What’s Behind Metric Media’s Info Request for Nation’s Public Colleges? Sampan Finds Out

A news report on GBH posted recently caught our attention. The story was about how the head of a national media company, Brian Timpone, who runs Metric Media, was seeking information from public colleges and universities about course materials that he deemed “anti-American.”

Metric Media, according to the story, was also seeking data on the number of enrolled Chinese national students (which Timpone explains further below). Several Massachusetts schools were on the list of U.S. schools, including the University of Massachusetts-Boston.

Given earlier attempts by some politicians to try to block Chinese international students — who like other students from abroad often have to pay full tuition costs — and attacks on higher education over the past two years, Sampan wanted to find out why Metric Media was making the requests. Earlier this year, a group of Republican lawmakers pushed a measure attempting to bar Chinese international students from the U.S. and later, the U.S. State Department issued a short statement on plans to “aggressively” crack down on some students from China and Hong Kong ­­— efforts which Sampan has criticized in editorials. And throughout the past couple of years, both little known schools and those as famous as Harvard University have been under attack both for students’ solidarity with Palestine and for diversity efforts. Those attacks escalated when the current presidential administration issued executive orders combating what it called “anti-Semitism” on campuses and DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion, programs.

Sampan interviewed Timpone to hear more about his plans as well as some area schools for their take on the request.

First, this is what the University of Massachusetts Boston said:

“At UMass Boston we believe the future of American higher education will not be saved by slashing programs or closing our doors to the world. It will be saved by embracing the full richness of the students who want to be here and who can lead us into a more just, innovative, and interconnected future,” wrote DeWayne Lehman director of communications at the University of Massachusetts Boston in an emailed response. “We are shaping the citizens and problem-solvers of tomorrow. To do that well, we need every kind of mind at the table — in state, out of state, international and from every ethnic background.”

Following is the exchange between Sampan reporter Liam Crampton, who is also a student at UMass-Boston, and Timpone:

Sampan: When you say you are looking for anti-American content being taught in these college classrooms, what exactly do you mean by anti-American? What would fall under that category in your mind? Do you have an example of something you’ve witnessed in a college class before (you don’t have to name the school)?

Timpone: When U.S. universities instruct students that Marxism is viable and has been successful — that it is not the murderous, illiberal ideology we know it has been, through observed experience in our own lifetimes — they are by definition “anti-American.”

When professors teach young, impressionable students that slavery was a unique sin of the U.S., rather than something that every society in the history of humanity practiced, and that the U.S. played the leading role in ending it, at incomprehensible human expense, they are purposefully trying to sow division and subvert the country. I’ll also add — it is particularly noxious that U.S. taxpayers are the ones funding all of this.

Sampan: What is the purpose behind requesting the number of Chinese national students? Why specifically Chinese students and not students from other countries? Is this just referring to Mainland China? Is there a higher concern for them to consume (what you believe is) Anti-American content?

Timpone: We have requested information on students from all countries, not just China. U.S. taxpayer-funded universities are for the children of U.S. taxpayers, not foreigners. What was once a legitimate effort to recruit exceptional foreign students to the U.S., to help the U.S., has become something completely different.

Sampan: What is your end goal if this information were to be given to you? What are you generally trying to accomplish with this project?

Timpone: We’re going to publish all of this information to inform our citizenry to what is happening. Parents should know what they are paying professors to teach their children. And when a parent has to send their child to a university many states away, rather than the state university for which they are paying, they should know the reason. They should know that hundreds of thousands of spots once reserved for in-state students are now given to foreign nationals who aren’t exceptional at all. It’s a complete outrage.

— Adam Smith contributed to this report.