Betsy DeVos busts colleges misusing federal dollars for anti-Semitic social justice curriculum

On Sept. 17, the Department of Education published a letter warning the Duke-University of North Carolina Consortium for Middle East Studies that it has been improperly using federal grant dollars. The money, intended for foreign language and cultural education, instead went to a highly biased social justice curriculum that fails to meet congressional requirements on several fronts.

This isn’t an example of the federal government meddling with a university curriculum they don’t like — which would be wrong. Rather, it’s an instance of the Department of Education holding schools accountable for misusing public dollars intended for specific programs to instead advance a political agenda.

The investigation that uncovered this issue began in June after a Consortium for Middle East Studies-sponsored conference, one that used the federal grant dollars. The conference gave a platform to overtly biased and anti-Semitic presenters. One video from the event even showed a guest performer encouraging his audience to join him in singing “I’m in love with a Jew” because he “cannot be anti-Semitic alone.”