Buying Dangerous Secrets

Vincent J. Curtis

13 Feb 20

It was recently reported that Harvard and Yale Universities were being investigated by both the U.S Departments of Education and of Justice for having received some $6 billion in donations from foreign countries and failing to disclose, as they are required by law to do, this money.  The foreign countries are China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.  In January, the Chair of the Department of  Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Harvard was arrested by the FBI on charges of spying for China.

Here, in Canada, various Confucius Centers funded by the Chinese government have had to be shut down on account of spying-like activities.  Last year we discovered that 15,000 Saudi nationals were students at Canadian universities.  Then there is the airliner shot down in Iran that was found to have had on it an alarming number of Iranian Ph.D. students enrolled in Canadian universities.  It remains a mystery how these students were able to visit Iran when Canada has had no diplomatic relations with that country in over seven years.  Visas would not be easy to arrange, nor stamps in passports easily explained.

It appears that hostile foreign powers are using their financial strength to infiltrate, compromise, and exploit institutes of higher learning in the western world, in order to obtain knowledge and skills they cannot develop on their own.  Iran wants a nuclear bomb, a missile to carry it, and increased cyber warfare capability.  China wants to be able to spy on the world in order to protect the regime.  The Arab countries want to suppress any hostility towards Islam.

Lenin used to say that a capitalist would sell you the rope that will be used to hang him.  I accuse our institutes of higher learning of having mercenary interests, such that foreign students get preference to Canadian students - because those institutes get triple the money for enrolling a foreign student than they get for a Canadian student.  These institutes unwittingly advance the war-like technical capabilities of hostile foreign powers.

It is time for the Canadian government to investigate the full extent of foreign penetration into our institutes of higher learning, and to put a stop to the transfer of our technical sophistication adaptable for war-like purposes to foreign powers.  It is also time for Canadian universities to understand the Faustian bargain they are making.  Universities came into existence out of Western enlightenment, but Western enlightenment is not what many of these foreign students are giving to their home countries.  The mercenary attitude of taking money and growing bigger for the sake of it has to stop.  At one time it made sense for Canadian universities to educate foreign nationals from the third world, but it no longer does.

This isn’t about racism – it’s about realising the nature of power politics in the modern world.
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