The professor is Charles Kurzman, associate director for the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations (I’m sure that’s just a coincidence), who frets:
To what extent are we helping students go out and do all sorts of dirty deeds that we would be embarrassed to have a hand in?
What a telling assumption, “dirty deeds.” Here a student has won a scholarship worth up to $20 grand to study “Tajik and Russian languages in the Asian nation of Tajikistan” and it’s cause for alarm, not celebration. What about diversity, multiculturalism, studying other cultures, cross-cultural understanding, and all those other euphemisms for leftist politics? Oh, but the student “must agree to use his knowledge to help with some aspect of national security after he graduates.” Kurzman worries about the “cloak-and-dagger stuff” of having a student in the classroom who might be headed for a future in intelligence-gathering. (Apparently it’s all the rage in Chapel Hill to imagine someone’s spying on you in the classroom.)
Meanwhile, UNC has a minor and a program devoted to fostering primarily leftist political activism for academic credit, let alone pay, and no one on campus raises a complaint (even when several of the “partner” organizations are government groups). Furthermore, plenty of scholarships and grants have obligations on the recipient to work in certain areas upon graduation ? see Teaching Fellows, for one. They’re not unusual; what is unusual is Kurzman’s criticism, the basis for which seems quite evident and more in line with academic leftists’ objections to military recruiters on campus.
