“Friendly” Influence Matters, Too

Much has been reported lately on the influence of foreign actors such as Qatar, Iran, and China on American campuses. What seems to slip under the radar in this debate, however, is the influence of ostensibly friendly actors such as Germany.

Through the quasi-governmental agency German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), “German studies professors” are placed at universities across America to teach courses on politics, history, anthropology, and philosophy. They are paid in part by DAAD and supervised with a clearly defined mandate to represent German national interests.

DAAD aims to project a particular, curated, and state-approved understanding of Germany in accordance with its international-reputation strategies. While they teach at places such as Georgetown, Cornell, Berkeley, UNC-Chapel Hill, and other host universities of “strategic importance,” they report to the DAAD headquarters in Bonn. In DAAD’s own words, the goal of German studies professors is “the transmission of a contemporary image of Germany abroad.” The program aims to project a particular, curated, and state-approved understanding of Germany in accordance with its international-reputation strategies. This amounts to a foreign soft-power deployment within an American academic environment.

This amounts to a foreign soft-power deployment within an American academic environment. Unlike Fulbright exchanges for “mutual understanding,” DAAD professorships are long-term positions (2-5 years) of lasting institutional influence, especially since recipients are integrated into their departments and are most often renewed. DAAD professors are embedded in curriculum design and teaching and hence influence what gets taught and researched about Germany: which authors are emphasized, how political and cultural controversies are framed, and what guest speakers are invited.

DAAD’s 2024 evaluation acknowledges that the professorships are explicitly designed to serve foreign-cultural policy objectives (außenkulturpolitische Ziele). Consequently, while expecting to receive a critical academic education about Germany, students at host universities in America may receive a state-curated image instead.

All DAAD professors must apply through a German selection process before they are recommended to their host universities. DAAD considers whether candidates have lived in Germany at least in the past two years, as well as their ability to represent Germany in accordance with the mission. Actual teaching ability also plays a role but at times can be skipped over. The overall emphasis in the selection process is less on academic merit than on the ability to promote Germany as a “desirable place to study and do research” (Deutschland als attraktiven Studien- und Forschungsstandort). With these non-academic criteria in mind, DAAD professors effectively become instruments of foreign public diplomacy, while the American host universities effectively outsource part of their curriculum and student engagement to a foreign government.

Due to financial difficulties, DAAD recently had to cut 13 of its scholarship and university internationalization programs that allow German and foreign students to study and conduct research. Yet German studies professorships were not among the eliminated programs despite a declining number of applicants, which speaks to their importance.

DAAD is funded by the German Foreign Office, and the German constitution guarantees freedom of research and teaching as a fundamental right. But even without censorship or direct state pressure, DAAD’s structural incentives encourage a sanitized version of Germany to be taught at American universities. Germany’s failure in combating antisemitism, for instance, does not fit well with Germany’s new self-perception. A concept such as historischen Aufarbeitung (historical reappraisal) could, therefore, be framed positively, such that the professor emphasizes Germany’s morality and global leadership during Holocaust education.

I am not sure how much is left of that narrative of national virtue, given that the German government funds through another organization projects such as this one: “Jewish Pimps, Prostitutes and Campaigners in a Transnational German and British Context, 1875–1940.” Is the Germany that produces such antisemitic tropes a “desirable place to do research,” one that DAAD professors should promote, or is that to be ignored?

Presenting Germany’s methods to America as a way to engineer a better, less radical society is baffling. Other events and relationships further expose DAAD’s problems. The professor who led the “Jewish Pimps” project was invited to deliver a “German Studies Seminar” at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2021, despite her involvement, as one Israeli scholar put it, in “weakening or replacing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s 2016 Working Definition of Antisemitism.” Another actor in that effort is the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which ironically partners with the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University in Washington, D.C. The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation emerged from the Communist regime of East Germany and, later, the radical left in the reunited country. It has been widely criticized for its anti-Israel activities.

At times, the DAAD head office comments on American domestic politics, as well. Cynthia Miller-Idriss co-founded PERIL “after years of studying education-based responses to rising hate and extremist violence in contemporary Germany.” Yet, I see no evidence that those approaches have worked. Anyone can see that German society is radicalizing from all sides. Presenting its methods to America as a way to engineer a better, less radical society is baffling.

