If the government needed to develop newer and better rockets, and it handed over millions in grants to university physicists to do so, wouldn’t it be the government’s business to make sure that the physicists weren’t neo-Ptolemaic crackpots who thought the earth was flat? If the government wanted to develop new vaccines, and it handed over millions in grants to university biologists to do so, wouldn’t it be the government’s business to make sure that the biologists understood and accepted basic tenets of modern medicine? When taxpayer money is involved, the government has every right to demand that its subsidies — given for a concrete purpose — are bing used by competent people who are actually working to achieve that purpose.
At bottom, that’s all that Daniel Pipes’ and Martin Kramer’s projects to hold government-supported Middle East Studies programs accountable for their denials of the realities of the Arab and Muslim worlds are all about. The Washington Post, in a surprisingly even-handed profile, has more.