Western governments and universities have long treated international education as the gentle face of foreign policy. Programmes such as the American Fulbright and the British Chevening are presented as enlightened tools of statecraft: identify bright students from abroad, immerse them in liberal institutions, and send them home as friends. Fee-paying international students at prestigious universities are wrapped in similar rhetoric. They are meant to become bridges between societies and quiet ambassadors of mutual understanding.
Most of the time, something like this does happen. The overwhelming majority of international students study, struggle with rent, make cross-cultural friendships, and leave with mixed but generally favorable views of their host countries. This essay is not about them.
It is about a smaller but increasingly visible minority for whom Western education and scholarships function in a very different way: as platforms from which to denounce Western polities as decadent, illegitimate, or permanently indebted, sometimes in ways that shade into justificatory extremism. Their effectiveness depends precisely on the prestige Western institutions have conferred on them. They speak not as external critics but as ordained insiders whose judgements Western elites and publics are primed to treat as weighty.
There are several possible remedies for this. First, it is noted that international scholarships and foreign students studying at elite universities are openly conceived as tools of statecraft and soft power, but in practice they are ordination machines: they manufacture capability, credentials, and platforms, not loyalty. Second, it can be illustrated by way of examples how Western exposure and prestige amplify projects that depict Western societies as morally discredited, often in civilizational terms, and they do so precisely because Western audiences instinctively defer to graduates of their own apex institutions.
Finally, by distinguishing between liberal commitments to free speech and the quite different question of whom institutions fund, platform, and badge with honor, the conservative doctrine of sponsorship has grown more appealing. That is, Western states and universities, including formally private ones, may and ought to withhold scarce, high-prestige opportunities from projects premised on their own illegitimacy, without violating free expression. The critics may speak; they are not entitled to a prestigious platform on which to do so.
International Students and Scholarships as Statecraft
The foreign-study programmes that now structure international education were never politically innocent. The United States’ Fulbright–Hays Act of 1961, which established the eponymous scholarships, explicitly frames educational exchange as a way to “increase mutual understanding” and “strengthen the ties which unite us with other nations.” The UK government describes its Chevening scholarships as “[supporting] UK foreign policy priorities and [achieving] FCDO [Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office] objectives by creating lasting positive relationships with future leaders, influencers, and decision-makers.” From the outset, these schemes were instruments of statecraft: they aimed at cultivating foreign elites who would be sympathetic to, or at least understanding of, the sponsoring state.
In official strategy documents, international students more broadly have been pulled into the same frame. Policy papers and sector commentary in the UK and the U.S. routinely emphasize that hosting foreign students advances soft power and public diplomacy, alongside the more obvious benefits of tuition income and local spending. The empirical record is more equivocal than the rhetoric. Antonio Spilimbergo’s oft-cited article finds in the American Economic Review (March 2009) that foreign-educated individuals are associated with democratization in their home states, but only when they studied in democratic countries, and even then the relationship is probabilistic rather than guaranteed. More recent work complicates the story further: a study of Chinese students in the United States finds that experiences of racism and xenophobia increase support for authoritarian rule at home, whereas exposure to non-racist criticism of the Chinese government does not have this effect. Foreign study, in other words, can make recipients more or less sympathetic to liberal democracy depending on what they encounter.1
A modest conclusion suggests itself. International education schemes do alter political attitudes, but outcomes are highly contingent on prior beliefs and lived experience. What they reliably produce, then, is not political alignment but a particular kind of person: individuals who have lived inside Western societies, navigated their institutions, and acquired highly portable credentials.
Universities as Prestige Machines
Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of elite education helps explain why this matters. In The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, he argues that such institutions do not simply transmit knowledge or skills. They manufacture symbolic capital: recognized prestige, honor, and status that can be converted into influence in politics, bureaucracy, business, and intellectual life. An Oxbridge or Ivy League degree is not merely a signal of ability; it is a consecration.
Scholarship schemes and prestigious universities, then, are ordination machines. They identify promising outsiders, subject them to demanding selection processes, immerse them in valued institutions, and send them back into the world bearing stamps of Western approval: “Fulbright alumnus,” “Rhodes Scholar,” “Harvard Ph.D.” Those stamps travel extraordinarily well. They open doors to ministries, editorial pages, international organizations, NGOs, and universities far beyond the West itself, as the alumni pages of these programs will happily boast.
Crucially, prestige is not a general-purpose ornament. It is tightly coupled to the capacity to shape Western opinion itself. Western elites, for understandable reasons, are trained to perk up when someone from “our” apex institutions speaks. The graduate of a provincial university abroad criticizing Western foreign policy can be dismissed as resentful or ill-informed. The Harvard- or Oxford-trained critic, especially if they come from the Global South, is granted a presumption of insight. Journalists commission their op-eds, think-tanks host their panels, and publishers market their books as important voices we must hear.