And what is there to copy? In 2022, a court in Hamburg exonerated a journalist for calling the official antisemitism commissioner for the German state of Baden-Württemberg an “antisemite,” given the “sufficient facts” supporting that characterization. The Simon Wiesenthal Center even put Germany on its “Global Anti-Semitism 2021 Top Ten” list, in seventh place (behind Hamas in second and Iran in first).

In seventh place the year before were German groups including the Goethe Institute. A Jewish newspaper in Germany reported about members of the foreign ministry who would “hold their protective hands over the Goethe Institute and the antisemitic scandals of other institutions of German foreign cultural policy.” The paper specifically complained that there haven’t been any consequences for a high-ranking DAAD employee who supported the BDS movement, which even the German parliament considers to be antisemitic.

Another image of Germany as out of touch becomes evident in the case of a current DAAD assistant professor at the University of Florida. He reported in an interview that he had lived in an Arab district of Berlin for many years but had “never encountered any antisemitic comments there,” adding elsewhere that “‘The Jew’ is no longer weak. The new Jews are the Muslims.” After he suggested “that the Central Council of Jews [in Germany] be renamed the Central Council of Racist Jews,” he lost his position at a college in Potsdam. Another Jewish newspaper in Germany called him “a useful idiot who kicks Jews in the shins in a media-effective way.” So much for the Florida “where woke goes to die.”

But what does DAAD have in mind here in terms of “the transmission of a contemporary image of Germany abroad”? To project the image of a Germany that has solved the problem of antisemitism? That strikes me as odd, given that the DAAD professor described above alleged that German politicians were “demanding that immigrants express solidarity with Israel or threatening them” and claimed, absurdly, that the Biden administration followed “an unconditionally pro-Israel political agenda.”

At times, the DAAD head office comments on American domestic politics, as well. In June 2025, while Harvard was under pressure from the Trump administration for its mistreatment of Jewish students, DAAD’s president wrote in a press release, “We observe with great respect how U.S. universities, including prestigious institutions like Harvard, are using legal means to challenge [President Trump’s] measures.” Not a word about the persecution of Harvard’s Jewish students.

Although DAAD regularly issues statements condemning antisemitism and expressing support for Israel, it also maintains a strong partnership with the Palestinian Birzeit University, at a time when even Harvard has suspended its partnership with the “terrorist-supporting” institution. According to nearly 30 members of Congress, the university “names buildings after convicted terrorists,” praises October 7, and conducts a “policy of barring Israeli Jews from campus.” Five members of its student council were also arrested for planning a “significant terror attack” for Hamas. David Litman of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis called Birzeit a “terrorist hotbed masquerading as a university.” Yet it is, in the words of DAAD’s country profile, “one of the country’s leading universities.”

Given current concerns over Qatari funding and Chinese Confucius Institutes, DAAD seems to get a free pass. The director of the DAAD scholarships department went even further in a speech, calling the institution “the most important partner of the DAAD in Palestine” and celebrating “the growth of the warm friendship and partnership between Birzeit University and the DAAD.”

Given current concerns over Qatari funding and Chinese Confucius Institutes, DAAD seems to get a free pass, largely due to Germany’s democratic credentials. From an academic standpoint, however, students’ perceptions of any topic should not be influenced by state-sponsored foreign actors who bypass academic scrutiny. The liberal-democratic origin of the funding doesn’t eliminate the problematic structure of influence.

The “free labor” of DAAD professors comes at a price, because they institutionalize a foreign state’s cultural-diplomatic agenda within the U.S. university system. Just because Germany’s values may align with liberal academia’s doesn’t mean its influence is value-neutral or harmless. EU-style federalism, social market economies, regulated free speech, and state-funded media might all be presented to American students as ideal models instead of policies needing critical engagement. At the same time, host universities may avoid critiques of such curricula to preserve their financial support—a dynamic that risks self-censorship and institutional deference, even if unspoken.

Christopher L. Schilling is a lawyer and political scientist and the author of The Japanese Talmud: Antisemitism in East Asia (Hurst) and The Therapized Antisemite: The Myth of Psychology and the Evasion of Responsibility (De Gruyter).