DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Why America’s Richest Universities Are Protecting Hate-Filled Foreign Students.
Behind this increase lies the simple reality that only a comparatively small number of Americans can afford the mind-numbingly high fees that American universities extort from their captive domestic market. Foreign students, the overwhelming majority of whom are either the children of wealthy foreign elites or directly sponsored by their governments, represent a serious source of funding for American colleges, public and private alike. These students often pay full or near-full tuition and board, and help public universities balance the books in the face of budget cuts. More broadly, they augment revenue by helping to fill federally funded programs that are based on racial and ethnic quotas.
Depending on how you look at it, American universities have made either an exceedingly clever or else exceedingly reprehensible bargain: Quota-filling at a profit. While this practice is generally covered with asinine bureaucratic language such as “promoting diversity” and “fostering a cosmopolitan culture” for a “global community,” it is in fact a racket by which universities take slots presumably intended for members of groups that are held to be economically and culturally deprived—and on which the universities would be obligated to take a loss—and instead sell them at a profit to the families of some of the more privileged people on Earth, while also continuing to sell identity-politics platitudes as institutional ideology.
It seems obvious enough that foreign students who can afford the cost of full tuition and board without financial aid often come from the elite segment of their societies, which in authoritarian countries often translates into overlap with the ruling regimes. When it comes to the Middle East especially—though hardly exclusively—this privileged class is both outwardly “Westernized” and soaked in the antisemitism prevalent in their home societies.
Thus leading to headlines such as this: Pro-Hamas Protests Rage Into the Night at Columbia University.
As Roger Kimball asked yesterday of Columbia, “The whole unseemly spectacle raises at least two large questions. One, why are American colleges and universities such hotbeds of virulent antisemitism? A corollary to that question is why the antisemitism is more pronounced and reflexive the more elite is the institution? Right on cue, Yale was on board announcing its ‘solidarity’ with the Columbia protests, as were other tony institutions.”
MORE: Box ticked by John Gill’s handlers:
Biden has his own Twitter. Why no message from him? https://t.co/PWNqTHq9yD
— Pradheep J. Shanker, M.D. (@neoavatara) April 21, 2024