Should the US Stop Admitting Chinese Students to our Top Universities?
The head of defense for Palantir Technologies says yes. Let’s discuss.
Send the Students Home?
In a WSJ Op-Ed writer Mike Gallagher says Send Harvard’s Chinese Students Home
Roughly 30% of Harvard’s student body is foreign. At Columbia, that share approaches 40%. America’s finest universities benefit from billions in government grants and tax breaks while admitting fewer Americans every year. Our elite universities need a change of mindset. They should make a priority of educating exceptional Americans and citizens of our partner nations—not our adversaries.
Mr. Trump noted this summer that “the United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence,” which Joe Biden called “a defining technology of our era.” Universities help drive that race. Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, has argued that the rate of AI progress may be such that “you need to prevent all of our secrets from going over to our adversaries and you need to lock down the labs.”
Blindly embracing academic cooperation with a geopolitical rival is absurd. Nobody suggests we should train Iranian nuclear physicists or Russian ballistics engineers. The U.S. wouldn’t have been better off collaborating more with Nazi Germany in the 1930s or with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Why make an exception for a nation dedicated to surpassing the U.S. in emerging technologies?
Universities love Chinese students because they generally pay full freight, often subsidized by the Communist Party state. Universities need that money to feed their ever-expanding bureaucracies, and this dependency corrupts them.
The Trump administration doesn’t need to make deals with universities to rebalance the foreign-student population. Visas are the American president’s responsibility, not Harvard’s. The government gave universities leeway with immigration policies that mostly rubber-stamped admissions office decisions, but we can change that.
Refuse to issue student visas to Chinese Communist Party members and their children. Do the same for researchers affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army.
Critics will trot out the old canard that we need to admit more Chinese students to spread freedom via cultural exchange. It is a lovely idea but impossible to square with the reality of China today. The Chinese Communist Party’s chief ideologist, Wang Huning, was radicalized, not moderated, by his time at Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley. General Secretary Xi Jinping is a proud Harvard father.
When I was chairman of the House Select Committee on China, a group of university presidents asked me why so many of the party elite want to study at our colleges. I half-joked that, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Chinese want to send their youth to the last bastions of true communist ideology. The joke got more laughs than expected because it hit close to home. It is up to the Trump administration to ensure that Beijing doesn’t have the last laugh.
About Mike Gallagher
Mr. Gallagher is head of defense for Palantir Technologies and a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute.
He represented Wisconsin’s Eighth Congressional District (2017-24) and was chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
You Cannot Stop the Spread of Knowledge
Mr. Gallagher foolishly believes the US can stop the spread of knowledge.
He lives in a right-wing conspiracy vacuum that wants to try.
If there are genuine security concerns over specific individuals, by all means, address those. But Gallagher wants a blanket solution.
This was the subject of discussion last week with some friends, one of whom graduated from Harvard. My friend commented …
I think that this is ignorant nativism.
These nativist fools think that we are somehow giving Chinese students information to which they would otherwise not have access. Harvard does plenty of work for defense, but you need security clearance. Whether you are from D.C. or Beijing, you can’t get access to secret stuff without clearance. You accomplish nothing by sending home a bunch of people with no access to secret materials.
Nor is there any technical training that the Chinese can’t get elsewhere. Harvard does not have secret academic texts to which no other university has access.
Here’s what I got out of attending Harvard: I got to debate legal issues every day with the smartest people my age I had ever met. Hundreds of thousands of such interactions over three years trained my mind to anticipate counter-arguments. They taught me to think out of the box – because if you stay in the box at Harvard, you are doomed to below average status. Those kids taught me that brilliant minds can come to different conclusions about the nature of society and thus all well-defended views must be respected. I learned what was different and what was similar among people from very different places. And I made lifetime friends I met in courtrooms, conferences, restaurants and outside activities.
There were not many Chinese students when I was in school. But there were many people from other corners of the globe who helped my education by bringing their different perspectives. So, all you are really doing by keeping them out is impairing the education of American students and destroying the possibility of long-term friendships that will someday prevent a terrible war for our descendants.
My son-in-law teaches what you might call technical information. He is on the cutting edge of “blue sky” technical research. He has done work on the fearsome robots that will soon be involved in infantry and submarine combat. His specialty is marine robots. He does not share classified work with people without clearance. But he strongly supports the presence of Chinese and other international students on campus for the very reasons that I outlined in law.
Chinese and American scientists participate in international conferences on advances in knowledge in all non-classified aspects of their work. And that’s over 90% of what they do.
US scientists cannot cut themselves from the international exchange of ideas. In fact, they have even less ability to do so than we lawyers, who function in artificially segregated legal systems.
The people who are urging Chinese expulsion are almost entirely people who have no idea how science works in the modern era.
I replied …
I view this similar to the US attempting to cut Huawei off from chip technology. The US forced Huawei to make its own chips and then was surprised when China exceeded years before expected.
The Chinese chips are not as good, but for phone technology they are plenty good enough. The result was lost exports and a doubling down by China to catch up.
It’s futile to believe one can stop the spread of knowledge.
My friend replied back …
I agree, Mish But it’s even sillier. China doesn’t have to develop its own information.
All China has to do is keep attending the international conferences where people share their findings.
People who are not in science think that everything is conducted in a dark room.
Moreover, the narrow application of scientific knowledge to devices is carefully guarded. And it’s not just because of national security. THERE IS COMMERCIAL BENEFIT IN SUCH APPLICATIONS.
You don’t want anyone to be able to beat you to the patent or trade secret that is going to make a lot of money for you and your institution. And that, of course, includes Chinese students.
A Fool’s Mission
Mr. Gallagher either believes Chinese students have access to top secret research or the US has some sort of monopoly on education that cannot be found elsewhere.
Neither is true.
In his right-wing conspiratorial rant, Gallagher stated “Mr. Trump deserves credit for addressing the corrupt and immoral links between universities like Harvard and the Chinese Communist Party.”
What a hoot. As head of Palantir Technologies, Gallagher ought to know that science is not conducted in a dark room. And what is conducted in a dark room, Chinese students don’t have access to.
But Gallagher is blinded by right-wing conspiratorial nonsense and ignorant nativism. Unfortunately, Trump is surrounded by such individuals.
Throwing Away a Trade Surplus
Finally, the US has a huge trade surplus in services. Education is a key reason why.
Gallagher and his ilk want to kill that surplus in belief they can stop the spread of knowledge.
But the US has no monopoly in education so it’s a costly fool’s mission to do what Gallagher opines.
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