George Soros is 96 years old, and he’s making sure his leftist projects will last at least another century.
As if leftist, progressive indoctrination in America’s academic institutions weren’t a big enough problem, the Open Society Foundations and Bard College pressers announced today that Bard College succeeded matching “a $500 million commitment from Open Society by raising an additional $500 million from other donors, securing a $1 billion endowment to support the college’s undergraduate and graduate programs, faculty, student scholarships, the arts, and international engagement.”
Bard College in upstate New York has campuses in New York City, Boston, California, Germany, and Russia; Al-Quds University in the West Bank; Arizona State University; the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan; and BRAC University in Bangladesh, while also funding many other academic institutions.
In January 2020, Soros chose the World Economic Forum in Davos to announce his most ambitious initiative, the “most important and enduring project” of his life: the Open Society University Network (OSUN). He pledged $1 billion to create what “the world really needs”: an international platform for teaching and research that existing universities worldwide could join, among other things, “to fight dictators and would-be dictators.”
Soros created the OSUN, a “new kind of global educational network,” to serve as a global indoctrination organ for training and fighting against “climate change” — which at that time was the left’s hottest crusade; today, it’s “anti-ICE” and censorship — and proliferating teaching “against nationalism,” along with supporting other opportune themes that advance his progressive-left diversionist agenda. All of this is under the guise of Soros’s distorted “Open Society” doctrine. Soros established the OSUN to guarantee that radical socialist political activism endures and spreads after he’s gone.
The OSUN, like other Soros-funded organizations, operates as both a teaching and an advanced finishing school — not like the Swiss ones for the offspring of the well-to-do, but more like the Soviet Moscow-based People’s Friendship University of Russia, AKA the Patrice Lumumba University, which had thousands of thoroughly indoctrinated foreign students who continued spreading the Marxist, anti-capitalistic, anti-West, globalist socialist utopia.
Man of the world that he is, Soros surely noted the effectiveness of the madrassas (Islamic religious schools) in spreading radical Islamic revolutionary principles around the world. Their efforts resulted in the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. and unending terrorist attacks everywhere, often by illegal migrants, making the West a much more dangerous place. Indeed, OSUN’s global structure is not unlike the successful multi-billion-dollar worldwide Islamist propagation efforts of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Soros’s Open Society doctrine serves as a clarion call to resistance and revolution, evoking ideas from Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky about permanent revolution. Judging by his heir, Alex Soros, who — as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared in Davos– is also the “sugar daddy” of California’s woke governor, Gavin Newsom, continues to fund progressive leftist “resistance” groups. George’s ideology is now promised to endure and spread.
*This commentary was first published by American Thinker on January 22, 2026.
*Rachel Ehrenfeld, PhD, is the author of The Soros Agenda.