News Advisory: China Has Plenty of Clout on IU Campus

July 2, 2020

BEGINNING WITH the Coronavirus outbreak here, Margaret Menge, an adjunct scholar for the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, began researching the policy of her alma matter on students from China. 

She learned that in the 2019-2020 academic year, students from China paid just over $80 million to IU-Bloomington in tuition and fees alone. This is close to half the total amount of funding that IU Bloomington gets from the state of Indiana each year, which is around $200 million.

Those numbers and the clout that goes with them raise a question: Would an IU professor be free to teach objectively about the atrocities past and present of the Chinese Communist Party, or analyze China’s growing bellicosity?

With over two thousands students from China enrolled at IU last fall (fully a third of the total foreign national enrollees), it made sense for Menge to ask an IU spokesman whether he thought any of them had absorbed American values or otherwise met the university’s goals (other than the boon in tuition).

“Is there any real evidence that it’s worked at all,” Menge pressed, “that any students from China who have studied at IU have renounced communism or become dissidents, or returned to China and worked to reform and liberalize it. Is there anything remotely like this?”

Link to Menge’s full white paper here. We think you will find IU’s answer troubling.

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