Prestige, in other words, selects who can wound. It does not determine the direction of the blow, but it constrains who is admitted into the circle of those whose blows count. This is why the coupling of Western ordination and anti-Western political projects matters: it is not simply that critics exist, but that they are placed in positions from which Western institutions instinctively defer to them. It is whether Western civilisation’s rarest symbols of ordination are used to crown its most articulate accusers.
At the same time, and to rebut presumptively my critics, the practical life prospects of these individuals do not stand or fall with membership of the symbolic apex. Even if a prospective accuser is denied a place at Harvard or Oxford, a Rhodes Scholarship or an Ivy League doctorate, they may still gain admission to solid but less prestigious Western universities, or to joint programmes and transnational campuses, that enjoy a “resource and prestige advantage” over local options: indeed, it could be argued that “studying in (and physically relocating to) Western, Anglophone countries is still perceived by many students as the pinnacle, in the context of a global field of higher education.” In many home labor markets, such degrees are more than sufficient for what we might call everyday practical goals: entry into civil services and foreign ministries, university posts, NGOs, law firms, and media. Rejection from prestigious colleges or scholarships on the conservative grounds I will later outline does not condemn these students to illiteracy. Western liberals are understandably uneasy about “closing doors” for talented students from poorer or unstable societies. But setting aside the fact that gratitude is a small thing to learn, in any case their capacity to live, work, and succeed can be unaffected.
Accusing the West
With this in view, consider the pattern that concerns me. It involves a comparatively small group of international students and scholarship holders whose public role depends on being both consecrated by Western institutions and sharply critical of Western societies.
Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian literary critic and later Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, spent almost two years in the United States between 1948 and 1950, studying education in Washington, Colorado, and at Stanford. His essay usually translated as “The America That I Have Seen” portrays American life as materialistic, sexually licentious, spiritually barren, and politically complicit in Zionism, and is widely taken as a turning point in his development of a comprehensive Islamist critique in which “the West” figures as a kind of global ignorance and idolatry. The force of that critique partly rests on his claim to have known America from the inside.
Eric X. Li, a Shanghai-based investor and commentator educated at Berkeley and Stanford, is best known in the West for his TED talk “A Tale of Two Political Systems,” which defends China’s one-party regime as not only legitimate but in key respects superior to Western democracy. His authority in Western debate does not derive from any party post, but from the fact that he speaks flawless English from the stages and op-ed pages of institutions that trained and endorsed him. Western elites listen because he carries their own badges.
Brian Wong, a Hong Kong-born Rhodes Scholar at Oxford’s Balliol College, offers a more academic variant. In Moral Debt: Defending a New Account of Reparative Justice (2025) he develops a theory of intergenerational obligations generated by historic injustice, focusing on paradigmatically Western cases such as Atlantic slavery, European empires and settler colonialism, and casting Western polities primarily as enduring debtors. The argument appears in a major Western press, framed in Western theoretical idioms, and gains much of its authority from being voiced by someone who has been singled out by Western institutions as a thought leader.
Sazi Bongwe, a South African writer and Harvard undergraduate, published “Taking Frantz Fanon at His Word” in The Nation’s StudentNation section, applying Fanon’s reflections on anti-colonial violence to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. Critics argued that the piece amounted to a moral rationalization of atrocities against civilians, a concern sharpened by Bongwe’s selection as a Rhodes Scholar-elect. The scandal lay not only in the article, but in the spectacle of such an institution elevating, as one of its standard-bearers, a writer apparently committed to a justificatory framework of that kind.
These figures disagree about religion, political models, and moral conclusions, and they are not representative of most international students or scholarship recipients. They are, precisely, part of the tiny minority that apex institutions single out for ordination. It is this group that will disproportionately shape elite discourse at home and in the West, and when they use their consecration chiefly to condemn Western societies as decadent, structurally illegitimate, or permanently indebted, they do so with a force their less credentialled counterparts lack, because Western institutions themselves have taught their elites to listen.
Liberty vs Prestige
At this point a predictable charge arises: is the remedy not simply censorship in another guise? If scholarship bodies or universities take political alignment into account, does this not chill radical criticism and entrench ideological conformity?
Answering this requires a clear distinction between speech and sponsored prestige.
Liberal societies owe robust protection to freedom of expression and academic inquiry. Within the normal limits of law, scholars and citizens are entitled to criticize empire, slavery, racism, foreign policy, and constitutional arrangements, and to argue for radical alternatives. They are entitled to do research, to apply for ethical approval, to submit articles to journals, and to publish books with whatever presses will take them.
