Moolah from Mullahs Joel Kotkin, Marshall Toplansky
https://www.city-journal.org/article/arab-countries-bankroll-u-s-universities
Arab countries are bankrolling American colleges and universities.
For decades, China and Middle Eastern autocracies have been pouring billions of dollars into American and other foreign universities. Such funds support students from their countries but can also support academic programs that propagate these countries’ world views.
China’s so-called Confucius Institutes, for instance, which push the Chinese Communist Party’s agenda on college campuses and seek access to U.S. technological prowess, have garnered much international attention. Including these institutes and other efforts, China contributed $1.2 billion to American colleges between 2014 and 2020. It has spent roughly another $1 billion since 2020.
Middle Eastern countries’ donations draw much less attention. Between 2014 and 2020, Muslim-majority countries together donated $4.86 billion to American higher-educational institutions, representing 29 percent of all foreign donations.
Qatar and Saudi Arabia were responsible for much of this largesse. The two countries together invested $3.7 billion in American higher education and were cumulatively responsible for 2,303 grants, gifts, and contracts, of which 422 exceeded $1 million and 17 exceeded $50 million in value. Most of the largest gifts came from Qatar to Cornell and Carnegie Mellon.
Qatar’s role is particularly troubling, since the country is often an ally to both Iran and Hamas. The country also backs other terrorist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, and is home to the most important Middle Eastern media outfit, Al Jazeera. Along with Saudi Arabia, Qatar is among the largest donors to Palestinian organizations and causes.
It’s too early to make direct connection between a school’s anti-Israel agitation and its donations from Middle Eastern countries, but the biggest recipients, such as Cornell, NYU, Georgetown, and Harvard tend to have large pro-Hamas elements. Student groups on each of those campuses have embraced the Hamas cause, most prominently at Harvard, where more than 30 student groups initially signed pro-Hamas statements, though some have since sought to dissociate themselves.
Israel’s donations to American colleges and universities have proved somewhat ironic. Between 2014 and 2020, Israel made 373 gifts to U.S. colleges and universities, together worth $124.1 million. Twenty-nine of those gifts totaled more than $1 million. Surprisingly, Yeshiva University was not among the recipients. Israel’s largest nine donations, totaling $36 million, went to Brigham Young University. Yale was the tenth-largest recipient, with a gift of $2.4 million. Harvard’s five gifts from Israel totaled $3.1 million. Medical schools such as Johns Hopkins and Albert Einstein College of Medicine were also major recipients of Israeli dollars.
Some of the Muslim-majority Middle Eastern countries’ donations may be used to stoke anti-Israel and anti-Jewish attitudes. The past decade has seen a surge of Muslim students, including large numbers whose tuitions are paid by Arab governments. These students, though a small portion of all enrollees, have often led the pro-Hamas activity on college campuses. They are frequently joined by Middle Eastern studies faculty, many of whom hold anti-Israel and anti-American views, and whose departments often receive funding from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. While Americans rightfully worry about Chinese influence in our universities, we seem to think less about attracting anti-Israel and often anti-American students to our shores.
As was the case with the Confucius Institutes, it is hard to know how foreign donations influence college presidents and their publicists. Some, such as Florida’s Ben Sasse, have unequivocally denounced Hamas. Others have been less forceful, while some seem at best “evenhanded” in their assessments of mass murder. Among the most mealymouthed presidents include those of big-recipient schools such as Cornell, Northwestern, and Harvard.
Pushback will need to come from donors. Several prominent donors, including former ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, have cut ties with the University of Pennsylvania over its Israel stance. Harvard, too, is hemorrhaging some big donors, such as Les Wexner, Idan Ofer, and Mark Rowan, while hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman says that he will not hire students engaged in pro-Hamas activities.
Ultimately, this controversy reflects the changing nature of the university. The campus reaction to Hamas’s attack suggests that many universities no longer have the will or the desire to embrace the most basic human values. As they cash in their petrodollars, the people running academia may be giving their autocratic backers exactly what they want.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/tenured_cowards.html
I always try to avoid Holocaust metaphor when discussing campus anti-Semitism. But the craven indifference of academic elites to the anti-Semitism that threatens Jewish students on their respective campuses is reminiscent of the purges of Jewish professors and students in the darkening days following Kristallnacht in November of 1938.
When I was a young girl, my parents, emigres from Poland via Bolivia, entertained colleagues and friends who had escaped from the corners of hell in Europe. In prewar Germany intellectuals and academic professionals were the elite — even their wives were called “Frau Professor” or “Frau Doktor.” One of my parents’ friends was a physician who had been a well-known medical school professor and pioneer radiologist following in the steps of Wilhelm Röntgen who won the first Nobel prize in physics in 1901. This particular gentleman was bald and had on his cheek the fencing scar “Renommierschmiss,” a mark of honor sported by many German and Austrian veterans, doctors, lawyers and professors to signify valor and social rank.
On November 10th in 1938, the day after Kristallnacht, Herr Doktor reassured his Frau Doctor Ilse that this was a passing event. He told her that decent, cultured, and educated German intellectuals would be appalled by the violence against Jews. After all, even as the Nazis were implementing their Nuremberg Laws in 1935 he and “Frau Doktor” were on the “A” list of soirees, salons, dances, dinners, musicales, in which the intellectuals expounded on the joys of reading Goethe or Schiller, avoided politics and listened to the music of great German composers. It was Kultur and class.
But when he went to his medical school his formerly obsequious students who customarily leapt up to help him don his teaching robe, his colleagues and friends, all turned their backs on him. He was summarily fired. Other Jewish professors were similarly dismissed and all Jewish professionals lost their licenses. And, with rare exceptions, their former friends and colleagues joined the shunning. Kultur had its limits.
But back to the present — and future. Where is a democracy, a model democracy, routinely slandered with Holocaust and apartheid metaphors? Where are the jihad-driven efforts to destroy her ignored? Where is the moral world tergiversated so that the real evildoers, Israel’s would-be destroyers, are painted as victims? And where has this morphed into violence and threats to Jews?
Why, in the universities and colleges, of course, where boycott and divest and assorted hate fests may be manipulated or financed by Arab money, but flourish through the studied and outrageous indifference — and worse — of presidents and faculty.
Where are America’s intellectuals, including above all the academics, today? In fact, where are those of the Western world? Ostensibly, they are in the vanguard of those promoting progressive thought and liberal values, staunch opponents of bigotry and racism, virtually quivering with multi-cultural sensitivity. They are silent when anti-Semitic lecturers spew hateful rhetoric and passive when Jewish speakers and students are harassed and vilified.
There are many academics who decry the bigotry and gamely defend Israel — too many to name and risk the offense of exclusion of any. However, they are increasingly marginalized and called “parochial” and narrow minded by students and other faculty members.
Many of these professors are recycled radicals from the anti-war movement who approach their teaching mandate with an anti-Israel and anti-Western agenda and manufactured history. Some may be deluded enough to think they teach impartially and fairly.
They warn about the earth’s temperature, about endangered flora and fauna, they fret about abortion rights, they worry about every and all minority rights except for the right of Jews to live in safety everywhere, including on their own campuses.
These cowards, particularly Jewish professors — who preen and strut in narcissistic self-hatred — have turned their back on Jews and Israel. They will be the first to be shocked when the rising tide of international anti-Semitism comes lapping at their heels and their cronies and friends abandon them as they have abandoned principles and decency.
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