, 12.06.2023 02:52 PM

My latest: got university hate? Follow the money

 
Follow the money.
 
That’s the best strategy when trying to get to the bottom of a political scandal.  Follow the money, and you’ll eventually find the bad guys.
 
But what about ethical and moral scandals? What about, say, when the presidents of some of the most prestigious universities on the continent – Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology – appear before a U.S. congressional committee, and smirk their way through non-answers about Jew hatred on their campuses? What then?
 
The rule still applies: follow the money.
 
Some background, first.  The Harvard, UPenn and M.I.T. presidents deigned to appear before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday.  They were there, mainly, to field questions about how they are dealing with an explosion in anti-Semitism at their universities.
 
To say that they did not do well is an understatement of epic proportions.  Harvard president Claudine Gay, Penn president Liz Magill and MIT president Sally Kornbluth smirked and smiled and sniggered when asked, repeatedly, whether “calling for genocide of Jews” was against their respective codes of conduct.
 
Every time they were asked that question – to which the answer, always, is “yes” – the university presidents dissembled and prevaricated.  
 
Said UPenn’s Magill, echoing the other two: “It is a context-dependent decision.”
 
No, it isn’t.  It’s not even a difficult question, either: calls to exterminate a people based on their faith is clearly against the rules at every place of higher learning in the world – and, in countries like Canada, a criminal act.
 
It’s also wildly-bad PR.  Donors and students are now boycotting universities where anti-Semitism is going unchecked, and politicians are talking about withdrawing funding.  So why don’t these university presidents do the right thing?
 
It’s about prejudice, of course.  But it’s also about money.
 
This writer’s first book was called Unholy Alliances.  In part, it detailed how outlaw Middle Eastern nations – Libya, Iraq, Syria, Iran and others – have been jamming “students” into Canadian, American and European universities for decades.  And, too often, some of those students aren’t here to study.
 
In Unholy Alliances, I revealed how the FBI uncovered a Libyan plot to use students as spies, terrorists and intelligence-gathering operatives. During a raid at the Virginia home of one Libyan “businessman,” Mousa Hawamda, the FBI found dozens of documents relating to the Canadian Bureau for International Education, World University Services Canada and similar organizations.
 
The CBIE, WUSC, and others work to find spaces for foreign students at Canadian universities and colleges.  The FBI did not make any specific allegations about these groups – but they alleged that some of the Libyan students were indeed involved in terrorist plots, including one to assassinate former White House aide Oliver North.
 
Arranging spots for the Middle Eastern students is big, big business.  Despite the 1986 pledge of former External Affairs Minister Joe Clark – to keep Canada from becoming “a backfill,” as he put it, for students who posed a security risk – Libya, to cite just one example, gave $35 million to place 900 students at educational institutions across Canada in that very same year.
 
Since then, the numbers have grown exponentially. In 2023, the federal government has conceded, Canada is expected to admit around 900,000 foreign students – and reach an astonishing 1.3 million by 2026.
 
And what is the dollar value of all those foreign students? Some $20 billion, Ottawa says.  And most of it is going into the coffers of those universities.  
 
To cite just one small-scale example, reported by The Hub: “[Cape Breton University] reported a haul of nearly $85 million in tuition fees [in Spring 2023], a 200 percent increase from just five years ago, driven mainly by an increase in international students.”  
 
The same thing is happening across Canada, the U.S. and Europe.  Foreign students, particularly from the Middle East, are fattening the coffers of universities big and small.  And, now, we are seeing those same universities look the other way when anti-Semitism is surging on their campuses.
 
It’s not a coincidence.  At Harvard – where, full disclosure, this writer studied law and business, and now wishes he hadn’t – anti-Semitic incidents and crime are epidemic.  And, at Canadian universities like Concordia, Jew hatred can now be seen everywhere, and is captured on nightly TV news broadcasts.
 
Asked about that, one Concordia professor told me: “I don’t know who those people are.  They don’t look like our students.” 
 
There’s a reason for that: they aren’t.  They’re not here to learn.  They’re here to cause trouble, and worse. And they’re doing just that, a lot, since October 7.
 
