So, a big deal was made by all last week when businessman Stephen Schwartzman decided to fork over $300 million (one-third his own money, two-thirds money he’s collected from a whip-round of blue-chip American companies) to create a set of scholarships for (mostly) foreign students to study at Tsinghua University.  The money will fund 100 students per year – 20 Chinese, 45 American, and the balance from the rest of the world – to study at Tsinghua’s newly created Schwartzman College.  Cue immediate comparisons to the Rhodes (not least from the donor himself), and tortured metaphors about tsumamis re-shaping international higher education, etc.

Allow me to be the killjoy here.  There are three obvious points which need to be made about this donation:

1)      Just doing the math on this: 4% times $300 million is $12 million/year, or $120,000 per student.  Clearly, the entirety of that sum won’t be going to support scholars directly – a lot of this money seems to be for the Schwartzman College itself, rather than for the scholars.

2)      The assumption that a scholarship’s size relates directly to its level of prestige is just crazy.  Gates scholarships are twice the size of the Rhodes, but you’d have to be directly related to Bill to think they were equivalent in prestige.  Scholarships are only as good as their alumni – and those take decades to pan-out.

3)      Schwartzman, for some reason, is under the impression that the college which bears his name  will have full academic freedom, even though it is located in one of China’s most politically sensitive universities (located in the capital, Tsinghua is the alma mater of both Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao).  One suspects that, far from building a culture of greater trust and understanding between China and the US, as Schwartzman wishes, there’s a fair chance that an incident over free speech could wreck the whole thing.

There is a fourth point, actually.  Despite the overblown Rhodes analogy, and the potential pratfalls on academic freedom, and how the membership of the program’s advisory Board (Kissinger, Blair, Mulroney(!), Sarkozy, etc.) suggests that there’s more at work here than philanthropic motives – let’s give credit where it’s due.  At least American philanthropists are prepared to put money into international education.  From what I hear from university fundraisers, Canadian philanthropists show not the slightest interest in international education.

That’s mirrored at the governmental level, of course: our government interest in international education lies purely in getting foreign students to spend money here, while the US State Department has created the “100,000 Strong” scholarship initiative to increase study in China.

How exactly Canadians get off deriding Americans as being insular, I’m not quite sure.