When we hear about foreign governments using their money to buy influence in our universities, the Chinese come first to mind. Then there are places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, eager to have American students think well of them.

But as Christopher Schilling notes in today’s Martin Center article, Germany is also playing that game.

He writes:

Through the quasi-governmental agency German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), “German studies professors” are placed at universities across America to teach courses on politics, history, anthropology, and philosophy. They are paid in part by DAAD and supervised with a clearly defined mandate to represent German national interests.

Our universities get some “free” teaching, but the profs aren’t objective scholars. They’re chosen because they’ll be policy assets for the government.

So, just what is the problem here? Schilling provides examples. Here’s a slice:

Other events and relationships further expose DAAD’s problems. The professor who led the “Jewish Pimps” project was invited to deliver a “German Studies Seminar” at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2021, despite her involvement, as one Israeli scholar put it, in “weakening or replacing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s 2016 Working Definition of Antisemitism.” Another actor in that effort is the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which ironically partners with the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University in Washington, D.C. The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation emerged from the Communist regime of East Germany and, later, the radical left in the reunited country. It has been widely criticized for its anti-Israel activities.

Just as most of our colleges and universities have finally turned away from the Chinese “Confucius Institutes,” perhaps it is also time for them to decline DAAD.