http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/10340
Not surprisingly, the University of California at Berkeley has also set up a department with Middle Eastern cash.
http://cmes.berkeley.edu/
Do you really think that anything funded by Middle Eastern regimes is going to be balanced and fair? Am I naive if I say that universities are supposed to be about education not indoctrination?
Don't answer that.
3 comments:
I will answer that Gary, and you should be ready to dial 911 again.
Yes, this is a legitimate concern. Large sums of cash from an interested source always distorts academic teaching. That is true of concentrations of corporate cash, joint business and marketing ventures, firing left-wing faculty to secure a big donation from the Hearst family (circa 1930) and taking cash from oil-rich Salafists to establish departments of Middle Eastern studies.
The minimum requirement should be, first, anyone can donate the money, then, we'll hire competent faculty and develop a curriculum. If you want to dictate the content of courses, you should open your own university, as the C.S. Lewis Foundation is doing, with a pile of cash from Hobby Lobby. If students will attend King Feisal University in Peoria, OK, but they know what they are signing up for.
Siarlys,
Two things are for sure. The universities are getting the money-principally from SA to set up ME Studies departments. Second, these departments are dominated by anti-Israel types.
I think they call it quid pro quo or something like that.
Well, in the spirit of the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision striking down Arizona's public financing law, I could say that Israel is free to finance all the "Israeli studies" or "Jewish studies" departments it wants.
But Israel doesn't have billions of barrels of oil reserves to extract dollars from us in order to finance such centers. (That would be a good argument for developing solar power technology, which we need at much more efficient conversion levels than we can currently obtain).
There ARE of course SOME Jews who are wealthy, who could finance such centers. But that would raise the same problem. Education would be all about who paid the professors' salaries, and even got involved in the hiring decisions.
We could go socialist on all this, and provide that ALL donations MUST be paid into a centralize fund, which would then be disbursed without prejudice to the viewpoints of the institutions or professors involved. But then, we all know there are plenty of hucksters who would start fly-by-night "colleges" just to collect the money, and would scream and file lawsuits if they didn't get their "fair share."
So, what are we going to do?
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