Fanta Aw
speaker
39 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Fanta Aw’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So I guess sort of to back up a little bit, the name of the task force is the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. And the reason it was stood up is because Jewish students on campuses, particularly at Columbia and Harvard, were being harassed. They were getting screamed at on the way to class. And that's the focus of... the task force.
What Trump and folks in the task force are saying is that, listen, the universities have adopted an ideology that's so progressive and leans so far to the left that they've accepted these notions, which ultimately believe that Israel, Zionism is a form of racism and it's a settler colonial state that doesn't have a right to exist.
And so this way of thinking has led to people promoting Hamas and these groups that are at war with the United States. And so we have to create a more intellectually diverse environment and we have to make sure that folks who are enemies of America don't have a place in the university and they're not comfortable there. So universities are largely self-governing.
The faculty determines who is gonna be on the faculty, who is gonna get tenure, and they guard this jealously. They have the freedom to decide what to think, what to study, what to research. Other places don't have that. They have ministers of education, and there's more of a top-down approach that's bottom-up here.
So if the government says, we want to be the ones who decide who's teaching, what you're teaching, then they're challenging this notion of academic freedom. And that's sacrosanct on college campuses. And that's why people are going crazy. This notion, Donald Trump or anybody else in the federal government gets to determine what should be on a curriculum, on a syllabus.
That's a First Amendment issue. So on the one hand, you've got overreach from the left. that squashed intellectual debate on college campuses because they said, we'll cancel you if you say certain things, if you believe certain things. And a lot of faculty were aligned with that. And now you've got the right coming in and saying, we're gonna take over and we're gonna be the ones who decide.
And so there's this sense of overreach from the right. But the university also has an obligation to regulate itself so that it is not so far out of touch with the American public in this case politically, that the support that the American public is giving them makes sense to the public. And so this disconnect is why this is happening.
Thanks very much.
So international students who come to the US, granted that they only make up 6% of the total population enrolled in universities, their economic contributions is quite significant. We track that on a yearly basis. And for our most recent data, it's about $43 billion. And it's not only to universities, by the way.
The 43 billions are to universities, but also to the local economy of where those universities are situated. And it's also over 300,000 jobs that are created as a result of international students coming to the US to study. Most of the students who come to study tends to be graduate students. They study generally in the STEM fields or in the business administration area.
In terms of their source of funding, the source of funding is mostly students who are self-funded. However, at the graduate level, given the importance of research and given the importance of assistantship and so forth, there are graduate students who come with funding provided to them in return for research and assistantship at the graduate level.
What we keep hearing from students and from stakeholders is a lot of anxiety, tremendous confusion around the processes and so forth, and the need for greater answers and transparency around these processes. We're constantly hearing that. For students who make the decision to come and study in the United States, that's not a small decision to make.
Preliminary data has indicated that in several parts of the world where there had been previously a high level of interest in wanting to come and study in the US, that we're seeing about a 40% decline in the number of those students who are looking to the US as a destination. So if universities...
Well, it depends, right? Because a good number of them are graduate students. Whether you're talking about business programs and other fields of study, graduate students are bringing in funding to the university. They're bringing tuition dollars to the university. But also, for those universities that are receiving research funding,
Often at the graduate level, particularly in fields like the STEM field and others, a lot of times it is graduate students who are working in partnerships with faculty to in many ways be able to fuel the research engine of universities as well.
And that's another component that could be potentially at risk is the research infrastructure and the ability to be able to conduct the level of research that is often needed with both domestic and international students as we speak.
I think it can be a hit to the reputation of universities, not in the immediate, because these are universities that have had a long-standing and solid reputation for decades internationally, but I do think over a period of time it could be.
The other piece about this also is that international students, in many ways, when they come and they study and they've learned more about the United States and they go back home, they become a very important bridge to trade and other relations for the United States. So the loss of that can have other consequences in the long run.
Thank you, Alex. Thank you for the opportunity.
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