As protestors once again gathered on the campus of Columbia University this Oct.7, it was a grim reminder of the radical ideas that have been incubating on campuses for decades and burst out into the open, sometimes violently, last year.
As they piled onto public transit to take their anti-Israel chants downtown, it was also a reminder that — in ways large and small, direct and indirect — American taxpayers wind up funding all this. Their dollars trickle down to the programs and professors who have helped inculcate this anti-Western, “anti-colonial” worldview.
The Department of Education (ED), for example, awards grants to fund foreign studies programming and help students learn more obscure languages. $283 million has been spent just since 2020, with $22 million focused particularly on Middle East programs.
The stated public benefit is turning out a larger pool of workers in the national security, foreign aid, and policy fields who can speak local languages, understand geopolitics, and represent American interests abroad.
But a look at publicly available records suggests we may not always be advancing our national interests. We might instead be helping to turn out more of the same radical protestors more likely to side against the United States, Israel, and our allies they would sooner call “settler colonialists.” Each of the three top-funded Middle East programs in the country are home to a readily identified professor who has backed these ideas — and who has been highlighted on past ED grant applications.
Columbia University
At
