Too Many Foreign Students At Top Tier Schools

CNN is crowing about a federal judge enjoining Pres. Trump's proclamation suspending new international student visas at Harvard. Reading it, I spied this interesting tidbit: "Foreign students make up roughly a quarter of the school’s student body." The article also quotes this from Harvard's complaint filed with the court: “Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard.” But why? What are the international students doing? Why are they central to Harvard's identity and mission (whatever that may be)? 

     Perhaps the answer--or a partial answer--lies in looking at another elite school: Stanford University. In an op-ed at the Washington Post, Marc A. Thiessen relates how "Stanford is a case study in how Beijing infiltrates U.S. universities." He begins:

    The Trump administration is revoking visas for Chinese students “with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields” and revising its “visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications” for students from China and Hong Kong.

    This is both necessary and long overdue. For years, China has been engaged in a systematic effort to target U.S. universities, using Chinese students to conduct extensive espionage and intellectual property theft on elite campuses across the United States — which has helped fuel China’s technological and military growth.

He goes on to describe how Chinese students are regularly debriefed by Chinese officials and provide documents, internal memos, methodologies, future directions of the research. If the students do not cooperate, their families in China will be threatened. It seems even worse among those students in graduate programs:

Nearly half of Chinese students are pursuing advanced degrees. Many graduate students are sponsored by state-backed vehicles, such as the China Scholarship Council, which the Chinese regime uses to recruit and pay tuition for Chinese students chosen to attend, and almost certainly spy on, U.S. universities. CSC-funded students are must pass party loyalty tests, Molloy said, and are “required to go to the Chinese consulate and provide information” on research taking place at the university as well as conduct “peer surveillance” of other Chinese nationals. 

     While most people probably associate Harvard most strongly with business, liberal arts and humanities, Harvard has strong STEM programs conducting significant research. We should expect, therefore, that many of the foreign students at Harvard, like at Stanford, are involved in stealing American technology.