.jpg&w=1920&q=75)
State taxpayer-funded Arizona State University is a listed founding member of a “global” college education network created by notorious progressive internationalist billionaire George Soros with $1 billion in seed money in 2020 and originally led by a longtime education official currently mired in a major scandal over his prominent presence in the Epstein Files.
“Arizona State University is a member of the Open Society University Network, a global higher education alliance established in 2020,” the school states right at this moment on the “Global at ASU” portal on its website. “With a shared commitment to academic freedom and institutional resilience, OSUN fosters collaboration among its partners to tackle global challenges such as climate change, inequality and human rights.”
Soros’s Open Society Foundations flagship operation announced the formation of OSUN in a January 2020 news release. “George Soros announced today that he is creating a new university network to better prepare students for current and future global challenges. He is endowing the network with one billion dollars ($1 billion) and asking other philanthropists to contribute,” the statement begins.
Epstein Pal Hails ‘Transformative Initiative in Higher Education’
One university founded by Soros and another that is heavily funded by him are key to the enterprise, with ASU the first university named as a member. “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,” OSF declared.
Soros has heavily bankrolled Bard College over the years. In 2021, he gave the university a whopping $500 million as part of a “landmark endowment challenge” seeking matching funding.
Bard President Leon Botstein was appointed founding “chancellor” of OSUN. His devotion to the Soros agenda was fully acknowledged.
“OSUN is the most transformative initiative in higher education I have witnessed in my career. It promises robust and diverse partnerships, and innovation extending critical inquiry, research, and scholarship on an international scale,” Botstein crowed in the 2020 OSF news release. “I want to express my gratitude to Mr. Soros and the Open Society Foundations for their vision and confidence.”
OSUN is now known as the Global Higher Education Alliance for the 21st Century after a 2025 rebrand.
Botstein today finds himself at the center of a storm of controversy due to emails released by the Justice Department in the infamous Epstein Files, the trove of correspondence from and to late pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Botstein’s name appears over 2,500 times in the Files. In May, Botstein announced he would retire as Bard president just as an independent review of his Epstein ties was spurring the college’s Board of Trustees to vote to remove him from the position.
On Oct. 7, Botstein “resigned immediately from all remaining positions he held at” Bard after Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, released a letter demanding a federal investigation into “an email in which Botstein asked Jeffrey Epstein about a young woman Epstein was trafficking.” “Is [Jane Doe] for me or are you keeping her for yourself?” the email reads. Botstein claims he never wrote such an email.
‘Social Justice Through Education’
The Open Society University Network under its new GHEA21 moniker is a leading supporter of global mass migration. Arizona State is specifically mentioned as a participant in this effort.
“The OSUN Hubs for Connected Learning Initiatives also supports refugee access to higher education through the Refugee Higher Education Access Program (RhEAP) in cooperation with BRAC’s Center for Peace and Justice, Princeton’s Global History Lab, and Arizona State University by equipping them with the necessary skills and foundational education to qualify for BA degree programs,” a 2022 post carried over from the old OSUN website to the new GHEA21 page states.
A Hubs mission statement details the credentialed internationalist involvement with GHEA21:
“Through deep partnerships with GHEA21 partners across the Network, actors in countries of first asylum, States, refugee-led organizations, the private sector, and [United Nations] agencies, the Hubs design and implement programs for post-secondary learners, teachers working in these communities, and refugee researchers exploring issues related to refugees and displaced people. As a global leader in the refugee education space, the Hubs advocate for educational access and the needed policy changes to ensure durable solutions, to cultivate strong connections between GHEA21 partners, and to foreground the university as an actor for social justice through education.”
In a 2022 op-ed he co-authored for the news site Inside Higher Ed, Botstein extolled ASU and Bard College for supporting the importation of student refugees into America:
“As our two examples demonstrate, support for refugee students’ higher education does not have to be limited to only one type of institution: ASU is a state university with one of the largest enrollments in the nation, while Bard is a liberal arts college with an enrollment of about 2,000. Despite our differences, we share in the commitment to refugee students’ education and recognize that now is the time – and the new university pathway the vehicle – to meet this global challenge facing higher education.”
“The time is now for the Biden administration to act on establishing a new university sponsorship program for refugee students,” the subhead to the article proclaimed.
From Soros Staffer to ASU Dean
Soros has given millions of dollars over the years to the Arizona State University Foundation for a New American University, including a $500,000 grant in 2024 “to provide support to the McCain Institute for International Leadership.”
Not surprisingly, his influence can be found within the university’s halls of education. An Open Society Foundations alum is an associate dean at ASU. Iveta Silova is Professor and Associate Dean of Global Engagement at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. This is from Silova’s official ASU bio:
“Prior to her academic career in the US, she worked as an education researcher and adviser with various international organizations, including UNICEF, UNESCO, USAID, and the Open Society Institute/Soros Foundations.”
Her educational pursuits at ASU fully reflect this background.
Silova “supervises PhD students undertaking research in the areas of globalization and education borrowing; post-socialist transformations; post-colonialism, decolonial studies, and border-thinking; artificial intelligence and education; nature-culture interactions in the anthropocene; as well ecofeminism [sic] and environmental sustainability,” the bio continues.
What’s that big A-word mean?
“We are living in a time many people refer to as the Anthropocene. Humans have become the single most influential species on the planet, causing significant global warming and other changes to land, environment, water, organisms and the atmosphere,” the UK’s Natural History Museum explains.
Silova embraces an animist, anti-human “dominance” view of ecology and education.
“The challenge is to bring all of this diversity into focus, to make education itself more inclusive of different worlds and worldviews.... [W]e have much to learn from non-Western and indigenous ways of knowing and being that have been practicing a more reciprocal relationship with the Land and all its beings, both living and nonliving, for thousands and thousands of years,” she says in a 2020 interview with ASU on a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO]-commissioned report for a “Futures of Education initiative” that she contributed to.
International radical feminism is another area of academic expertise under the Soros umbrella at ASU.
“Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice built on the inspiring accomplishments of recent courses and initiatives offered at various OSUN colleges and universities and acknowledges the importance of transnational feminism as a toolkit for social-justice activism,” GHEA21 writes on its website. The topic page highlights a project headed by two ASU researchers.
“Led by Angela Serrano (Universidad de los Andes), Magda Hinojosa (Arizona State University) and Camila Páez (Arizona State University), this research project explores how new transnational feminist movements in the Global South address the whole range of conditions of gendered exploitation that are structural to contemporary capitalism.”
This is just a small portion of what George Soros’s money is turning out at Arizona State University. Perhaps Arizona taxpayers would like to know why one of their signature state-funded universities is avidly working to further this man’s messianic leftist globalist vision?
.jpg&w=1920&q=75)
.jpg&w=1920&q=75)
