My latest in PJ Media:

Will the Trump Administration move against the radioactive wastelands of far-Left indoctrination and Islamic proselytizing that our nation’s colleges and universities have become?

On Friday, it made a small, long overdue step in that direction: Associated Press reported that “the Trump administration is threatening to cut funding for a Middle East studies program run by the University of North Carolina and Duke University, claiming that it’s misusing a federal grant to advance ‘ideological priorities’ and unfairly promote ‘the positive aspects of Islam’ but not Christianity or Judaism.”

The U.S. Department of Education wrote to the UNC-Duke Consortium for Middle East Studies, no doubt interrupting these cosseted pseudo-academics as they swapped stories about how oppressed they are, and told them they had three weeks to revise their course offerings or else they could lose federal funds that were intended for instruction in foreign languages.

The Education Department letter came after Rep. George Holding (R-N.C.) noted that the UNC-Duke Consortium for Middle East Studies had held a taxpayer-funded conference featuring “severe anti-Israeli bias and anti-Semitic rhetoric,” which made it like virtually every other conference on Israel and the Middle East held in every college and university over the last few years, but never mind. The Education Department found that instruction in foreign languages (which, remember, the money was for) and national security had “taken a back seat to other priorities,” and that the Consortium was spending taxpayer money on courses that were “plainly unqualified for taxpayer support.”

The letter also observed that the Consortium was failing to offer – shocker! — a “balance of perspectives” on religion. Instead, the Consortium was placing “considerable emphasis” on “understanding the positive aspects of Islam, while there is an absolute absence of any similar focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, Judaism or any other religion or belief system in the Middle East.” There were few, if any, courses discussing the persecution of non-Muslims in the Middle East, “including Christians, Jews, Baha’is, Yadizis, Kurds, Druze and others,” and pointed out that the grant’s rules require that students be given a “full understanding” of the region. Not, that is, one that could have been taught by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

AP, unsurprisingly, thought this was horrifying – not the course on Jew-hatred or the ones proselytizing for Islam, but the Education Department’s letter. It reported that “academic freedom advocates say the government could be setting a dangerous precedent if it injects politics into funding decisions.” These “academic freedom advocates” were not reported as saying anything at all about the dangerous precedent that academic institutions all over the country have already set by injecting politics – far-Left politics, of course, required, taken for granted, pervading everything – into academic discourse.

Henry Reichman, chairman of a committee on academic freedom for the American Association of University Professors, fumed: “Is the government now going to judge funding programs based on the opinions of instructors or the approach of each course?” Without any sense of irony, this man who has won honors and advancement because of his adherence to left-wing political correctness railed against the Trump administration’s letter, saying: “The odor of right-wing political correctness that comes through this definitely could have a chilling effect.” He said nothing about the chilling effect of indoctrinating a generation of young Americans into thinking that their nation and its history are evil, that murderous jihadi thugs are noble freedom fighters, and that “climate change” and “Islamophobia” are real things that they need to worry about.

There is much more. Read the rest here.