Three months after announcing that it would investigate the use of federal funds in an academic conference on Gaza at the University of North Carolina (UNC), the Department of Education has published a letter threatening to withdraw funding from the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies, which sponsored the event.

Sent a week after the start of the fall semester, the letter threatens to cut off funding to Middle East Studies unless Duke-UNC provides a “revised schedule of activities that it plans to support for the coming year, including a description demonstrating how each activity promotes foreign language learning and advances the national security interests and economic stability of the United States” by September 22.