From Whence These Demonstrators? Foreign Influence in American Higher Education

By John F. Di Leo

Since the horrific attacks by Hamas on October 7, we have watched in dismay as thousands and thousands of college students, faculty, and staff have rallied, marched and chanted, calling for the overthrow of the state of Israel, and for genocide against its Jewish residents. (For the benefit of those unaware of the euphemism in the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” this actually means “…shall be free of Jews.”)

We have watched in recent years as the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement spread across higher education (and big business, and Wall Street too, for that matter), and we’ve been concerned by the popularity of such bigotry, but we have assumed that surely it would be countered by the high Jewish population of the same institutions, and by the American people’s memory of the Holocaust.  

Surely, anti-Israel sentiments must be a tiny minority, Right?

Wrong.

Instead, we have seen these massive numbers, both on campus and off, as college crowds take advantage of their flexible schedules (and often, likely, their disinterest in actual academics), to fill similar rallies in our big cities’ downtowns, our city halls and our state and national capitals.  

It’s hard to imagine that a genocidal philosophy could get such a hold on academia, but the past month has awakened us to this reality.

And in asking why, we find that a great deal of research has been done already, showing how billions and billions of dollars of money from foreign sources – disproportionately from Qatar and China, but from lots of other countries as well – have found their way into American higher education.

Why, and how?  Some of it is obvious, some is more cleverly hidden.  And the reasons behind all this are more varied, and sometimes more devious, as well.

As we walk through this partial list of the issues, consider two very different types of enemies:  the Arab money is “religious” in nature, being largely designed to support the global spread of islam and the destruction of Judaism and Western values.  Chinese money, by contrast, is technological and militaristic in nature, designed to support the spread of communism, and therefore the destruction of Western economies.

Simple donations

The billions of dollars in outright donations that China, Qatar, and many other countries give to colleges need the least explanation. Get a million dollars, or two, or ten, in untargeted funds to be used however the college wants, and a college administration is inclined to think highly of the donor, and perhaps to look the other way when the world news highlights the donor’s less savory side.  

So too will the student body, the alumni, the board of directors, the faculty, even the surrounding community, gradually think more highly of the donor, as time goes by and announcements of such donations make the local press, again and again. Eventually, the flow of money changes attitudes and predispositions.

A college can close this door anytime, and decide at some point that the blood money comes at too great a cost.  But do they ever?  It’s hard, when you’ve become used to the inflow of money that you’re using for building projects, expansion programs, advertising, development deals. 

When your finance committee gets used to millions from China or the Middle East, it’s not easy to tell them “We’re losing this donor because they’ve become distasteful; you’ll have to make up those millions by finding other donors.”

The student body

But the above is obvious.  Let’s look at some of the less obvious ways that foreign interests gain more than a foothold in our colleges and universities.

At both public and private institutions, the combination of tuition and room and board tends to be well over $20,000 per student per year, with $50,000 being typical, and numbers as high as $80,000 to $100,000 (before discounts) being the norm at the more expensive undergrad and grad schools.  That means that a single four-year student is worth $80,000 to $400,000 to the college, in theory. Those who stay for advanced degrees, even more.

Hardly any American pays these numbers, in full, themselves.  They qualify for financial aid, they get department scholarships, there are federal and state grants. College still costs a lot, of course, but the costs are spread out across society.

Not so, for the foreign students.  With few exceptions, foreign students are funded by wealthy (read, “connected”) foreign businessmen, foreign royalty, foreign politicians.  As a result, when an institution loses a local student getting in-state tuition, it might be losing $20,000 per year. When it loses a foreign student, it loses $50,000, or $80,000, or $100,000 per year.

You notice that sort of income.

Universities grow very fond of these foreign students.   When they have five, or ten, or twenty foreign kids paying full freight, that means millions of dollars of certain money, kids who don’t eat into their limited financial aid for the other kids they want, like the football and basketball players who aren’t likely to get academic scholarship money.

Chinese students account for over $12 billion per year in tuition to US colleges and universities.  And that’s just China.

Joint research projects

What happens when universities have students from a foreign country, often government-funded?  Those students have parents – who are themselves connected to their governments, their countries’ biggest companies, and usually, both.