Crucially, these things can all be done without being attached to elite institutions or funded by prestigious scholarships. Many doctoral students around the world, even at institutions which are not the most prestigious, self-fund their studies or rely on ordinary teaching assistantships or work part-time. Independent scholars write articles and monographs and send them to journals and publishers. The peer-review system does not formally discriminate against unaffiliated authors. In the age of digital publication, it is also perfectly possible to self-publish, build an online platform, and attract readers without any institutional backing at all.
What follows is simple. The ability to speak, research and publish is a right in a liberal order. The ability to speak, research, and publish as a Rhodes Scholar, Fulbright alumnus, or Ivy League doctoral candidate is not. It is a privilege dependent on the decisions of particular institutions. Those institutions select, fund, and platform people in ways that reflect their own missions and loyalties. That is not censorship. It is an exercise of associative freedom.
Moreover, universities and scholarship bodies are not free-floating global NGOs. Even when formally private, they are rooted in particular polities. They are chartered, regulated and protected by specific states. They are funded by alumni and benefactors whose wealth is underwritten by legal and economic orders. Their reputations are bound up with national histories.
The ordinary moral intuition that one may prefer one’s own—that parents may prioritize their children, that citizens may care specially about their compatriots—applies here too. The analogy is even starker if we examine the converse. The Catholic Church cannot be required to endow a chair or fund a doctoral student whose project is to prove that Christianity is a malignant fraud. A trade union need not fund a fellowship devoted to showing that collective bargaining is immoral and should be abolished. An army—in time of war—should rightfully be allowed to prevent a pacifist soldier from making his case to his comrades-in-arms while on duty. In each case, refusal to subsidize is not censorship; it is basic associative integrity. Western academic bodies stand in a parallel position. They should legitimately decline to underwrite projects whose core premise is that their own political community is irredeemable, or whose rhetoric flirts with apologetics for political violence against that community and its allies. To call that “censorship” is to flatten every institutional decision into a free-speech issue and to deny institutions and states any right to self-preservation. Institutions, in turn, embedded in Western polities owe those polities some degree of loyalty.
Within this frame, one can mark a category of projects that ought to trouble sponsors. Projects and individuals whose thought is marked by the organizing premise that the polity or civilization underwriting the scholarship is fundamentally illegitimate—ineradicably racist, criminal or colonial—and which can shade into justificatory extremism, presenting violence against civilians as historically mandated “resistance,” or threaten to place whole polities under conditions of permanent moral (and financial) debt. Those who hold such views are, perhaps, entitled to argue for them, research them and publish them. What they are not entitled to is a claim on the scarce prestige and public platform of institutions whose very existence they regard as a mistake. Where this has been conferred, there is an argument for retraction or withdrawal. Where this is merely a prospect, the eventuality should be forestalled.
The conservative doctrine of sponsorship is therefore modest. Western governments and universities should notoutlaw these views. They should, however, recognize that they are under no obligation—and arguably have strong associative reasons not—to subsidize and badge them with their highest honors. A government scholarship explicitly aimed at cultivating “friends of the UK” need not elevate individuals who deny that the UK is capable of legitimate self-government. A private university that owes its life to a particular legal and constitutional order need not and should not, with its rarest fellowships and chairs, endorse projects that treat that order as irredeemably unjust. Those individuals will often still be able to pursue their studies elsewhere, including in the West. What they lose is not education, but ordination.
Conclusion
Western universities and scholarship schemes have, for generations, excelled at educating their own critics. In one sense, this reflects a kind of moral courage: a civilization willing to train its prosecutors and hand them the tools with which to condemn it has not entirely lost faith in argument. In another sense, it is a strategic oddity. In a culture already prone, as Pascal Bruckner argues in The Tyranny of Guilt, to a debilitating politics of remorse and self-reproach, turning scholarships and elite degrees into ordinations for one’s most eloquent accusers looks less like nobility and more like carelessness.
The appropriate response is neither panic about international students nor withdrawal from the world. It is the recovery of two simple recognitions. First, speech in a free society should be broad, contentious, and sometimes hostile to the very order that protects it. Second, subsidized prestige is different. Institutions that depend on particular polities may rightly be generous, self-critical, and open. They are not required to be indifferent to their own survival, or to treat their highest honors as if they belonged to no country at all. Critics of the West may say what they like. They are not automatically owed the badge that tells Western audiences to take every word as gospel.
George F.A.W. St. Claire, a pseudonym, is a doctoral candidate in International Relations at the University of Oxford.
1 Yingjie Fan, Jennifer Pan, Ziji Shao, Yiqing Xu, “How Discrimination Increases Chinese Overseas Students’ Support for Authoritarian Rule,” (June 29, 2020). 21st Century China Center Research Paper No. 2020-05, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3637710.
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