Tag Archives: education

Foreign Donations to American Colleges and Universities

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A letter writer in the WSJ‘s Monday Letters section answered the section’s subheadline—Should colleges and universities be required to disclose the names of foreign donors?

Transparency measures aren’t running universities dry of foreign funds.

I go much beyond that passive affirmative. There should be no debate over foreign money in our education systems. The schools should be required to reveal more than just names. They should give up, also, any restrictions, caveats, codicils, etc. that the foreign donor has attached to his donation. There should be no such money at all from donors who are citizens of or entities domiciled in enemy nations, like Russia, Iran, northern Korea, and the People’s Republic of China.

This is as much a national security matter as it is an education one.

Nor is there any free speech problem here. Foreign entities and individuals are not subject to American free speech constitutional clauses or free speech statutes.

An Illegal Strike

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Teachers strikes are explicitly illegal in Washington, but so far that State’s law men and women, at both the State and city level, have lacked the integrity to enforce their law. Thus, Seattle’s children are in danger of being deprived, yet again, of their access to education: the teachers of Seattle’s teachers union voted 91% in favor of striking and are set to walk off their jobs before the current school year starts.

There are two responsible answers to this move, if the union follows through, and both of them should be carried out. One is to fire for cause every teacher who goes on this illegal strike. The other is to decertify the teachers union for carrying out the illegal strike.

There are no other legitimate alternatives. The fact that the State’s and city’s managers have kowtowed to teachers unions in past illegal strikes presents no excuse for letting the union and those of its members get away with its illegal action this time. All acquiescing would do would be to demonstrate, once again, the intrinsic dishonesty of those in the State’s and city’s government.

Update: It appears the school district and the teachers union have reached an agreement. Apparently, the union is getting 9% in guaranteed salary increases, plus added school staff, but no added teachers on anything else to improve the children’s academic performance.

An Alternative Solution

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The lede lays out the foolishness and government union disingenuousness simultaneously. A twofer.

Do government unions have a vested interest in saddling students with more debt? So they argue in a new and revealing lawsuit against new graduate loan limits.

The situation:

One of the biggest achievements in the 2025 tax bill was limiting the amount of federal loans that students could borrow to a total of $100,000 ($20,500 a year) for most graduate degrees and $200,000 ($50,000 a year) for professional ones. ….
Graduate programs have become cash cows for universities, and the caps could impel them to reduce prices and spending. … The caps are forcing some universities to reduce their bloated workforces. Hence, the union lawsuit….

Never mind how generous those limits remain, even for university incomes. Of course the government unions are objecting; those loans—uncapped—are cash cows for the unions, also, washed as they are through those bloat employees’ union dues.

Still, there is a solution, and it even serves the useful purpose of getting government out of the business of making loans. A tangential beneficial side effect is that what government gives away, here in the form of those loans, it must first take, here in the form of government borrowing.

One way to cap Federal student loans, a way which would render the question of caps irrelevant (and which would eliminate that small tangential vicious circle), would be to stop doing Federal student loans altogether. No loans, no caps.

Easy peasy.

Exposing Truth in Belgian Universities is a Punishable Offense

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Nathan Cofnas, a post-doc at Ghent University in Ghent Belgium, has been suspended by the school’s Rector, Petra De Sutter. Cofnas expects to be fired, and he may well be by the time you read this. He was, you may recall, the man who exposed (former, now deceased) Cambridge Professor Jason Arday’s fraudulent activities, activities that were primarily broad based plagiarism.

Calling out an academician’s dishonesty, though, is strickly verboten in Belgium.

University Rector Petra De Sutter:

[T]he University takes the recent public statements made by a postdoctoral researcher [Cofnas] at Ghent University regarding this matter very seriously. Ghent University has decided to take appropriate action within its powers and the applicable framework.

Never call out an academic. That’s the Ghent message to academia.

My Personal Experience Says Otherwise

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Matthew Hennesey, writing in the WSJ‘s Free Expression columns, was concerned about the heavy exposure to the unbridled freedom of everything being abundant and—from the student’s perspective—free and how this gives those still impressionable minds a false sense of the effectiveness of socialism to the point that it seems like to each according to his wants and from each according to what he feels like giving. And then the child faces the world as it is after “graduation” [my euphemism quotes].

College is where young people get a first taste of living on their own. But it’s a false freedom. The cost of things most adults must budget and pay for—food, transportation, housing, entertainment, even laundry—is bundled on campus. There are no price signals. Everything comes out of the big payment made before the semester starts. And who picks that up? Mom, Dad, and maybe Sallie Mae.
…As a result, “they experience consumption without consequence or even comparison.” Everything feels free. When, after graduation, these kids hit the real world, the shock is too much to bear. They have no sense of opportunity costs and trade-offs. They revert to a defense of the all-inclusive economic program they know and love.

The ill discipline, though, is a mark of the degradation of parenting as well as of the schools themselves. My first two years in college, I lived within the allowance my parents gave me. That upfront cost? One semester of each of those two years came from the fruits of my summer jobs. My second two years, I had no parental allowance, I had USAF Sgt’s pay courtesy of an ROTC scholarship. The upfront cost, though, was entirely picked up by the USAF, via my ROTC scholarship.

Nothing in the book store, from books to froo-froo to junk food was free the entire time. Nothing in the student union was free, also. The school’s cafeteria only served lunch and supper, no snacks or anything of the like. Nothing between meals. Snacks could be purchased in the student union or in the book store. The cafeteria might have served breakfast, too, but I wasn’t eating breakfast so I never noticed.

Now helicopter parents or lazily uninvolved parents—no middle ground constituting a measure of parental responsibility—ruin their kids before they get to college, and colleges now coddle those children while burying all of the costs in those upfront payments that the students never experience and indoctrinating them rather than teaching them.