These students can therefore be the gateway to massive research and development projects, funded by foreign countries, foreign multinational corporations, and international NGOs (non-governmental organizations).  If your own country doesn’t have a certain technology, just partner with a research university in a country that does.  

And the USA does.

And if it’s an export-controlled technology you want (technology that’s illegal to transfer to foreign nationals or to a foreign country) – a type that you would be less likely to get out of a private company that understands the law and respects its own intellectual property – then pay a grateful university that thinks of itself as being above the law.  

They’ll use these foreign students in the project, and when it’s over, the kids will go home, all that new technology safely tucked away in their heads, notebooks, laptops and cellphones.

Funded professorships or even whole departments

Sometimes foreign countries will donate the necessary funds to establish a chair – such as “Middle Eastern Studies” or “Chinese Studies” programs.  This may involve the hiring of a single professor, or a professor and an assistant, or a whole team of such professors, an approved minor or even major program. Maybe they’ll build a new building on campus to house the program.

This can be an opportunity to move their own spies into the country on work visas (what could be a better justification for a work visa than a person filling a job that was literally designed for him?), or an opportunity to create a job to reward Americans for taking their side and going over to their service. Such positions are notorious for their undemanding work schedules, allowing their fully-funded participation in political activism, union participation, and other infiltration of local groups.

Also, as we have seen from federally funded police department “assistance” – such as the famous two-year Clinton-era funding of tens of thousands of policemen (known as COPS-MORE) – once a position is established, it becomes extremely difficult to let the position go away if the funding source dries up.  Should the flow of Chinese or Arab money run out, there are professorships in place, perhaps tenured; the college won’t want the embarrassment of shutting down an existing certificate, major, or minor program, while there are students two or three years into it.  So they will move money from other departments or other purposes into this one, to keep it in place.

College partnerships or even foreign campuses

Most respectable American colleges offer a study-abroad program. Many have close ties with their foreign partners, to the point of exchanging professors and collaboration on research projects, which as we’ve seen, increases interaction between students and faculty and the local government and business sectors.   Sometimes this is beneficial to the student; often, however, it is detrimental to American national security and the security of our allies.

NYU has a campus in Florence, Italy; St Louis University has one in Madrid, Spain, and Georgia Tech has one in Metz, Lorraine, France.  Nothing scary there, right?

But for every foreign campus in a friendly nation, there now seems to be at least one in an unfriendly nation too.  

Duke has one in Kunshan, China. Northwestern has one in Doha, Qatar.  American University, chartered by Congress itself in 1892, now has overseas campuses in Lebanon, Egypt, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates.

In fact, dozens and dozens of American universities started out with just a simple reciprocal exchange program in distant communist or islamic tyrannies. They barely even noticed as, in the blink of an eye, foreign “investment” quickly turned those “cultural exchanges” into full-fledged partnerships – in countries that are committed to the absolute opposite of the philosophies of academic freedom and Scottish enlightenment theory for which their students’ parents approved their choice of schools.

Scratching the Surface

There’s more to it, much more.  Distant governments have infiltrated every aspect of our colleges and universities, both public and private, populating everything from dorms to faculties, from research labs to IT departments, from college libraries to program design offices with foreign agents.

Our universities have become a revolving door of the carefully-placed activists, spies, and cultural termites of third world governments, taking advantage of every opportunity to infect America with their poisonous ways.

We see it in the BDS rallies and pro-Hamas demonstrations; we see it in the frequent discoveries of students and professors illegally sharing confidential technology with Beijing.  

And we see it in the effect this exchange is having on our very culture:  socialism in place of capitalism, islamic jihad in place of Judeo-Christianity, praise of barbarism in place of a proud defense of Western Civilization.

It’s never easy to turn the clock back, but our government must try. The hundreds of thousands of pro-Hamas demonstrators we saw take over our nation’s capital last week, defiling our statues, chanting themes of genocide, will be a new reality for us, unless we wrest control of academia back from our nation’s enemies.

Copyright 2023 John F. Di Leo

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant.  A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009.  His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II) are available only on Amazon

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