The U.S. Should Stop Supporting the American University of Beirut https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2020/06/the-u-s-should-stop-supporting-the-american-university-of-beirut/

June 26, 2020 | Tamara Berens
About the author: Tamara Berens, a former Krauthammer Fellow at Mosaic, is the director of young professional programming at the Tikvah Fund.

Every year, Washington sends millions of dollars to the American University of Beirut (AUB), an institution that for many decades hasn’t lived up to the ideals of tolerance and liberal education on which it was founded. Tamara Berens argues that it is time for the U.S. to end the relationship:

In recent years, the AUB has been accused of providing material aid to Hizballah, a designated terrorist organization at odds with U.S. interests.

The university has an American Studies department with a chair endowed in the memory of the [viciously anti-Israel] Arab-American scholar Edward Said. . . . From 2015 to 2017, Steven Salaita occupied this chair. Salaita had previously made headlines when the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign withdrew his tenure-faculty appointment after he was found to have issued a series of incendiary tweets relating to Israel and the Palestinians, including one that read, “Zionists: transforming ‘anti-Semitism’ from something horrible to something honorable since 1948.”

Before Salaita, the chair had been held by Lisa Hajjar, a sociology professor with a long history of harshly criticizing Israel and American counterterrorism policy who had expressed support for the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Though private institutions can teach what they want and hire whom they want, the U.S. should not pursue the worthy goal of liberalizing the Middle East by underwriting illiberal universities. . . . If the American University of Beirut has become American in name only, it no longer deserves America’s support.

Read more on National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/american-university-of-beirut-doesnt-deserves-american-taxpayer-funding/