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Exporting Knowledge Via Students
brainhum writes "SF Weekly reports that proposed Department of Commerce regulations will require foreign students at US universities to apply for export licenses to use dual purpose technologies in the classroom. From the article: 'Inherent in the new rules is a discriminatory contradiction: Students from India, which has cordial relations with the U.S., will need licenses to study, but students from Saudi Arabia -- home country for most of the participants in the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, and much of the financing and ideology behind Islamist terrorism -- will not.' The proposed regulations point out that current export license requirements are based on the person's most recent citizenship, which they believe, could allow a person born in Iran to avoid licensing if they held Canadian citizenship. More information is available in the SF Weekly story "Student of Concern"."
Going to a university is unlikely to help you kill Americans, but it is very likely to give you skills to take America down a peg economicly.
Incredible.
What happened to our ideals? I was taught that educating people, filling their heads with knowledge, also filled their hearts with respect for the society doing the teaching.
That's traditionally why military officers went to college.
And it's true: a professor stands in front of the class giving his political opinion between items in the subject matter. Students absorb it readily, since their guard is down - it has to be, or they won't be able to ace that test on Thursday.
I wonder if it's a side-effect of the reputation American academia has for expressing anti-American sentiment. If colleges and universities were known for talking up the US as the Land of the Free and the Home of the, etc., do you think the government would be trying to limit foreign citizens from exposure to it?
As it is, trying to regulate which people can learn what in the age of the Internet is like trying to control where the rain comes from or which way the wind blows when it leaves.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.