The hysterical campaign against Title VI reform may finally be coming to an end. Daine Jones, director of the office of government affairs at Princeton University, has written a very important piece on HR 3077 in the Yale Daily News. In effect, Jones–one of higher education’s own lobbyists–tells the opponents of this bill that they are both embarrassing themselves and rendering themselves ineffective by misrepresenting the contents of HR 3077. Jones is familiar with the negotiations on the language of HR 3077 that took place prior to the bill’s passage. She rightly points out that any concerns about government control of the curricular process have been eliminated by the addition of a provision of the bill that forbids this. By the way, I think the fear was exaggerated to begin with, and I have never opposed the provision forbidding curricular control. On the contrary, I have welcomed it. But it is a dramatic moment when one of Princeton’s own education lobbyists announces in the Yale Daily News–which has led the opposition to this bill–that the hysterical campaign against HR 3077 is off base. Jones is right. And as I said in “Opening the Classroom Door,” the better question for HR 3077 is whether, given the bill’s (justified) protection of the classroom, this legislation will actually help to correct the field’s bias. I believe that over the long term, this bill will help to make area studies more fair and open. But as I explain in “Opening the Classroom Door,” it will do so indirectly, and in a way that respects academic freedom. In the meantime, HR 3077 will put a stop to egregious abuses like bias in Congressionally mandated public outreach programs, and boycotts of national security scholarships by the very institutions being funded to support them. Now that Diane Jones has exposed the lies about this bill, it may be very difficult indeed to stop it. But we still have to worry about subtle efforts to gut the bill like the one I describe in my post about the California deans.