China's soft power ... in US universities?

China conducts in its own strange ways acts that are political, which makes me more and more uneasy about its rapidly growing economic and military strength.  If that is how I feel, when comfortably situated in the US, I can easily imagine the much larger scope of anxieties among the typical Filipino or Vietnamese or Japanese or ...

Forget the big-time news generating activities like the Chinese hacking into the US government data.  Set aside even how "China is quietly permitting and even encouraging companies to steal American agricultural secrets right out of the ground." Allow me to bring this much closer to where I live.

The University of Oregon has a Confucius Institute.

It was inaugurated in fall 2010. The institute is made possible with the support of our partners in China: The Chinese Language Council International (Hanban), and East China Normal University in Shanghai.

What's the big deal about it?  Consider the following:

Cantonese was widely taught at Canadian and American universities 30 years ago, says Ross King, head of UBC’s [University of British Columbia] Asian-studies programme. That is because most Chinese immigrants came from Hong Kong and southern China, where it is the main language. Cantonese still resounds in Chinatowns, such as those of Vancouver and San Francisco. But the economic rise of mainland China, whose official language is Mandarin Chinese (or putonghua), is pushing Cantonese off the streets and out of the academy.

Why should this matter?  There is pressure to ditch Cantonese and to teach Mandarin instead.

UBC is putting up a fight. The university has rejected four offers from the Confucius Institute, a cultural body financed by China’s government, to expand its teaching of Mandarin.

The Confucius Institute has a determined political agenda.  In the old days, such operations would have been located outside the academic walls.  But these days, universities are ready to take money from anybody who is willing to give them in plenty.  The Koch brothers buy out an economics department.  The Chinese government peddles its influence.  It is a bizarre academic world of prostituting for money!

It takes a lot to fight that kind of prostitution.  UBC is the latest to join a line--perhaps too short a line--of universities that have rejected funding from the Confucius Institute.  The most high profile one in the US happened a few months ago:

Critics of the program are uncomfortable that faculty is sent from China — an exception to the tradition that a university judges who is fit to teach its students — and say that classes avoid controversial subjects such as the Tiananmen Square massacre and Falun Gong, a religious sect outlawed in China. Some schools that host the programs have canceled visits from the Dalai Lama under pressure from Beijing.
The University of Chicago was one of the country's first elite schools to adopt the program, but it severed its relationship with the Confucius Institute in September.

Are you now beginning to get a tad uncomfortable as well?  Not yet?  How about I add this:

The American Association of University Professors and its Canadian counterpart have urged universities to end partnerships with the Confucius Institute unless academic control reverts to host universities. The Toronto School District and Pennsylvania State University both recently canceled plans for a Confucius Institute.
But the programs remain attractive to many schools.

It remains attractive because, hey, it is all about the money!  (I don't know if the Institute interferes with the academic affairs at the University of Oregon.)

China's money-based-war will continue and expand, especially under the current leadership, which sees a huge brand value in the name "Confucius":

Since he came to power in 2012, Mr Xi has sought to elevate Confucius—whom Mao vilified—as the grand progenitor of Chinese culture. ...
 he evidently sees Confucianism as a powerful ideological tool, with its stress on order, hierarchy, and duty to ruler and to family. Unlike the party’s imported, indigestible Marxist dogma, Confucianism has the advantage of being home-grown. It appeals to a yearning for ancient values among those unsettled by China’s blistering pace of change.

I way prefer the old ways, like the USIS and the British Council that I used to frequent back in Madras.  Ah, the good ol' days when the US and the UK left it to their own professionals to do the dirty work ;)

From engineering to terrorism ....

I present you this excerpt from an interesting piece in Slate!

A paper (PDF) released this summer by two sociologists, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, adds empirical evidence to this observation. The pair looked at more than 400 radical Islamic terrorists from more than 30 nations in the Middle East and Africa born mostly between the 1950s and 1970s. Earlier studies had shown that terrorists tend to be wealthier and better-educated than their countrymen, but Gambetta and Hertog found that engineers, in particular, were three to four times more likely to become violent terrorists than their peers in finance, medicine or the sciences. The next most radicalizing graduate degree, in a distant second, was Islamic Studies.

And here is the best part:

Is there some set of traits that makes engineers more likely to participate in acts of terrorism? To answer this question, Gambetta and Hertog updated a study that was first published in 1972, when a pair of researchers named Seymour Lipset and Carl Ladd surveyed the ideological bent of their fellow American academics. According to the original paper, engineers described themselves as "strongly conservative" and "deeply religious" more often than professors in any other field. Gambetta and Hertog repeated this analysis for data gathered in 1984, so it might better match up with their terrorist sample. They found similar results, with 46 percent of the (male American) engineers describing themselves as both conservative and religious, compared with 22 percent of scientists.

Gambetta and Hertog write about a particular mind-set among engineers that disdains ambiguity and compromise. They might be more passionate about bringing order to their society and see the rigid, religious law put forward in radical Islam as the best way of achieving those goals. In online postings, Abdulmutallab expressed concern over the conflict between his secular lifestyle and more extreme religious views. "How should one put the balance right?" he wrote.

Terrorist organizations seem to have recognized this proclivity—in Abdulmutallab, obviously, but also among engineers in general. A 2005 report from British intelligence noted that Islamic extremists were frequenting college campuses, looking for "inquisitive" students who might be susceptible to their message. In particular, the report noted, they targeted engineers.

I used to be an engineer. How about that for full disclosure!!!! hey, hey, don't you call up the FBI on me :-)

"Hottest" law school dean against torture

Asha Rangappa writes in Slate that:

whatever we conclude about the effectiveness of torture on terrorism suspects abroad, we will never use it to elicit information from people within the United States. That leaves trust and cooperation as our most promising means of getting intelligence domestically, and maintaining our good-guy image is vital to that effort. Any intelligence obtained through torture has to be balanced against the diminished capacity of the FBI to effectively exploit its intelligence base here at home. We should remember that when we calculate what kind of interrogation is a net gain or loss for our national security.

So, where does the "hottest" adjective come from, you ask? Details here:

There are certain honors that most lawyers aspire to such as clerking for the Supreme Court, or being selected for it. And there are others that descend unwished for, like a boon sent by the gods to the wrong supplicant. One of these is winning the annual contest for hottest law school dean. In 2006, this “honor” went to Yale Law School Assistant Dean Asha Rangappa who the sponsoring web page called “as hot as a fire in a crowded theater.

Now, the last name "Rangappa" almost certainly points to her roots to Coorg, which has a sobriquet of the "Scotland of India." The last name then might mean Kodagu origins?

One of my classmates back in high school was "Belliappa" whose father was "Medappa" ..... wonder whatever happened to him ....