By: Edward Sellenkoop
George Soros, widely condemned as the funding source for the bullying group Antifa, has found something new to do with his mountains of money: he is spending $1 billion on what he calls an “educational initiative aimed at promoting free and open societies.”
The announcement came at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Friday.
Soros wants to establish the Open Society University Network, targeting an impressionable group – students – with lots of naivete and little to no real-world experience or knowledge.
The network, which will operate throughout the world, is named the Open Society University Network (OSUN). It will integrate teaching and research across higher education institutions worldwide, his group said in a release. It will offer simultaneously taught network courses and joint degree programs and regularly bring students and faculty from different countries together with in-person and online discussions. The network aims to reach the students who need it the most and to promote the values of open society—including free expression and diversity of beliefs.
“OSUN will seek to promote rigorous education and reach institutions in need of international partners, as well as neglected populations, such as refugees, incarcerated people, the Roma and other displaced groups. OSUN, with the help of its allies, is ready to start a massive “scholars at risk” program, merging a large number of academically excellent but politically endangered scholars into this new global network,” according to the release.
“Already, OSUN is connecting institutions of higher learning and is holding networked courses that unite students and faculty from several universities located in different parts of the world in the classroom, sharing faculty and conducting joint research projects in which people from many universities collaborate.”
Noted Soros, “I believe our best hope lies in access to an education that reinforces the autonomy of the individual by cultivating critical thinking and emphasizing academic freedom. I consider the Open Society University Network to be the most important and enduring project of my life and I should like to see it implemented while I am still around.”
Soros, who has given more than $32 billion over the past 30 years to education and social justice causes, added: “We are looking for farsighted partner institutions who feel a responsibility for the future of our civilization, people who are inspired by the goals of OSUN and want to participate in its realization.”
The Central European University (CEU), which Soros founded, and Bard College will form the core of the new network. They will partner with Arizona State University, a world leader in distance learning, and other institutions around the globe, such as the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan and BRAC University in Bangladesh.
