East. The creation of a grievance procedure for public-outreach programs in no way guarantees the outcome of any grievances that might be filed. This battle isn't over, it's only just begun.
— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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