Title VI Funding and Man at Yale

Universities want money, but not accountability, for how they use federal funds.

Earlier this month, Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-TN) became the fifth Congressman to write Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos requesting she investigate a university’s use of federal funds appropriated under Title VI of the Higher Education Act, this time at Yale. Writing at The American Spectator, MEF’s Washington Project director, Cliff Smith, notes that Yale’s faculty has a long history of ignoring the wishes of its funders.

In William F. Buckley’s inaugural book God and Man at Yale, published in 1951, then-famed Professor Henry Steele Commager was cited for his belief that university faculty should have total control over the educational marketplace. In Professor Commager’s view, consumers and financers of education should have no say. Buckley believed differently. He believed that much of the Yale professoriate was contemptuous of religious believers and sympathetic to leftist economic theories, out of step with both its student population, and parents and alumni who funded Yale. While professors claimed impartiality, Buckley believed this was both untrue and impossible in any event. Thus, a central argument to his book was the need for countervailing forces. Failure to do so would create “an elite of professional Untouchables.”

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Winfield Myers is managing editor of the Middle East Forum and director of its Campus Watch project, which reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North American universities. He has taught world history and other topics at the University of Michigan, the University of Georgia, Tulane, and Xavier University of Louisiana. He was previously managing editor of The American Enterprise magazine and CEO of Democracy Project, Inc., which he co-founded. Mr. Myers has served as senior editor and communications director at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and is principal author and editor of a college guide, Choosing the Right College (1998, 2001). He was educated at the University of Georgia, Tulane, and the University of Michigan.
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