
Why Is There So Much Saudi Money in American Universities? - johnny313
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/magazine/saudi-arabia-american-universities.html
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ed312
I don't understand the protests. I would expect educating Saudi youth in
exceptionally liberal institutions like universities in the Northeast to have
a net liberalizing effect on the Saudi government and culture long term. Is
this not a better use of Saudi funds then e.g. buying more weapons?

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mattmanser
It's a double edged sword. For a few reasons.

Firstly it maintains an elite who are much better educated, and skilled, than
those at home.

Secondly, when there's lots of foreign students from the same place, they just
clique up. In my university there were a lot of Chinese students that hung
around almost exclusively with other Chinese students.

One year I represented the student common room, a sort of social club/support
network for everyone living in one of the 20 odd accommodation halls.

Despite trying, the 50-100 Chinese in our hall never mixed, keeping themselves
extremely secluded from the rest of us. I remember chatting regularly with one
person.

To put that in context, I knew the name and would at least exchange greetings
with virtually every one of the other 200 odd people in the hall.

There were a lot of other foreign students because it was a self catering
hall. They were better, though still ultimately formed their own, mixed
nationality, foreign students clique within a few weeks. It was more
accessible though as the shared language was English.

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spunker540
I think a lot of foreign students come to the US wanting to make friends with
Americans and more-or-less “assimilate” but then quickly realize their English
language skills aren’t as strong as they thought and that the cultural
differences are larger than they thought and truthfully, that Americans aren’t
as welcoming and tolerant of those differences as they thought. So they
fallback to a much more comfortable situation by hanging out with other fellow
transplants in what is still a very foreign and challenging situation.

A much smaller scale example of this is when I studied for a semester in
France. I thought my French was decent but it turned out to be barely
comprehensible by native French-speakers which doesn’t make for easy or fun
friendships.

~~~
qwerty9876
In Finland the Erasmus/foreign exchange students of universities also tend to
hang out among themselves and the native Finns don't really care about them.

One thing I've heard is that the Finns consider many of the exchange students
to be a bit juvenile since in their home countries people often live with
parents until their 30s. Whereas most Finnish students move out and become
fully independent by age 20.

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veb
where on earth is it the norm to be living with your parents until you're in
your 30s?

Kiwi here, a lot of us move out and go flatting at the first possible chance
we get - which is right after high school/first year of uni.

~~~
sho
Lol. How about pretty much everywhere in Asia? China? Singapore? Korea? The
"norm" is to live at home until you get married, when you use all the money
you saved living rent-free at home to put down a hefty deposit on a house. I
know actual millionaires who still live with their parents!

Given the difficulty of affording a deposit for new home buyers who have been
renting since 18 (like me - Aussie here), I can see the logic in it.

I would go so far to say that the only time this is _not_ the norm is when
children move to a big city to work, leaving their parents back in their
smaller hometowns. Then they live as cheaply as possible in dorms that exist
for this purpose. There's a whole infrastructure.

~~~
lowdose
Still we can agree on the fact a millionaire living at hotel mom sounds
outrageous.

~~~
wrong_variable
Why is it outrageous ?

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sangnoir
It's sounds outrageous to ears that value individualism and "independence"
over community and family ties. Money is typically an enabler for independence
in such societies, so a millionaire who doesn't use their money to acquire
"independence" from their mom seems like an oddity.

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saudijulia
The Julia lab is seemingly one of those beneficiaries [1].

[1]
[https://karpinski.org/images/2017,bezanson,julia%20-%20a%20f...](https://karpinski.org/images/2017,bezanson,julia%20-%20a%20fresh%20approach%20to%20technical%20computing.pdf)

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jccalhoun
I did my phd at an R1 university with a large international student population
mostly from China and South Korea. When I graduated I got a adjunct job at a
nearby liberal arts college of about 1/3 the size and was surprised that most
of their international students were Saudis.

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amai
“Pecunia non olet” (Money does not stink)
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet)

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dogma1138
Because the Saudis have a ton of money to spend; more than they can spend
locally.

~~~
jraines
“The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they
must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological
balance!”

Arthur Jensen, NETWORK (1976)

~~~
catacombs
Great movie. Great play.

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keepsmiling
The Saudis are forming opinions, so they're giving you money.

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masonkay
Is there an alternate article link without paywall?

~~~
vuln
Bittercynic meantioned in another comment on a different post the following
method.

“Fwiw adding

0.0.0.0 samizdat-graph

to your /etc/hosts fixes this for me”

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gruez
> samizdat-graph

what? that's not even a valid domain.

~~~
bittercynic
should be

    
    
      0.0.0.0   samizdat-graphql.nytimes.com
    

in /etc/hosts

~~~
vuln
Thanks! I really appreciate your tip!