Like we say: follow the money.  
 
And do it before it’s too late.

10 Comments

  1. EsterHazyWasALoser says:

    Is it really necessary for these (so called) “institutions of higher learning” to prostitute themselves for the almighty dollar? I am becoming more disillusioned every day. Where are this country’s leaders? Or is that just becoming a rhetorical question?

  2. EsterHazyWasALoser says:

    I have wondered a lot lately about how so many well educated people in this country could hold such vituperative views about Israel and members the Jewish faith. After all, it seems illogical and irrational to have such extreme views, unless you were part of a society that brainwashes its citizens and prevents them from accessing the truth about our society. But Canada isn’t like that. So how is it that this type of prejudice has become so commonplace? Reading this article shed some light on the subject.
    https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/how-dumb-ideas-capture-smart-and

  3. Martin Dixon says:

    I get irritated regularly at some dumb-ass step WLU takes. I have had friends on the board and I have no idea how they put up with the nonsense they regularly engage in. And my firm and many of our partners played a big part in getting them set up in downtown Brantford when they started with only 39 kids in 1999. They have 3000 now. And, sure enough:

    “At Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, assistant professor of social work Dr. Jessica Hutchison had this advice for conscientious Canadians: “I hope your upcoming acknowledgements will include support for Palestinians who are taking their land back from settler colonizers.””

    https://nationalpost.com/opinion/canadian-progressives-celebrate-israel-war

  4. Warren,

    They don’t call MONEY the root of all E-V-I-L for nothing. Enough said.

    • Pipes says:

      I think it’s the ‘love of money”.
      Those greedy, lusting, pangs of an insatiable appetite with its addictive gluttonous swallowing that consciously devours all things, resulting in perpetual Power Binging. It will be the death of us all and our planet.
      Ya, it is E-V-I-L
      Glad I have very little of it.

      • Pipes,

        One of my friends wasn’t satisfied with the blessing of a mere two million, so he had to have more. Then came God’s lesson: the Ponzi scheme and he was suddenly out of 400K. Got lucky that it wasn’t more.

  5. Sean says:

    100%.

    Post Secondary Education in our time has become entirely about making money… for the institutions.

    However, I boldly predict that well is drying up faster than most people realize.

    Brick and mortar institutions are on the way out. In Ontario for example, in 20 years, Western, U of T and Queens will be the only Universities left standing. That’s a good thing for education and for future generations in particular.

  6. Lynn says:

    I worked in academia for many years. There are no politics like university politics. Common sense went out the door long ago in many places and big money is at stake for the administration. A small province like NS with 5 universities? Really? It has to be a business to survive…education is second to the recruitment of money (students or donors).

    Re: UCCB- that is a project brought to us by the old “entitled to my entitlements,”David Dingwall. The place would not exist without the foreign students.

    and I will leave this old favourite quote of man. Clark Kerr was the President of University of California and in the 1960s famously uttered:

    “The university is a series of individual entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance about parking.”

    and so it goes…education is not about learning or turning out leaders and thinkers anymore..it is business. If the kids learn something… well great, but how about those admin salaries?

  7. Peter Williams says:

    Who would have guessed that these left wing ‘progressives‘ are anti-Semitic?

    And Jyoti Gondek shows her true colours.

  8. WestGuy says:

    I’m not sure I agree with the money angle. Sure, it’s there but I’m not sure it’s a driving factor.
    I think more of a factor is the notion among the “progressive” types is that non-whites can only be victims and whites can only be victimizers. Maybe it sounds like a conspiracy (apparently us conservative types are prone to believing in conspiracies) but when the various protests are covered in the media, the pro-Palestine coverage tends to show a lot of “protestors of color” while any coverage of pro-Israel tends to have a lot of white folk. Maybe that’s an accurate reflection of the crowds, I dunno, I haven’t been to either rallies. But it just seems to go with that whole “all white people are bad” narrative.
    Hell, look at universities these days. They’ll ban a speaker depending on the topic of the speech but won’t come out and say pro-genocide is bad mm’kay.

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