Education and empire, old and new: HR 3077 and the resurgence of the US university

This essay examines HR 3077, the 2003 International Studies in Higher Act, which sought to tie federal funding for university-based area studies programs to the interests of the US security state. While locating it in the post-9/11 context, the essay situates HR 3077 in a broader frame that elucidates the shifting but always intimate relationship between education and imperialism. It discusses how knowledge production has long been tied to imperialist endeavors and examines the origins and development of US area studies during the Cold War and its critical turn in the late 1960s. The article closely reads HR 3077 and the neoconservative literature that grounds it to trace wide-ranging efforts to foreclose intellectual freedom and critiques of the US state. It argues that HR 3077 marks only one example of a troubling movement to arrest critical public discourse, one that subjects invested in maintaining vigorous democratic publics must contest.