Arab Mean Girls

Felix was a German student at an American university in Virginia. He had applied to James Madison University and got accepted somehow despite not having amazing SAT scores or school grades. But regardless, his acceptance had made him very egotistical. He was so proud of getting in that he essentially adopted the sense of belonging that was usually reserved for US citizens. Soon he was referring to the US as ‘my country’ and generally acting as a white southerner in his interactions.

This wasn’t that big of a problem at the start. Sure, he had problems making friends with minority students because of his rhetoric, but he didn’t really care that much. He had his friends’ group who he cared about, but aside from that he wasn’t there to find friends. He was there to get his degree and if people found him pleasant to be around, that was a plus for him. But he definitely wasn’t going to change who he was for clout.

It was all going well, until the university decided to go all woke.

JMU had already had the Scholarship for Excellence in Arabic, which he was fine with. Proficiency in languages was something Felix was respectful of. And if that scholarship happened to go to an Arab student, then he wouldn’t have had a problem with that. But expanding that program to allow 3 students from the middle east and North Africa to get full scholarships to the university? That was a step too far. Earning your place to an elite university through a scholarship was honorable but getting given a place in the university through a scholarship made Felix’s blood boil. The difference between those 2 things were not well defined for him, but he had a bad vibe about the latter.

The first year of the program happened to coincide with his senior year. He kept a close eye on the university student newspaper ‘The Breeze’, where all such scholarships were announced shortly before the start of each semester. He wanted to immediately know which entitled brats had faked their way into his university. However, he could not prepare for the shock of what he would discover about the recipients of the scholarship.

They had awarded all 3 places to women! As if the university hadn’t already shown their bias by picking 3 – THREE – students from the most backwards part of the world, they just had to virtue signal by making all of them women. It was sickening to Felix that he would have to share a campus with people undeserving of the opportunities they got. He needed to do more research about them to find out who they were.

First there was Yasmine, a Moroccan Senior who was studying Arab languages and dialects back in her home country, and even managed to publish 2 peer reviewed studies in Arabic. He obviously couldn’t read them, but he knew that they weren’t up to the standard that warranted a free pass to the university. Besides, she had a bunch of male coauthors (or at least he assumed they were male, he couldn’t read arabic), surely they had done most of the work and she was just taking the credit for their work.

Next was Katia, a junior student from Lebanon who was well known in the Arab computer science community for creating one of the first natural language processing models that aimed to understand Arabic text written in the English alphabet, a daunting task considering the multitude of dialects present even within one country and the use of various numbers to substitute for sounds not present in English. “Sure that was impressive,” he thought, “but surely she had a lot of help from professors. There’s no way a sophomore could that all on her own.”

And finally, there was Fatima. Felix knew from her name alone that she was no good, and his gut instinct was right. She was a Jordanian hijabi starting her freshman year at the university. What could someone like her have done to get a scholarship like this ?? Looking even further he found out that she had been a student activist back in Jordan – Of course! – fighting for women’s rights. He didn’t even need to look further to figure out her accomplishments, because she definitely didn’t have any. He glossed over her attempts to lobby politicians into adding language to the constitution banning sex-based discrimination, because ultimately that didn’t go anywhere. Sure she had also spearheaded a campaign to revive the Arabic language through reading programs for elementary school students, but that couldn’t be enough to earn her scholarship. Felix sensed foul play involved.

Honestly, he should’ve guessed that the university was going purely for woke points when choosing the applicants. Surely no other factors could’ve played a big role in the picks.

He just couldn’t leave it at that, he had to investigate further. So for the next couple weeks, he sneakily followed them around campus to see what they were up to. He had made himself responsible for figuring out and stopping whatever scheme those 3 were probably concocting in secret, and he had made significant progress.