Editor,
As non-profit and taxpayer-subsidized, American universities look to augment their treasuries by setting up lucrative campuses in the Middle East, but they can be unwittingly supporting autocratic fusions of monarchy and fundamentalist theocracy.
For example, New York University has had a campus built in Abu Dhabi with imported South Asian construction workers laboring in the most egregious conditions of imprisoned slavery — this in a city Fortune magazine has called the richest in the world.
But both monarchies and fundamentalist theocracies have had zero qualms in building mansions as palaces and Houses of Worship with slaves and indentured servants, whom they deliberately and systematically keep poor.
In the Arab world, this cruel schism is held in place by the superiority their royal families and now rich businessmen wielding their notorious khalifa system feel toward, say, the hordes of kafir laboring for them from India, while their own young men go to their universities to study “religious philosophy.”
All this on account of the laziness a lucky, local population can feel in nations that are a layer of sand on a vast reservoir of oil, which is paying for the vast majority of their workforce now imported from poorer, third world nations.
This is why Frenchman Denis Diderot (1713-1784) can be forgiven for proclaiming: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
Till then, American higher education spreading abroad should include teaching the vital importance of anti-slavery and anti-trafficking laws, and how these can only be implemented in a democracy, hint-hint.
Sincerely,
Arun Anand Ahuja
UNM student
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