How Geopolitics Is Hijacking American Higher Education

Underneath the ivy-covered walls, American universities continue to appear to be centers of learning — full libraries, humming seminar rooms, and foreign campuses. But beyond those ivy-covered walls, higher education in America is being quietly relegated to collateral damage in the increased geopolitical war.

 

Now, once valued as beacons of international cooperation, universities are now at the center of national security controversies, blacklists, and foreign sanctions. In Washington and Moscow, institutions are being drawn into wars they did not sign up to fight.

 

Consider the China Scholarship Council (CSC), for instance, a government-funded program once touted as a tool of educational diplomacy. It is now being questioned by US legislators, charged with advancing Beijing's military-industrial agendas. Elite universities such as the University of California and Dartmouth are now being queried whether recipients of CSC have access to sensitive research. The tone is unmistakable: suspicion has supplanted scholarship.

 

Meanwhile, Texas itself has painted its own red lines, this time an executive order prohibiting public universities from cooperating with China-linked, Russia-linked, Iran-linked, and North Korea-linked institutions. The consequence? UT Austin and Texas A&M are reworking collaborations and halting research, anticipating backlash. Scholars fear this will induce racial profiling and intellectual silencing, that is, against Asian scholars.

 

Abroad, tensions are repeated. Russia recently blacklisted Yale University for meddling in internal affairs, even though the university has had minimal presence in the nation. It's a symbolic gesture — with the atmosphere as it stands today, even old historical relationships or intellectual affinities are grounds for revenge.

 

This corrosive, glacial politicization of learning isn't just an ivory-tower problem. It's corrosive of the very mission of universities: international understanding, open inquiry, and cooperative solutions to world problems. With 270,000 Chinese students in America last year alone, the implications are enormous. Visas, dollars, and research independence no longer are policy concerns — they're diplomatic wagers.

 

Universities are faced with a choice today. They either insulate themselves from the angst of geopolitics, or they become pieces in a game for world control. And if that is to happen to take place, the losers will not be policymakers or bureaucrats — but the very students and scholars who once believed that higher education was the door to possibility.