Chairman Gallagher Blasts 'DEI' & Foreign CCP Influence for Ruining Elite Institutions

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At a congressional hearing this week, the Presidents of Harvard, MIT and UPenn stunned the country by refusing to acknowledge that calling for the genocide of the Jewish people would be against their bullying and harassment policies. They said it would depend on “context” and whether those threats turned into “conduct”.

These are universities like Harvard where you can be disciplined for using the wrong pronoun and yet somehow, when it involves Jews, calling for the extermination of large swaths of the student body requires more “context”.

At a bare minimum, those university presidents should resign. But the sad reality is that won’t change anything at these elite universities – the ideological rot goes far deeper than the President’s office.

Take these universities’ relationship with China’s genocidal, communist government. 

The People’s Republic of China is the largest source of foreign donations to US universities over the past decade. On top of billions in tuition, we know China has added billions more in gifts and in kind donations of new centers and joint ventures. For years, universities completely flouted reporting requirements for foreign gifts, section 117 of the Higher Education Act.

The money flows both ways. University endowments have invested hundreds of millions in VC, PE, and ETFs that pour money into Chinese companies that have actually been blacklisted by the US government for building up China’s military and enabling the CCP’s human rights abuses and vast surveillance state.

It’s not just China. US universities have received billions from Qatar, the country currently harboring Hamas’ leadership. Northwestern has, of all ridiculous things, a journalism campus in Qatar, and lo and behold in the aftermath of October 7th the university wouldn’t condemn Hamas’ brutal massacre and mass rape of Israeli civilians.

My own alma mater, Princeton’s ties to Iran have recently been the subject of investigations. What is it with these elite universities and authoritarian regimes?

We want American students to learn other languages and study other cultures all over the world. But there comes a tipping point where you have to look at all the new gifts and institutes and partnerships with authoritarian regimes and realize that money is no longer just buying seats in the classroom. It’s buying political and social influence. These elite universities are becoming unregistered lobbyists for some of the most tyrannical regimes in the world, and using DEI as moral misdirection.

Despicable as their testimony was, I actually feel sorry for those university presidents. They probably took their jobs thinking they were in charge. But their disgraceful performance at Tuesday’s hearing shows the reality: the presidents answer to the DEI commissars at their university and the upside down logic of social justice. And Tuesdays hearing shows those DEI commissars rule with an iron, woke fist.

According to the twisted diktats of DEI, the massacre of Jews by Palestinian muslims is “brave liberation” while the ongoing genocide of Uyghur muslims by China’s far-left government is for some reason copacetic. The Chinese Communist Party has perpetrated the largest internment of an ethno-religious minority since the Holocaust, yet the silence from the DEI crowd is deafening. 

We need bigger changes than just getting a few presidents to resign if we want to actually educate, and not indoctrinate, the next generation of Americans.