By Sophie Popplewell @ Shutterstock.com
America’s elite universities have come to rely heavily on the tuition paid by foreign students. Now, out of fear of upsetting their very lucrative international student bodies, universities like MIT are refusing to discipline radical protesters who have been harassing Jewish and Israeli students on campus. Jordan Esrig reports in The New York Sun:
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is walking back from its threat to suspend students who disrupted Jewish and Israeli students’ classes out of fear that doing so could lead to “visa issues” for the non-Americans who participated in the antisemitic tirades.
As the Sun previously reported, anti-Israel demonstrators blockaded the central lobby of the prestigious engineering school’s campus despite being warned that they would be suspended. Images of the warnings were later posted on X, formerly Twitter, but by Thursday afternoon, the University said it had decided against suspension.
In a statement, MIT’s President, Sally Kornbluth, said “we later heard serious concerns about collateral consequences for the students, such as visa issues” and concluded that students will “be suspended from non-academic campus activities.”
Ms. Kornbluth’s statement is the latest indication by a school administrator that the leaders of the anti-Israel movement may be foreign citizens studying in America on student visas.
On October 19th, Senators Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, Pete Ricketts, and Deb Fischer, wrote a letter urging the Department of Homeland Security to deport international students found to be loudly voicing support for Hamas terrorists.
“The U.S. Department of State has the authority to revoke visas. Under these authorities, you must immediately perform a full review and coordinate with the Department of State to revoke the visas of those who have endorsed or espoused Hamas’ terrorist activities and then deport them,” the letter by the three Senators read.
“This type of hateful, anti-Semitic behavior should not be tolerated anywhere in the United States, and we should certainly not permit it from guests to our country who are studying at the greatest colleges and universities in the world,” the senators said.
Read more here.
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