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.”

Yes, that’s a tad concerning.

And it makes sense that the community is questioning the consortium’s $235,000 federal grant : one it received under a special federal program designed to support and establish “National Resource Centers.” These centers are meant to provide comprehensive foreign language education programs and develop a pool of experts to serve national needs, such as training diplomats and teachers.

But the DOE is now concerned that the UNC-Duke consortium may be in violation of the terms of its grant by failing to provide adequate foreign language instruction and curricular balance. Instead, the investigation found that the program was advancing a “narrow, particularized views of American social issues” at taxpayer expense.

The DOE investigators examined the curriculum details in the UNC-Duke consortium’s original grant proposal. They raised flags about the high volume of offerings that had nothing to do with supporting the development of foreign language and international expertise for the benefit of national security.

For example, the letter questions the relevance of a conference titled “Love and Desire in Modern Iran,” as well as a research paper on “Gender-Bending and Subversion in the Early Modern Ottoman Intellectual History.”

The letter also cites a “startling lack of focus on geography, geopolitical issues, history, and language of the area,” as is required by Congress under the federal program. It alleges that the UNC-Duke consortium has instead focused mainly on unconscious bias training, serving LGBT youth in schools, and exposing students to diversity in culture and media.

Of course, it shouldn’t have required a viral video of an anti-Semitic performance to get federal officials to pay attention to a department’s abuse of their grant program. In 2018, under the National Resource Center program alone, the DOE awarded more than $22 million in grants to 96 different institutions.

How many of those are taking egregious liberties with taxpayer money too?

As the letter acknowledges, professors must have the academic freedom to teach courses covering the kinds of social justice issues included in the Duke-UNC curriculum. Certainly, in a general academic context, it’s very important to expose students to diverse voices and ideas that subvert prevailing cultural narratives, and the federal government shouldn’t have a say over what kinds of topics are out of bounds.

In this case, however, federal dollars were being inappropriately used to serve highly questionable academic ends. DeVos made a wise move in trying to prevent the hyperpoliticization of academia from being directly supported by government grants intended for other things — but her department should also be careful about pushing its own political biases into the mix.

Christian Barnard is an education policy analyst at the Reason Foundation and a Young Voices contributor. Follow him on Twitter @CBarnard33.